Multiface 128

Your Sinclair

Jon Pillar

WIRED YS presents a handy-dandy guide to having fun with your peripherals. And who better to lead us down the hardware path than JON PILLAR? Quite a lot of people to be honest, but they were all at lunch. There's more to life than playing Speccy games. Using Speccy hardware is also to be recommended. Over the years a huge number of little black boxes have appeared for plugging into the back of everyone's favourite, um, little black box. Sadly, a lot of these have now gone forever. The Specdrum, the Slomo, the Music Machine... where are they now? Actually, they're still around, you just have to look rather hard for 'em. For those of you who can't be bothered looking rather hard, there are still plenty of goodies to be collected. MULTIFACE +3 Romantic Robot/£29.95 MULTIFACE 1 Romantic Robot/£29.95 MULTIFACE 128 Romantic Robot/£29.95 We here at YS swear by the Multiface. Yes, many a time you'll find us standing next to the little black box, hitting it and swearing. It's an indispensable programming aid, stopping any Speccy program in its tracks and allowing you to recover from total system crashes with just the press of a button. And then the press of a few more buttons. And then a few more. As well as saving the ears of nearby grandmothers should the worst happen, the Multiface enables you to save out screens or programs to about every storage device imaginable. (How else do you think we get those lovely Speccy screenshots in the mag?) Not only that, but by loading up the Genie disassembler, you can trip merrily through any game you darn well like, ripping off, er, picking up on the techniques of the professionals. A fabulous bit o' kit, and now that Romantic Robot are selling 'em off cheap, a fabulous bargain as well. IT'S ALL GOING HORRIBLY WRONG DEPARTMENT Speccies are like mushrooms. If you keep them warm and nurtured, they flourish. But if you trample them into the ground or allow your dog to eat them while walking in the woods, they tend to fall over. Furthermore, I wouldn't recommend that you put them in a pan and cook them with a nice free-range egg in an attempt to make a mushroom omelette, because it won't work. Um, actually, Speccies aren't like mushrooms at all. Forget I said that bit. Anyway. The point I'm failing quite spectacularly to make is that Speccies are temperamental beasties. Inevitably, they'll break down. And while the most sensible course of action is to take your ill machine along to an authorised repair centre, you can fix some things in the comfort of your own home. But be sure to have a responsible adult on hand. They will then say, "I told you that you should have gone to an authorised repair centre," in a patronising tone of voice when you bodge the job and wreck your Spec. If you feel up to the task though, quite a few companies offer Speccy spares - everything from new ROM chips to new +3 disk drives. WAVE are particularly well-endowed with small bits of Speccies. Their catalogue has just about everything you need to build your own machine! Buy the spares direct, put them aside for that fateful day, and it'll be cheaper to repair your Speccy yourself. Or else get your local soldering iron whizz to do it for you. Just don't say we didn't warn you if things go even more horribly wrong. Well, that's it. Hopefully this little trip through hardware land has been useful and informative. If not, why should I care? I'm off to digitise the climax of The Terminator and save it out to disk as an animated sequence. Just don't tell anyone, or they'll all be at it…

Handel, our lovely model, hails from Grimsby. His hobbies includes eating crisps. He's demonstrating the +2 ROM. (Clap clap clap).

Here's some hardware. Basically.

Um, that's a phone. The interesting bit is behind it. Just over there. That's the VTX5000 modem. It's rather fine. Thank you.

Without this little black box, YS would never reach the shops! Yes, our Multiface helps load the delivery vans. Or something.

Crash

Ben Stone

Dominic Handy

CHRISTMAS LISTE Ben and Dom, Crash, [redacted]. What's small and black and bursts the seams of a stocking? A Spectrum add-on, of course - there are hundreds of little black boxes for music, printing, screen art and program transfer. Dominic Handy suggests some utilities and hardware for the Christmas list, and Ben Stone brings joysticks to the world - but don't fight over them, or they'll all be broken by little black Boxing Day. JOYSTICKES TERMINATOR Supersoft £19.9 Like most pointless street cred - take Raybans, expensive earplugs on a Radio Shack personal stereo and the Beastie Boys - the Terminator does serve a purpose, but only just. And its wacky design takes a lot of getting used to. Being so tiny the Danish stick has a lot of travel, so it's quite unresponsive. And the fire pin is difficult to use: you have to hold the grenade and fire with the same hand, but you can get it to work fairly quickly it you're prepared to go through hand-ache agony. The Terminator is all but indestructible, made of very thick plastic and durable electrical parts, but for nearly 20 quid I'd expect something a little more efficient than this. OMPETITION PRO 5000 Dynamics £14.95 (£15.95 with transparent case, Competition Pro Extra £16.49 with autofire and go-slow mode) This is THE joystick. The fire action is brilliant and the stick performs like a dream. It looks much the same as the Euromax Professional, but for just a pound more you can get it with high-tech clear casing (as in the picture). It's durable, because the shaft is made of steel and the microswitched mechanism inside is remarkably simple (and pretty much user-serviceable). The fire buttons work with reed switches, sometimes considered unreliable, but I've never had any trouble. Sadly, there's no autofire on either model, though there's a souped-up version on the market (the Competition Pro Extra) with autofire option and a go-slow mode never before seen on any joystick. SPEEDKING Konix £11.99 (£12.99 with autofire) The Speedking was a novelty when it appeared - the first truly hand-held joystick that worked well. It's easy to use, though it has the problem of the Euromax Professional in reverse: the diagonals are a pig to find and use quickly, which makes playing games like fighting sims very difficult. The position of the fire button really makes your hand ache if you're pressing it a lot - shoot-'em-ups turn into a nightmare when you're doing well! - though it would be difficult to have it anywhere else on the compact little body of the Speedking. There is a Speedking with autofire available. Earlier this year Konix claimed one Speedking lasted for 17,604,000 waggles (that's 27 days of nonstop waggling, folks!), but the story is not now believed, Our Waggling Editor writes. PROFESSIONAL Euromax £15.95 (£18.95 with autofire) The Euromax Professional has most of the features now becoming standard in the joystick world: posey design and microswitches, and an autofire option if you want to pay a bit extra. (It's the autofire version in the picture.) At first it's a little difficult to get to grips with, literally, because it's biased slightly to the diagonals. Theoretically this means the joystick's eight directions are equally easy to use, but in practice the stick often slips out of the vertical/horizontal into a diagonal. But the Euromax Professional has a brilliant fire action. And it's a great stick for games where deft, precise movements aren't needed; it feels rather flimsy, but the couple that were in the office had fairly long lives considering the hammering a CRASH joystick gets! 125 SPECIAL Cheetah £12.99 This new joystick, introduced in last issue's PCW Show report, has the usual eight directional controls as well as two independent fire buttons - and a special rotate function which allows the player to twist the joystick for extra-realistic movement. Of course a joystick of such complexity needs more than the usual five pin in/outputs; you'll have to have an extra joystick port, or use both ports on the +2 and +3/. There is an autofire function. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER MIDI INTERFACE Cheetah Marketing £49.95 With this interface box and accompanying software you can control any MIDI instrument via the Spectrum. It's superb for people who can write music but can't play - just enter the notes and the computer plays the instrument. Or do it the other way round: you play the music and the computer puts it into musical notation. Including a MIDI lead for connecting the interface to your instrument, the MIDI interface was reviewed in issue 40. MK5II KEYBOARD Cheetah Marketing £199.95 This 61-key fully polyphonic board with foot switch and MIDI output ports comes packed in a rugged steel case. It's an ideal accessory to Cheetah's MIDI interface. MUSIC MACHINE Ram Electronics £49.95 'One of the best all round music add-ons for the Spectrum' - Jon Bates, Issue 34. A sound sampler, sequencer, editor, drum machine and composer all in one little black interface, the popular Music Machine is supported by a wide range of software. Recent additions include Quasar Software's Sample Editor (reviewed last issue) and Tectrics's chord construction kit Compuchord (Issue 45). SPECDRUM Cheetah Marketing £29.95 Now the standard drum add-on for the Spectrum, the SpecDrum comes complete with eight samples of real drum sounds. Extra drum sounds can be loaded in from tape: the Electro Kit and Afro Kit both retail at £4.99 and the older Latin Kit at £3.99, and all come complete with their own editors. The SpecDrum plugs into most hi-fis via a connecting phone lead. Jon Bates enthused over it in Issue 27. MUSIC TYPEWRITER Romantic Robot £7.95 Coming complete with keyboard overlays (48/+), this clever piece of software is a sophisticated tool for music on the Spectrum. Music written on Music Typewriter is displayed onscreen using realistic graphics which can be dumped to most dot-matrix printers, so you can print your own music. And your compositions aren't limited to Music Typewriter - all your tunes can be converted to machine code for use in your own programs. Jon Bates went sharpening and flattening on Music Typewriter in Issue 16. PRINTING MULTIPRINT Romantic Robot £39.95 A printer interface with all the options, the Multiprint can dump any Spectrum screen to an Epson-compatible printer in three different densities - it's handy for listings, too. There's more info in Issue 43. RAM PRINT Ram Electronics £34.95 Not only does this little black box drive your printer using a very easy menu-driven system (all stored on a ROM chip), it's also useful for those apres-Christmas 'thank you' letters because it comes with a built-in word processor, accessible from BASIC at any time and also on ROM. And if you ever get bored of all those line feeds and ESCape codes you can always plug your joystick in the built-in Kempston port and bash away at a game. See the details in issue 35. FOR THE ARTIST THE OCP ART STUDIO THE ADVANCED OCP ART STUDIO Rainbird £14.95, £24.95 'Probably the best art utility on the Spectrum' - Mike Dunn (On The Screen Editor). Need we say more? Several versions of the mouse- and joystick- compatible Art Studio utility are available for different Spectrum setups; The Advanced OCP Art Studio, which really needs an Interface One and microdrive to use its full potential, is much more powerful than the original. It has a Scrapbook library facility so you can combine and paste together pictures. Issues 24 and 40 have reviews of The OCP Art Studio and The Advanced OCP Art Studio respectively. VIDEO DIGITISER Sunset £128.00 Ever wanted to change Prince Charles's ears, or rub out out that blot on Gorbachov's forehead? You can do this and more, provided you've a video recorder, with the Sunset Video Digitiser. This little black box has all the connections for grabbing TV pictures from the video and then using them anywhere you want - even in games. Sadly, there's no printer ribbon that will put them onto T-shirts. Franco Frey got frame-grabbing in issue 31. VIDEOFACE DIGITISER Romantic Robot £69.00 plus £1.00 postage and packing The Videoface Digitiser is amazingly cheap and fast - it's all here. You can grab and scan three pictures a second, and then produce a very realistic animation sequence using up to six screens. At about hall the price of the Sunset Video Digitiser, this represents unbelievable value for money. NOT A CREATURE IS STIRRING, EXCEPT FOR A MOUSE KEMPSTON MOUSE Kempston Data £49.95 There's no WIMPing out with Kempston's version of the yuppie controller, with button eyes and connecting tail. Don't forget to lock up your cheeseboard and keep the cats indoors. Kempston is still bundling Rainbird's OCP Art Studio with this rodent at £69.95. Or those with a Spectrum +3 you can get Kempston's new Desktop utility package for +3 DOS and the mouse for exactly the same price. COMCON Frei £17.95 (single port), £19.95 (twin port) This is guaranteed to work with any product that uses the Spectrum keyboard. By connecting the six plugs to the miniature keyboard add-on you can have eight directions and TWO independent fire buttons (provided you have the correct joystick - also available from Frei). A twin-port version is also available for complex games. Lloyd reviewed the single-port version way back in Issue Eight. AND... MULTIFACE ONE, MULTIFACE 128, MULTIFACE 3 Romantic Robot £39.95, £44.95, £44.95 'One of the most versatile and user-friendly units on the market' - CRASH Issue 29 - Romantic Robot's Multifaces are ideal for the serious gameplayer or utility user with a fast storage device: they can put cassette games on Beta, Opus and Kempston disks. The Multiface 3 (pictured) can transfer cassette programs for the Spectrum and 128 to the - +3's Amstrad disks. It was welcomed in Issue 45 as a good reason to buy the +3, though Sixword's Swift Disc and Rockfort Product's Disciple are also worthwhile disk systems. The Multifaces have other uses: most POKEs can be entered using the ROM-based toolkit. And printer-owners are also catered tor with a COPY command, ideal for dumping your greatest high scores! All these options are available at any time at the press of a little red button. CRASH first saw the Multiface One in Issue 26. PLUS D Miles Gordon Technology £49.95 (£129.95 with 3.5-inch 780K-capacity disk drive) The Plus D is a new disk and printer interface from the designers of Rockfort Product's Disciple. Its Snapshot button will save all 48K and 128K cassette programs to disk, it's claimed, and the interface can make single and double-size screen dumps to a printer. The Plus D is also available in a package with a disk drive. GAMMA-STRIKE Gamesware £24.95 Gamesware's Gamma-Strike target-shooting system is a novel combination of hardware and software - you plug a target into the Spectrum, shoot at it with a model gun and watch the computer monitor your score! It's all done with the latest signal-detection techniques, and Gamesware promises more 'plug-in games' including darts and snooker soon... look out for the CRASH review. Thank you Santa, lots of luv Ben and Dom xxxxx

Sinclair User

Rupert Goodwins

MULTIFACE 128 The Multiface 128 is the 128K update of Romantic Robot's popular utility. And it's a pretty powerful hunk of hardware in its own right - the Poke person's delight in fact. Hooked up to any Spectrum, it allows any program to be stopped, screens to be dumped and memory to be examined and 'tweaked' to magical effect. Mind you, you'll need to know your way around machine-code pretty thoroughly to understand what you're looking at. It wont let you do anything you couldn't have done anyway - it just makes it less painstaking. The memory examination function (called, alas, the Multi Toolkit) is a bit crude. You can look at blocks of Ram and Rom in hexadecimal or as text, and can Poke new values in for the infinite lives. It's quite slow, though, and it helps if you can translate Z80 code to and from hex. This is where Genie - Multiface Disassembler - comes in. This is on optional extra, a program that loads into Multiface 128's internal 8K Ram. When it's in, the Multiface is a changed beast. Now when the button gets pressed a new menu appears - Ret Dis Text Num 280 find Mx:x. Stirring stuff. Ret returns you to the program you interrupted. Dis starts to disassemble Ram or Rom into proper Z80 mnemonics. Text displays in decimal of hex. 280 shows the complete status of the CPU in the Spectrum, registers, flags, interrupt status, the lot, as it was when the button was pressed. Find scans through the whole of Ram for a sequence of numbers. Mx:x displays (and lets you set) the Rom:Ram pages for a 128K+2 Spectrum. Dis is incredibly useful if you're in the habit of hunting for infinite lives or want to inspect the Rom. Text and Num do much the same as the standard toolkit, except that they do it faster. Z80 is almost as much fun as Dis because, not only does it show what the Z80 was doing, but it allows you to alter the registers and flags. There are a few things not on the menu. H toggles between hex and decimal at all times. S sets the device scrolling, so you can sit back and watch the disassembly unfurl. C copies the top eight lines of the screen to the printer, and A allows you to Poke stuff into Ram. Everything happens in an eight-line window at the top of the screen. Genie, like Multiface, stores the old screen, so that when the time comes to return to the program you're inspecting nothing is amiss. There are a few things that could be nicer about Genie. The Find facility is pretty limited (to find a text string, you have to convert it to hex by hand first), and you still have to know Z80 mnemonics in hex to be able to patch a program. Similarly, it would have been very useful to inspect Ram as hex and text simultaneously. Having said that, considering that the program fits in about 5K, it's impressive. It knows all about paging and the Spectrum 128K+2's little ways. The printer support is good enough to be genuinely useful. And I don't think I'm going to want to be without it, because it makes messing about with machine code such a joy. If you're into infinite lives - and know a bit about machine code - or you're heavily into Z80 mnemonics it's an essential purchases. Price: £44.95.

ZX Computing

John Wase

JOHN WASE GIVES THE LATEST MULTI PURPOSE INTERFACE A THOROUGH TESTING. Romantic Robot £44.95 Yes, it's here at last. The all-singin, all-dancing Multiface 128 by Romantic Robot. Advertised as "No 1 Spectrum multipurpose interface", its principal purpose is to transfer tape-based software to other more rapid storage media - microdrives, Discovery, Beta or Disciple or even to tape (with a turbo-load option). Although the copy saved is unprotected, it is of no use to commercial software pirates, as the first screen, usually the loader picture is distorted to a greater or lesser extent in the top half. This is usually righted during the running of the program. As an alternative to mere copying, Multiface will allow you to stop a program, study it, with various displays of the registers in hex or decimal, even ASCII to show hidden text, PEEK at it. Insert POKES and save screens. The customary black plastic box has a through port at the bottom and a red spring-loaded button on top, and it fits upright at the back of the Spectrum, on the expansion port. I found it fitted well on a 48K, but not quite so well (though adequately) on the 128K Spectrum+2. SNAPSHOT You load a program. Any old program. Press the red button; everything stops and a menu comes up on the bottom line inviting you to exit (to BASIC), return (to continue the program), save (to go to save menu), tool (to access multi-toolkit routines), print (to dump a screen to the printer, but only for interfaces with a COPY command like Kempston E or LPRINT III), jump (allows you to jump to any specified address on restart) and clear (to clear the extra 64K memory banks of a 128K Spectrum). I seized the nearest 128K program to hand; Tasword +2, loaded it and filled the file full of junk. I was particularly anxious to see if the distortion of the screen caused any problems; but it didn't. It saved a treat and loaded fine, the screen distortion disappeared. The only point that I could mention was the loader screen being completely blue, it left Tasword +2 with a blue border until I did some operation which turned it green. TRANSPARENCY Those who are familiar with the old Multiface 1 will know that it had a Kempston joystick and a switch to make the device transparent to other add-ons. There is no longer a joystick port, probably because the Plus2 has its own. The transparency switch is a different matter, however, and is sometimes necessary. This has been replaced by a software switch, toggled on and off by 'o' - it shows on the bottom line of the main menu along with the version number - in my case version number 87.1. Once set at off, Multiface is transparent on return to the program until reactivated with the red button. I then tested it with some pictures. These saved perfectly, bottom lines and all. So you can save pictures of games and then print them out large on a printer to prove that you've got to that impossible screen, or you can even print out a poster advertising Aunt Jane's party. Next I tried tape. First class. A battered old copy of Manic Miner saved perfectly but took well over 4 minutes to reload; the turbo version took 2 minutes 2 seconds, a very worthwhile saving. Then I tried the Disciple Interface. Things started to go wrong here it just wouldn't. I tried it between the Spectrum and unit as recommended. Crash! Romantic Robot told me that a Disciple-compatible Multiface 128 would be in the shops in April. So take care. TOOL KIT And so to the other facilities. Like the toolkit. This menu gives 'q' (to quit), ENTER PEEKS and scrolls through addresses, and allows you to POKE any value into any address. The space bar allows you to type in a new address to POKE to, the current address being shown on the bottom line in either hex or decimal, being toggled between the two by 'h'. W is extremely powerful; it opens a window which displays 128 hex addresses and their contents, all in glorious black or yellow, the current address, the one on the bottom line, being also shown on the window in tasteful flashing blue. The whole can be scrolled around with the cursor keys. If, like me, your hex is doubtful, then it's easy to have the main window in hex and change the current address to decimal to check. This too changes as the window scrolls. The window can also be changed to ASCII equivalent, allowing "hidden" text to be located, and this can be a useful facility. Finally, 'reg' shows the Z80 registers at the time of stopping, and 's' selects additional RAM banks to examine. Incidentally, you need to POKE 8192/3 with a specific address, before returning to the main menu. If you want to use the jump facility. That, then is the address to which the program will subsequently jump. Finally, if you're a machine code freak, there is an additional facility. Multiface has an 8K ROM and an 8K RAM as buffer, and this can be used for further machine code: it's no use trying BASIC since the RAM overshadows the Spectrum ROM, so both cannot be paged in at the same time. For instance, it could be used for a piece of code enabling one to remove the menu from the bottom of the page thus pressing the button would freeze the frame and allow a photograph to be taken. The ideas and potential are limitless... It's a pity about the temporary problem with the Disciple but, apart from that, Multiface 128 has a lot going for it. It has an excellent package of facilities, just the job for one to get the most out of ones gear. I thought it worked very well, and though it's not cheap, would recommend it.