Copycat

ZX Computing

Brian Beckett

QL NEWS FROM BRIAN BECKETT The last ZX microfair of the year was held on 13 December and you might be forgiven for thinking that it was the Spectrum that was terminally ill rather than the QL. For a pre-Xmas fair, hardly anybody was there (maybe no one's giving presents this year) and virtually all the Spectrum stuff had been seen before. A very notable exception is Prehistoric Adventure (£9.99) from Crusader Computing. It's an adventure game which takes the hero "Ohio' (remind you of anybody?) from Stonehenge into a prehistoric world on search of the elixir of life. He faces various pitfalls and dangers including loads of unfriendly dinosaurs. It's a very good and well designed game and you get a free dinosaur poster that's very nicely done and - if you find the going too tough - you can send off for a hint sheet. Apart from this and a couple of other Spectrum games, the show pretty much belonged to the poor old QL. The big news for you quantum leapers out there is up-coming keyboards for those sick and tired of trying to do serious work on your original black box. The Schon QL keyboard due for release around Christmas wilt sell at £54.95 and just slots in to replace Sinclair's original. So it's compatible with all existing peripherals and the prototype that I played with had a good professional feel to it. Apart from the function keys (which are in red), the replacement board is in good-old-QL-matching basic black and the overall result is a QL that takes on an Amstrad-like appearance. But for those of you who want to fool your friends into thinking you've tossed the old QL out and bought something in the IBM price range, those devilishly clever West Germans at ABC Elektronic are preparing to release a QL upgrade kit consisting of a fully separate IBM-format, XT-style, 83-key keyboard and a box for the main board. The kit will sell at £210 and will be available in the UK from Digital Precision. For your £210, you'll get the keyboard, the mainboard box, two 3.5 disc drives (or one 3.5 and one hard disc drive), a genuine on-off switch and two expansion slots. If you prefer, you will be able to buy the keyboard by itself for £99.95 which is fitted with a special interface slotting into the processor socket and fully user installable without dragging out the soldering iron. This just gives you another peripheral hanging out of the old black box but it's a lovely keyboard and well worth considering. Buying the full upgrade kit, however, will turn your very own quantum leap into something that looks like an IBM and - with some added internal memory - it should even behave like one save for the fact that neither God nor ABC Elekronic can make it IBM compatible. Remember that diehard QL owners will soon be faced with hordes of boring people bragging about their new Amstrad PCs and from what I have seen so far this upgrade kit should give plenty of scope for putting them in their place. When the kit becomes available, I will report in greater detail. RAIDER II I would like to send my special thanks to the long suffering staff of Microdeal who were forced to endure my nine-year-old endlessly playing the firm's new QL game Stone Raider II at the company's Microfair stand. This is the game Microdeal promised us for Christmas and (as my son can testify) it's a good one with lots of things to block, kill or otherwise frustrate you in your collecting of hexogems. It sells for £19.95 and sadly it looks to be the last QL game from Microdeal unless somebody comes up with a real winner. It's also likely to be Microdeal's last ZX Microfair since, like everybody else's, their stand wasn't very busy this time around and the QL is not longer a profitable area of the games market. Another good new QL game is Tank Busters (£14.95) from Stellasoft. The object is to recapture the island of Stanley from the invading forces of one General "Galtihairy" in a series of tank battles. As tank commander you track and destroy the enemy by means of a sophisticated radar and an intelligent gunsight. The graphics and weapons simulation look good. Omega (£14.95) is a 3D arcade adventure coming on two microdrives (your QL needs some extra memory to run the game) involving a seek-and-destroy mission against a well-protected underground computer complex. The game is very involved, entertaining and a real challenge. I suspect most QL owners have some extra memory by now (or are about to get some as there are more and more bargains about) and designing games demanding it enables the programmer to create truly involved and highly sophisticated packages. If you don't like copy-protected microdrives that won't let you fully duplicate the master (which, with those ever temperamental microdrives, is a constant worry), Compware has released Copycat at £10.99. It will duplicate the master of many old QL favourites and is sold under the strict condition that it will not be used for any illegal purpose (so behave yourself). If your QL has at least an extra 256K RAM (and you have a spare £25 left over from Christmas), get Taskmaster from Sector Software. It's a multitasking program which enables you (with sufficient RAM) to run all four Psion programs at the same time. The program contains a facility for backing up, copying and editing files and a calculator which enables the user to enter results directly into the particular program from which it was called. The idea is to set the QL separate tasks, eg. file sorting and printer driving, which the machine carries out at the same time. It is also possible to use Superbasic while multitasking with Taskmaster. It is a very sophisticated package and as long as you have enough memory it's possible to use it to multitask up to nine programs at one time. If you use your QL and Psion packages for complex and serious work, Taskmaster is an unquestionable bargain. LIBERATOR I also picked up a Liberator (£60) Superbasic compiler from Liberation Software which is aiming to take on Supercharge in a big way. A factor of eight is described as "typical" for the speed-up in run-times for programs compiled with Liberator, and with large programs factors of up to 50 are claimed. It's a well-designed package with a good manual and the program has an assembler interface to support Superbasic extensions, procedures and functions written in assembly language. If you have an unextended QL, large programs may be compiled in stages. I don't have enough space to report Liberator's other features this month but I will report more next time.