Utility A

ZX Computing

Ray Elder

RAY ELDER LOOKS AT TWO UNUSUAL PROGRAMS FROM CHEZRON SOFTWARE. Chezron Software £3.50 each Chezron Software is a small mail order company who have produced some general purpose programs, mostly in Basic, for specific applications. UTILITY 'A' is primarily designed to enhance microdrive handling by providing a "front end" menu system for incorporation into your own programs. This performs as per specs in that it is a ready built CAT and menu from itself when saved on any microdrive as file 'run'. It is fairly versatile and will handle up to eight microdrives. Also supplied is a routine to add to your programs under development to auto save and update the cartridge. Thrown in for good measure are two other programs, Time Count produces tables of tape counter equivalents for users of more than one cassette player and Autodraw is a pretty pointless diversion into kaleidoscope graphics. All this is moderately useful, especially if you use microdrives and cannot be bothered to get to grips with them and write your own routines. At £3.50 it is worth it if you want something along these lines. Bonabanner is a half way house between a full blown artist program and producing graphics from Basic. Written mostly in Basic it allows you to draw on a third of the screen using the block characters and UDGs and then it produces a Basic line of REM, PRINT or DATA with it in. The drawing screen is easy to handle and works well, with practice (and as shown in the Demo) some quite impressive pictures can be produced. Two or three pictures can be combined to form a larger one. Some possible uses are to produce loading pictures which appear faster and more impressively than a screen, decorate and enhance your own screens or even produce graphics for your own Basic adventures. Each picture uses about 600 bytes and often, by using the supplied compressor, as few as 90 bytes. Priced at £3.50 it is again good value if you want this sort of program, it does ease the task of producing graphics from Basic, but do you need it enough to part with your money. I have no doubt that many readers will find it useful. Chezron Software: Contact Sandy at [redacted] or phone Ron on [redacted].