Those of us with ZX81s and TS1000s remember well the long and doubtful loading times of our original machines. To us, the TS2068 with its “fast” loading time was almost miraculous by comparison. But the new soon wore off, and we all cast our eyes longingly to Uncle Clive and the Sinclair Microdrives. Alas, they never got across the Atlantic before Timex bailed out.
In recent months we have at last begun to see our longings realized as microdrives, stringy floppies, and even disc drive systems have begun to make their appearance. This month we are going to look at the ROTRONICS WAFADRIVE SYSTEM. This system has been a big hit in England, where it was born, and is now available to 2068 owners with the aid of a Spectrum emulator.
The Wafadrive is to be distinguished in name from the A & J Microdrive and the Sinclair Microdrive. The Wafadrive has been nominated by the British Microcomputing Awards committee for “Peripheral of the Year” and was named “Product of the Year” by the Computer Trades Association in England. Many reviews I have read place it above the Sinclair Microdrive in performance and reliability.
The Rotronics Wafadrive consists of a black plastic box about 9 1/4″ wide by 4 1/4″ deep by 3″ high. It has a short interface cable and connector protruding from its front and three edge connectors visible in the rear. Two slots in the front near the top provide access to the wafadrives and three red LEDs between the two slots show power on and which drive is being accessed.
The Wafadrive unit uses the same Entrepo stringy floppy tapes used by early A & J Model 2000 Microdrives (later models have a different drive and tape). The Wafadrive plugs right in to a Spec- trum or Spectrum Plus as it comes from the box. It can be interfaced to a TS 2068 using the Omni/Emu Spectrum Emulator (will not work with Romswitch or Spectrum Rom) and a Spectrum buss converter board. Connecting the system, at least to a Spectrum Plus, is very simple. Only the one connection to the back of the Spectrum edge connector is made. The Wafadrive draws its power from the Spectrum (or TS 2068) and needs no external power supply.
The back of the Wafadrive provides three outputs: a Spectrum compatible ex- tension of the edge connector, a centronics parallel printer port, and an RS-232 serial port. Cables for the non-standard printer port connectors are available at a very reasonable price.
Once the Rotronics Wafadrive is connected and the computer is turned on, the regular opening screen shows the Sinclair copyright notice. The computer functions like a normal Spectrum computer. To activate the Wafadrive Operating System, you type NEW*. After a very brief flicker of the screen, the screen shows that the operating system is in place.
Now the fun begins. CAT* #A (or B) will give a directory of the tape currently in drive A (or B) showing name of file, type of file, size of file, storage capacity of the wafatape, and storage space left.
To load a program, type LOAD * “a:filename” or simply LOAD *”” if the tape is in the default drive and has only one file on it. Saving is SAVE * “a:filename”. The minimum size of a file is 1k so only 16 files maximum can be saved on the 16k tapes, and up to a maximum of 32 on the 64k and 128k tapes. Programs are transfered to or from tape at about 2k/second (18k baud) once the program is located by the Wafadrive. Maximum time to find a file is 45 seconds on the 128k wafers and 6.5 seconds on the 16k. The W.O.S. (Wafadrive Operating System) takes care of where to place the files and how many there are. Files do not have to be numbered as with the A & J drives.
New tapes must be formatted for use with the FORMAT * command. This is also useful for erasing a whole tape. Tapes can be protected from erasure by removing the write protect tab.
Other, more advanced work can be done with the file capabilities of the Wafadrive reminiscent of floppy disk systems. For example, random access data files can be written to and read off the wafatapes, and commands such as MERGE, MOVE, COPY, and VERIFY can be used.
The printer interfaces have their own software on built-in ROM so need no other software to work in Basic except the OPEN# command. They both support PRINT and LIST. The RS-232 can both send and receive at baud rates between 300 and 19,200. Pin-outs and sample programming applications are included in the manual.
The manual consists of a 68 page wire-ring-bound book about 5″ by 5 1/2″ in size. It has both a Table of Contents and Index, and is very well written and easily understood. Though not everything you might ever need to know is found in it, I suspect that enough information is there for you to figure the rest out.
Also included with the Rotronics Wafadrive System is one blank wafatape and a word processing program called Spectral Writer. Spectral Writer resembles and functions very much like Tasword Two in many ways. It offers 64 character screen, 352 line text capacity, automatic word-wrap and justification, page numbering and headings, tabs, very fast text entry, “bell” before line ends, ends, programmable printer codes, etc. It comes with its own 39 page manual also well written and organized. Its advantages over Tasword Two are these: it’s “free” with the system, faster keyboard response, tabs, auto page numbering and heading, and ability to change screen colors. Its biggest disadvantage seems to be that there is no way given to change the 64 column line length. In other words, all lines of text must be 64 columns, no more or less! This makes it unsuitable (unless someone has the patch knows an undocumented command) for producing anything with narrower columns such as this magazine article.
The Wafadrive Operating System commandeers 2k+ of your computer’s memory when it is booted up with the NEW * command. It confiscates this memory just above the System Variables area and below the Basic Programming area. As a result, some programs may not fit when using Wafadrives. Other programs, because they address specific areas of memory also may not be compatible with the Wafadrives. We will be able to report more later on which popular software does and does not fit. Rotronics claims to have a list of software that has been converted to the Wafadrives.
The American distributor of the Rotronics Wafadrive System is Damco Enterprises, 67 Bradley Ct., Fall River, MA 02720; 617/678-2110. Their retail price for the system for the Spectrum is currently $165.95. Price for the TS 2068 version including Omni/Emu and buss converter is $229.95. Printer cables, either kind, are $12.95 each. Blank wafers are $3-4 each. They also offer a number of games and other software on Wafatapes at very reasonable prices.
Are they worth the money? You will have to decide. For a little more money than the A & J Microdrive, you can get a two drive system with two printer interfaces and a word processor thrown in for good measure. The price is considerably less than the price of any of the single disk drive systems being advertised as of this writing. What would I do? I’ve already bought one!