Assembler

Your Sinclair

Max Phillips

HARDWARE BONANZA Yeeeehaah! Max Phillips rounds up all the latest Speccy add-ons and pens them up... Peker Assembler Cartridge Peker £17.95 or £14.95 with course Reviewer: Max Phillips Like the MicroSource, this is a ROM pack giving you instant access to its built-in software. You can buy it on its own or as a part of Peker's machine code postal course. Now, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything in this world. And, unfortunately, the Peker does something that's fundamentally very naughty. When you switch on, it completely takes over your Speccy by disabling the built-in ROM. No harm in that except it means that you can't write programs that call on the Spectrum's ROM to do small things like print characters or do calculations. Or programs that work as USR subroutines to Basic. Or programs that do fancy tricks with the system variables or whatever. Nor can you use your microdrives. Maybe you can sell them to buy a Peker Centronics interface 'cos the one you already have probably won't work. And, since there's no monitor or debugger in the Peker, you re going to be hard put to debug any programs you write with it anyway! All of which is a shame because its assembler is pretty good - it's a standard two-pass program with bog-standard directives, rather limited maths and the unlisted Z80 opcodes. But it is blindingly fast and I, for one, prefer a lean assembler that runs like lightning to a flash one with paralysis. There's a proper screen-editor too with block commands, find and so on. Its only drawback is that it works with 24-column lines and gets confused if you do silly things like put comments in your program! All in all, it's a nice idea gone astray. It's probably ideal if you're doing the Peker course and fine for other Z80 courses but it's not much cop for everyday Spectrum programmers. C'mon Peker, let's see the same software - on a cheap cassette and behaving like a civilised program!