Product: RAM-Drive
Price: undetermined
ROM/RAM required? 8K/64K
Printed listings? No
Program listable? No
Written in: Machine Code
Written by: Peter Ulrick
From: International Publishing and
Software, 49 La Salle Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14214
RAM-Drive is a machine code utility program that gives you powerful program editing comands. Peter Ulrick uses addresses 8192-9215 in your 64K RAM to store machine code subroutines that LOAD more than one BASIC program at a time, renumber programs, merge up to 20 programs, create free-standing transferable data sets and more. The utility is menu-driven from MC but also uses command mode USR calls. It’s like having a Disk Operating System without the disk.
Using RAM-Drive you can concatenate programs on one tape with a command menu.
LOAD RAM-Drive, then load programs you want to string together (one at a time) and store them in RAM-Drive’s program stack (32-64K area) with command S. A selection menu program writes in the BASIC area of your ZX/TS. You can swap any program from the stack back and forth into the BASIC area (16-32K) with command T (trade).
Use the renumber command, this time a USR call, to change the line number and increment between numbers of each program. You can then merge programs using another USR call. The result is one program from which you can call up any of the original short games. SAVE the new program in the usual way.
Other useful features of RAM-Drive are: RemFill, Block Move, Fetch, Kill and Wipe.
Mr. Ulrick’s documentation gives examples for most functions along with a command summary list. However, most functions are called with USR commands which I found inconvenient. The program loads and moves itself, so you can’t easily see the original code.
One other flaw–the documentation doesn’t mention that storing over 20 programs is difficult but possible. Each program you store takes up about 1K, so depending on their size it is possible to store more. But, only 20 names can be listed on the screen.
RAM-Drive is a valuable and versatile utilities package.
RAM-Drive was originally marketed by ZX Users Group of NY (Box 560 Wall St., NY, NY) as Disk-M Multiprogramming Features, $25 for nonmembers. RAM-Drive is in the process of becoming an International Publishing and Software product. Contact them for more info.–Ed.