The Rotronics Wafadrive system provides a very viable alternative to cassette tape or even disk drives for many Spectrum users in the UK. Now, with the appearance of several “twister” type boards which allow “spectrumized” TS-2068s to run Spectrum hardware, 2068 owners are enjoying the Wafadrive as well. However, there is a fly the soup– the Wafadrive operating system occupies about 2K of the computer’s memory, making it difficult to directly transfer many commercial programs containing machine code over to wafer.
“TRANS-EXPRESS” from the Romantic Robot (?) company in England is a software utility which purports to help transfer difficult programs over to wafer. In the U.S., Trans-Express is available from Damco, the distributor of the Rotronics Wafadrive.
SUM tested a copy of Trans-Express with mixed results. Tasword II would not transfer, nor would Taswide or Pool. Admittedly our selection of Spectrum software is slim but we could not get a single major program to transfer which contained any significant amount of machine code. Programs entirely in Basic did transfer, though in general they could be transferred even without Trans-Express.
It is difficult to say whether or not the program can do what it claims. It did not live up to our expectations. The main problem is very simple–LACK OF DOCUMENTATION! The only instructions packed with Trans-Express is a single full size sheet printed on one side in two columns of 2040 printer output. Several items that appear on the screen while running the utility are not explained or even mentioned in the instructions. When a program would not transfer or when the Wafadrive would run continuously, no hint from the instruction sheet was there to help. Probably, the author of Trans-Express knows exactly what to do in those cases, and how to make the program do exactly what he wants. But Since he could not tell other users how, a program that is innovative and potentially very useful is very limited in its use.
Whenever Romantic Robot publishes’ the details needed to fully utilize their program, then we can re-evaluate this software and make our recommendations. Until then, we cannot recommend it except for experimenters. Price is $19.95.
Postscript: Probably much more useful for many Rotronics Wafadrive users will be the Engineering Technical Bulletin available from Damco. Included are modified listings of Tasword II, Vu-Calc, Vu-File, and Mas- terfile allowing them to be saved on and run from wafer. A new improved version of Spectral Writer and several utilities are printed out which Rotronics claims will help in transferring other software to the wafers. Price is about $5 from Damco, 67 Bradley Ct., Fall River, MA 02720; 617/ 678-2110.