Q Save

Sinclair User

LOADING IN THE FAST LANE The most exciting product being reviewed this month is QSAVE by PSS. It is a hardware and software package which will allow you to save and load tapes at 16 times the speed of Sinclair ROM commands. The hardware consists of a small black box which plugs into the ZX-81 EAR and power sockets via two 3.5mm. cables. The power supply and EAR lead from the tape recorder are plugged into two 3.5mm. sockets on the other side of the box which contains an amplifier and two filters which eliminate any noise produced by the tape recorder. It also cleans the signal which has been recorded and can be used on its own to improve the loading of machine code or Basic tapes. The software does the tricky bit and has to be LOADed first in the normal way before QSAVE can be used. It Auto-Runs and transfers a 300-odd-byte machine code program above RAMTOP. There it will stay unless you remove the power or use the NEW command. PSS will provide a tape for use with any memory size. Three routines are provided via PRINT USR X where X is the routine required. They are SAVE, VERIFY and LOAD. They will enable you after you have LOADed a Basic program in the normal way to re-record it in QSAVE format - 16K takes 30 seconds. After re-winding the tape it may then be verified and checked against what is stored in memory. LOADing of any program QSAVEd must be done by the LOADing routine provided. As it takes only 30 seconds to LOAD a program of up to 16K that does not take long; if the VERIFY command does not recognise the QSAVE program it will not return to Basic, so the only way to get out of it is to load known loadable tape. That is its major failing but PSS says it will be corrected by now. The price is £15.95 inc. VAT and postage - 64K version £17.95. A version with a switch prevents you having to pull out the EAR lead of the cassette recorder when SAVEing. PSS is at [redacted].

QSAVE fast loader hardware