Byte Drive 500

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

EXTRA BITS Two things which make a micro are hardware and software. Software is the part you can't see - the program, recorded on tape or disk. Hardware is that part that you can see - the computer itself, disk drives, the cassette recorder, a printer. Anything which you plug into your micro to add certain facilities or functions is called a peripheral. In February's C&VG we decided that it was about time we looked at some of the hardware which might interest the games-playing micro-owner. Since then, a lot more add-ons have been released, so we've decided to make Extra Bits a regular feature. You'll find all the latest hardware releases in these pages every three months. Just to prove that we know there's more to the hobby than software. So if there's anything that you think deserves a mention and perhaps a review on these pages, then drop me a line with some details. If you're already in with the communications revolution then you may be a member of Micronet. If so, write to me via Mailbox. My account number is 012 786 556. NOT THE ZX83 A lot has happened for the games player since February. One of the most interesting and closely-watched launches was Sinclair's new micro - the QL. The initials stand for Quantum Leap which sounds like it should mean enormous but, in fact, means quite the reverse. A quantum leap is the smallest possible. Maybe Clive doesn't mean it's a giant leap forward at all. Perhaps he thinks it's only a small step down from, say, an IBM PC which costs many times more. Indeed the free software which comes on microdrive cartridge with the QL will soon be made available to IBM owners, at a cost of around £800. Although Nigel Searle, Sinclair's Managing Director, said at the QL's launch that the machine was aimed at small businesses and not at the games market, many software houses are realising how good a machine the QL will be for writing games on. Its very fast. It has 128K of RAM; enough to store a very large arcade game, and for adventure freaks, the 800k of space available on microdrives could bring some of the traditional adventures out from the massive mainframe computers and onto a home micro for the first time. SPECTRUM INTO QL WILL GO Software house Joe the Lion is currently working on a Spectrum emulator for the QL. This, we're promised, will allow you to load and run Spectrum games on your new QL. The adaptor to handle the cassette input (the QL works only on microdrives) plus the software will cost around £25. MONITOR YOUR SPECTRUM Spectrum owners unhappy with the quality of the display which the machine produces on a normal television can now use a professional monitor, but luxury comes at a price. There are two ways of linking a Spectrum to a monitor. Microvitec, well known maker of display monitors and given much publicity on the BBC's Computer Programme, now has a monitor especially for the Spectrum. And if you think you may ever outgrow your trusty little micro with rubber keyboard, then it'll also fit a QL. It's a standard monitor in a black case to match Sinclair's fairly uninteresting colour scheme. As well as having standard connections for a BBC and QL (which has normal RGB output to drive standard monitors), it is also the first to have the added circuitry inside to accept a connection straight from the Spectrum's edge connector. Although a video signal is available from this connector, it is not in the correct form to be used by a monitor and until now no-one has converted it. The Microvitec product in question is the 1431 and it costs £286, which is around £35 on top of the basic Beeb-only model. This covers the extra chips and things to handle the Spectrum. IT'S A MIRACLE If £35 for a few chips sounds a little expensive to you, then you obviously haven't heard of the Miracle Systems MI3 interface. Its a fairly large black box which you plug into the back of the Spectrum. It then has a socket on the outside to allow a normal RGB monitor to connect to the machine in the same way as the BBC. In effect, this machine has the same circuit as the special Microvitec monitor but fits on the Spectrum directly instead. As an added extra, it also contains a sound amplifier. A volume knob on top is provided to keep the neighbours happy and the box takes all its Power and signals from the edge connector. And so it should - at a cost of just over £70. It's better value to buy the Microvitec monitor and put your ear closer to the machine. Unless of course you already have a monitor. And talking of TVs, the new Sinclair flat screen TV is now available, but still only through mail order. It costs £79 and is a true pocket television. You can run it from a mains adaptor or a special battery. There's no connection for linking it to a computer, although such a facility would be impractical anyway and rather difficult to read. RISING THERMALS Until recently the only printer which would connect straight to a ZX81 or Spectrum without extra hardware was the official Sinclair electrostatic printer. Currently priced at £39, it's still pretty good as value goes. Problem is that it doesn't go very far where print quality is concerned. The paper's also quite expensive and is difficult to write on. Without opting for the expense of a professional dot matrix or daisywheel printer, there is still a happy medium to be found (Russell Grant take note) in thermal printers. These use special paper, but it's treated in a different way. It's a lot thinner, and you can write on it too. Rolls of this thermal paper cost around £l each and, because it's thinner, you get a lot more on a roll. There are two thermal models, distributed by Dean Electronics. Called the Alphacom 42 and 32. they cost £99.95 and £59.95 respectively. The 32 will plug straight into a Spectrum or ZX81 and print the full graphics of the machine. As well as being easier to read than the output from Sinclair's device, it also prints faster. The model 42 comes complete with an interface to link the printer to an Atari, Vic, 64, Dragon or BBC and prints all the graphics. Further interfaces can be plugged in and they cost £25 each. So if you've got a Beeb and a Dragon, you can link them both to the printer for a total of under £125. The Commodore version works with both the Vic and the 64, and even prints cursor control characters properly. A couple more Commodore add-ons have arrived recently. Protek has brought out an interface which will allow you to use any tape recorder with your Vic or 64 - you won't have to fork out for the overpriced Commodore version. This box of tricks cost £9.95, and Protek is based in Edinburgh. TRUE MAGIC Facing imminent launch from Commodore itself is Magic Voice, a speech synthesiser for the 64. It comes as a cartridge but has the expansion slot duplicated on the back, in true Sinclair style, so that you can also plug games in. Some speech systems work on allophone systems. This splits the words up into syllables so that you can produce any word. The Commodore unit only stores whole words, and can hold 235 of them. You can change this list of words if you can digitise your own voice. Commodore will be launching such a system in the summer, called Voicelab, which will let you do just this. No price has been announced for this, but Magic Voice itself costs £49.95. No doubt other software companies will produce games with built -in speech, but Commodore has started the ball rolling with 'Wizard of Wor'. MICRONET HITS 64 Also due out soon for the 64 is a Micronet modem to allow you to link up to the Micronet service. Launch date for the system is mid May, and until then they'll all be hard at work preparing the Commodore 64 database of news, reviews and software. DISK OR MICRODRIVE? Since the launch of the Byte Drive 500 from ITL, you can now buy a true 5.25in floppy disk drive from your local Spectrum dealer. Based around a Shugart drive, the package includes all the necessary interfaces to link to your Spectrum and costs £245. The interface alone, which allows you to use the drive of your choice, costs around £90. However there are a couple of problems with the device. A couple of people have told me that it's rather difficult to use and that the commands are rather complicated - especially in machine code. Slightly more serious is the almost total lack of software released on disk for the Spectrum. This makes the system an ideal buy for a programmer, but not such a bargain for the games player - unless software companies will provide ways of backing up cassette games to disk which is very unlikely in view of recent events. DRIVE WITH CLIVE If exercise is the name of the game, then these two new Spectrum add-ons will interest you. A driving module is now available for the Spectrum, similar in function to the add-on for the ColecoVision. It's a steering wheel contraption which plugs into the Spectrum to add reality to those road race games. The device is produced by Spirit Software which is based in London. I can't tell you anymore about the company as they don't have a phone number at the moment. But if we hear any more news about this product, then you'll be the first to know. Also recently announced is an exercise bike complete with computer interface. The idea seems to be that you use it like a joystick. In your attempts to out-run a Pac-Man, the faster you pedal, the faster you move on screen. Sounds quite clever, really, but rather tiring. After 20 screens of action, your legs'll probably feel a little worse for wear. If you'd like to try your own hand (leg?), then details are from Micro Scope in Maidenhead. HEARING VOICES AGAIN Latest in the line of speech synthesisers to land on my desk is an offering from Cheetah, which comes as a little black box (don't they all) and sits on the user port at the back of a Spectrum. Unlike the Commodore Magic Voice cartridge, this one uses a system of allophones. This means that instead of storing whole words, it stores syllables which you can link together to produce absolutely any word in any language. Although this is harder to program, it is far more versatile and well worth the extra effort. You won't need any software to run the package - it's all on a ROM, so there're no tapes to load. It does come with a cassette demo, though, complete with sample speech in foreign languages, including German and French. And the Scottish one's pretty funny too. Sweet Talker, from Cheetah, costs £29.75. MORE MODEMS Latest news on the modem front is that Minor Miracles has brought out its world standard modem. Although still awaiting approval from British Telecom, the company told me this afternoon that, if the customer wants one, they'll be more than happy to supply it. And at a starting price of around £118, I'm not surprised. But rest assured that the product is well worth the money. It's beautifully made in real plastic, and features all the different baud rate settings. As well as allowing you to link up to Micronet, you can also dial up the various 300 baud bulletin board services which are run in this country. And, if your 'phone bill can stand the pace you can try some of the foreign ones too, The modem will handle all the different rates, leaving you to worry how you're ever going to pay for all those international calls.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Robert Schifreen

EXTRA BITS! If you want to extend the capabilities of your computer or games machine there are now lots of bits and pieces which you can plug into the back to make it do things better or faster, or things which it could never do before. Such plug in goodies include extra memory, better keyboards, joystick interfaces, Micronet adaptor or devices to make the beast speak or play tunes. Robert Schifreen takes a break from Bug Hunting to bring you news of some of the current plastic boxes which you can plug into your micro or games machine. Upgrading your present equipment by using add-ons means that you may not have to buy that new machine after all! COMMUNICATIONS Communications means making your micro talk or listen to other computers in their own language. They communicate either over the airwaves at radio frequencies or over the telephone lines. Each has its advantages. Radio communication is only one-way whereas telephone can be both. But long conversations on the phone can be expensive. If you want to read more about this subject, dig out November's issue of C&VG and turn to page 114. If you want to receive Teletext on your micro, you'll need a BBC model B with a Teletext adaptor. This lets you receive Ceefax and Oracle, which are information services broadcast by the BBC and by ITV. You just plug your TV aerial into the back of the adaptor, and the computer will do the rest. The adaptor gives you four channels of teletext information; BBC 1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4. You can find out about such things as what's on TV tonight, the latest world news, sports news and ITV also has a kids corner with jokes and the like. Teletext is like a big electronic newspaper, You can read its pages on your TV but you can't write back to it. The other method of communication is over the telephone. This is what systems like Micronet 800 use. This way, the computer can send messages and you can also type back. There are loads of computers which you can dial into and most of them are free except for the price of the phone call. However, these free bulletin boards, as they're called, run on different baud rates (no pun intended) to Micronet so unfortunately you can't use a Micronet adaptor to call them. You can buy a 300 baud modem quite cheaply from various companies, like Maplin Electronics who supply units for the Dragon, Vic-20, Commodore 64, Atari and Spectrum. I tested the Atari one and managed to dial into some local systems and also used Maplin's own service called Cashtel which allows you to order stuff from the Maplin catalogue via your computer by typing in your credit card number. A lot of computer clubs run bulletin boards, and you can dial them up for computing news; you can also send messages to the club by typing at your computer. This is the two-way advantage gained by using the 'phone as opposed to the airwaves. You can set up your own bulletin board with a Maplin modem, but you'll also need some software. You will soon be able to buy a Micronet/Prestel type modem for your BBC micro from Acorn which has some better features than the Micronet package. But it's more expensive, and you'll still have to pay a fee to join Micronet if you want to look at their private areas on the database. You can also buy slightly cheaper modems like the Micro-Myte which will not receive Micronet or other information systems, but will allow you to talk to your friend's computers, providing he or she also has a similar modem. This way you can send each other programs or messages, but you'll have to phone him up first to tell him to switch his modem on! The Micronet modems offer this person-to-person facility as well as normal Micronet use, but are slightly more expensive. STORAGE DEVICES When you finally decide that cassettes are too slow for your needs, you'll want to look for something faster. The best thing is a real disc drive which for micros will probably use 5.25" discs. A cheaper alternative is a 3" drive which is available for many micros. You can buy a Byte Drive 500 3" system from ITL for about £250, and this contains a special cable to link the drive to your micro. If you have two computers, or decide to change your machine, you just buy a new cable. Blank 5" discs start at about £1.50, but 3" systems use special cartridges which are currently about £6. The Byte Drive 500 will soon be available for the Dragon, Spectrum and Commodore 64. It is already available for the Oric, BBC and Apple. If you have a Spectrum, the official Sinclair way of progressing from cassette is the Microdrive. This costs £50 for each drive, but you'll also need an interface which is another £30. You can store between 85 and 100K on a Microdrive cartridge, and a 16K program will load in about 10 seconds. Microdrives are fast, but they're not really discs. Inside a microdrive cartridge is a loop of high quality tape, and the drive itself is just a very accurate (supposedly) cassette recorder. If you've got a BBC then you'll need a disc interface fitted, which costs around £90. ITL has no intention at the moment of producing one, so you'll have to use the BBC one. MORE MEMORY The size of the largest program which you cart fit into your machine is governed by the size of the area of memory in which the computer stores it. The problem is that although memory chips are now quite cheap, some micros still have very little RAM, as it's called. One of the first enhancements which a computer owner will make in such a case is a memory expansion. The ZX81 although very popular has only 1K of RAM. (1K is about two screenloads of program.) It's very easy to expand your ZX81's memory. You can buy a 16K RAM pack which just plugs into the back of the machine and costs around £30. You may have heard of the much-feared contemporary disease known as "RAM pack wobble", caused by Sinclair not putting the edge connector on their RAM pack in the right place. This disease can be fatal to a program, as a slight wobble at the wrong time can erase a whole afternoon's typing. One cure is a blob of something sticky under the machine, although a less messy solution is to look to a different company. You can also get 64K RAM packs which allow for even more storage of data and programs. Upgrades for the 16K Spectrum are available from Sinclair for £40, but you'll have to send your machine back to Clive, and you know how long that takes, don't you? Alternatively, you can buy a ZX81-like RAM pack which sits on the back of the machine, or some companies sell chips which you can stick inside, as long as you didn't really want the guarantee anyway. If you're going to upgrade your Spectrum, check that the company's product will fit your particular machine. There are currently three different versions of the Spectrum in circulation and although they all look the same from the outside, there are some small variations inside which may make a difference. Expansion for an Atari is easy; the memory comes in chunks of plastic which you install by removing the cover on top of the machine. Newer machines come with 48K but some old 400's still have only 16K. Your local dealer should be able to tell you how to improve this. To expand a Texas TI99/4 or 4a you'll need a peripheral expansion box. This takes the form of a large aluminium crate about the size of the small freezer compartment in a fridge. (I don't know why, but everyone seems to measure the size of computers in relation to parts of fridges.) Inside this you can then put disc drives, memory expansions and anything else. Retail price for the box alone was around £80 but that may drop now that the Texas micro is no longer being made. Memory expansion on a Vic is peculiar. It is in the form of plug-in cartridges and comes in four flavours, which are 3K, 8K, 16K or 32K. The annoying thing is that because the cartridge overwrites that part of memory which used to hold the contents of the screen, the screen RAM is moved to a different place. The problem is that each cartridge puts it somewhere different, so programs written for use with an extra 3K will not necessarily run directly on a 16K machine without minor alterations. This is very inconvenient, especially for magazines who publish program listings! If you're tired of having to do octopus impressions to play your favourite computer game a joystick interface is called for. This allows machines which normally have no provision for such a gadget to have one, and very useful they are too. The most popular machine, which lacks a joystick interface, is the Spectrum, and there are now quite a few companies who will remedy this situation for you. The official way is by use of the Sinclair Interface 2. This costs just under £20 - you get 5p change! - and allows two standard Atari-type controllers to be used. You can then write your own games using the joysticks to control the action, or buy commercial software written for use with the device. Interface 2 also allows you to use plug-in cartridge software, although these retail at £15 a time. The problem with all the different joystick interfaces is that they use their own systems. So a program written for use with a Kempston joystick will not run on an Interface 2 unless the program contains a routine for each and you are allowed to select which one you want. One way round this predicament is by a programmable joystick interface. Such a beast is the one from AGF. This comes with a grid of small holes and a set of five wires. The wires are labelled with the functions of the joystick (up, down, left, right and fire) and the holes are labelled with the keys on a Spectrum keyboard. If the game which you want to play uses the 'K' key to fire, then you plug the 'FIRE' lead into the 'K' hole and so on. Such a device is very useful. BETTER KEYBOARDS When you finally tire of the piece of dead flesh known as your Spectrum's keyboard, there are a number of better ones around. The best are quite expensive at around £40 but they allow the whole machine to fit inside and look rather smart. One of the most popular around is made by Fuller. Kempston is also about to launch a high quality keyboard for the Spectrum, as demonstrated recently at the ZX Microfair. You'll also find replacements for the touch-sensitive keyboard of the Atari 400 from about £65. If you have an Atari VCS and feel like getting into computing, you can now buy an add-on keyboard from Vulcan Electronics, which is made by Spectravideo. It sits on top of the VCS and plugs in to the joystick ports and the main cartridge slot and you can then program your VCS in Basic, it costs £50. Mattel Intellivision owners can also do the same to their machine. Mattel offers a similar device, as well as a music keyboard to enable you to compose music on your machine. I don't reckon Bach would think much of it, but it's not bad. SOUNDS AND SPEECH If your idea of a good evening is being locked in a quiet room with a micro, then you could always get more friendly with it by talking to it or having it talk to you. But before those nice little men in white coats come to take you away, let me explain. If you have a Pet, Vic, 64. Spectrum, ZX81 or BBC and need someone to talk to you then you could always try a Chatterbox. This costs £49 from William Stuart Systems and you can program it to say anything you like. From the same company comes Big Ears which, for another £49, reverses the process and allows you to speak to your computer. Say the word through the microphone a few times, and the machine will then remember it. If you then say it again, it should recognise what you're saying. If it's a Spectrum you've got then the Currah Microspeech is another possibility besides a Chatterbox. It works on the same system and sells for under £30. BBC owners can also choose the official Acorn speech system, which is a computerised version of Kenneth Kendall. Personally I can just about recognise him, but many say that it might just as well be Moira Stuart. (In fact, I wish it was.) If you prefer noise to plain speech then there are a couple of units available to improve the sound of a Spectrum by providing it with the same sound chip as the BBC and Oric. WHAT'S LEFT OVER Finally, we come to the rest of the oddments which space did not allow separate headings for. If you own an Aquarius, then this year should see the introduction of the home controller unit. Th is plugs into the machine and allows you to control household appliances by using special plugs which go into the wall and receive messages from the computer. Such a system is also planned for the Electron. If you have an Atari VCS then you may already know about the super expander. This lets you load games from cassette, and also improves the quality of the graphics slightly. Printerface is a mixture of interface and printer and is a device to let you link a printer to a micro. DAMS office systems supplies an IEEE cartridge to allow a Vic or 64 to connect to any Commodore printer (or disc drive for that matter.) The Spectrum will only work with a ZX printer, but you can use the RS232 connection on an Interface 1 to link a large range of printers. If you have a Centronics-type printer then Kempston will supply you with a suitable interface for a Spectrum. If you own a computer other than a Sinclair machine but would be perfectly happy to use a cheap (£40) Sinclair printer, you can get a suitable interface for many popular micros, including the BBC, Dragon and Vic, from Microtanic Computer Systems of London. LIGHT SENSORS Another way of controlling a game is with a light sensing device. Usually mounted in a pen-like barrel (and, therefore, called a light pen) these allow you to draw patterns on the screen as though it were a piece of paper. Recently launched is the Light Rifle from Stack Systems of Bootle, Merseyside. It comes with three demo games where you have to shoot at targets on screen, just like those old TV game machines, but these games are better as they rely on all the facilities of the micro. You can also write your own shooting-time programs. The light rifle costs just under £30 and versions are available for the Spectrum, Vic and 64.

At long last, the microdrive has actually been launched. As expected, demand is still exceeding supply and it will be some time before you can just walk into Smiths and buy one. They're not really disc drives at all, just miniature cassette recorders. You can load a 16K program from a Microdrive in about 10 seconds.

The byte-drive 500 is a 3" disc drive from ITL. The small discs are enclosed in rigid plastic and currently cost over £5 each. The clever part is the cable which links the drive to the micro. This contains all the electronics, so if you change micros, you just change the cable but keep the same drive.

You can now fit two standard Atari-type joysticks to your Spectrum with an Interface 2. It plugs into the back of the computer, and also has a slot to take the new Sinclair software cartridges. The BBC (below) can now become a Teletext terminal with the new add-on from Acorn. As well as displaying pages of information, it can also store the data in memory and use it in its own programs.

Personal Computer News

Piers Letcher

ITEM: Byte Drive 500 MANUFACTURER: ITL Kathmill, [redacted] PRICE: Floppy Disk Drive £192.37 inc VAT; Power supply unit £29.82 inc VAT; Hybrid Cable + Disk +Manual £99.42 inc VAT OUTLETS: Retail 500 KBYTE DRIVE The advent of the 3 inch disk drive for the Oric, BBC and other micros is heralded by Piers Letcher. The Byte Drive 500 promises to put a range low-cost micros 'on-line' to fast-access disk storage and reasonably sophisticated file-handling. As a drive for the Oric, this is an important peripherals development, heating Oric to the mark and providing a useful addition to the Oric range. What makes this drive different from others is the way it connects to your computer. The 'hybrid cable', developed by ITL and Tyrell Systems, has an interface built into it so, in the same way as a printer, the drive can be used with different cables for different machines. There is a 'hybrid cable' available to make the drive compatible with the Oric, and it can also be used with the BBC since this has its own disk operating system (DOS). ITL plans to produce cables for the Commodore 64, the Dragon and the Spectrum early next year. PRESENTATION The drive is compact, neat, and will come with a 96-page manual, though at the time of this review it was still at the printers. The power supply unit (PSU) has the same casing as the drive, and they fit together snugly and look smart (except fora toy-like coloured transfer on the PSU). INSTALLATION In the absence of a connecting cable, documentation, or any software, we plugged the drive straight into a BBC. Even without a manual, it is simple to put together. With this configuration, we formatted the 3in disk using the FORM40 program from the 5.25in disk, and then saved programs onto it. The writing takes longer than the reading, but both are fast. A 20K file takes about 2.5 seconds to read from, and about three seconds to write. At the moment, the BBC system works in single density, giving only 100K on the disk. By turning the disk over you get another 100K. Once the development of a double density system has been completed, giving 80-track disks, this 200K storage capacity should be nearly doubled. For the Oric, the drive will store 220K per side, giving the advertised 440K. BBC owners will be supplied with a format and verify disk with the drive. And if you're only using one drive with the BBC then you can save money by using the power socket from your BBC, rather than using the PSU. There is also a ROM called "zap' being developed in Bristol to provide extra disk software for the BBC. Among the utilities available will be one to set the BBC's page lower than that normally used by the Disk Filing System. This gives you more memory for your programs. You will also be able to rebuild the directory in case of disaster, set up the function keys and edit memory with the ROM. Zap looks interesting and would certainly be useful. RELIABILITY It's interesting to look at results from Bristol University, where 40 of the drives are being used successfully with BBCs. According to a spokesman, of 200 double-sided 3in disks, only three sides out of the 400 have developed faults after heavy usage, which compares very favourably with the reliability of 5.25in disks. The manufacturer's confidence in the product is reflected by the long guarantee on the equipment - one year for both the PSU and the drive, though after 90 days ITL reserves the right to replace a faulty drive with a reconditioned one. VERDICT Though intended mainly for use with the Oric in the first instance, the drive performs adequately with the BBC, and the new ROM should be interesting. There may be doubts about producing a drive for the Spectrum, since it will be twice the price of the computer, and for most people the Microdrive gives a sufficiently fast storage medium, at less cost. Even so, it would certainly give the Spectrum new scope. More interesting is the planned Dragon version, which should store far more than the Dragon drive, while being a lot less bulky. But no-one knows exactly when this will appear. Finally, the main problem for independent manufacturers of add-ons is software compatibility, because it's not much use having a disk drive if you can't use commercial programs on it. How much software will emerge remains to be seen. The Byte Drive 500 will be available from retailers for the Oric from January 1984.

Neat layout of circuits are essential in the production of something as small as a three-inch disk drive. This shows the inside of the Byte Drive 500.

The Byte Drive 500 with power supply unit underneath. Fitting together neatly they save space.