Romantic Robot Videoface

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

Your Sinclair

Kay Ann Helen

Michael Jones

Phil South

WE'VE GOT A SPECTRUM* YS MAKES IT BIG SPECIAL Three months ago, Black Mist, a band from Manchester, sent YS a demo tape containing songs they'd made using a SpecDrum. Impressed? Not half. But could the Spectrum catapult a band to fame and fortune? And could you, with the use of your favourite computer, use the Ram Electronics Music Machine, Cheetah SpecDrum and Sound Sampler, and the Data-Skip Video Digitiser to put together a package that would impress a record company? Only one way to find out. So, one day last month a Black Mist descended on YS. Resident muso, Phil South, reports. Photos by Tony Sleep. 8.30am - I arrive at Castle Rathbone and slap myself awake. Spot two shady looking figures dressed in black, silhouetted against the wall. They're carrying guitars and are accompanied by an evil looking smurf... must be the band. I take a hard swallow and approach them. Black Mist introduce themselves as Mike and Kay. The smurf says nothing, and I leave him to it. They seem friendly enough, though. We work our way down into the dungeon and put the coffee on. 9.02am - A couple of cuppas later I'm feeling more human, and Black Mist are looking more chipper too. The smurf doesn't have any, so he's looking as miserable as ever. 9.25am - A phone call to our local friendly Turnkey Shop, in Percy Street, secures the loan of a 4-track recorder for the day. Phew! I leave Mike setting up the gear (and Kay searching for some paracetamol 'cos she's got a headache) and nip round to Turnkey. The 4-track's a brand spanking (ow) new Yamaha MT1X tape recorder. Sounds technical? Not really. If you can use a Spectrum, you can use a 4-track tape deck. I sign in blood and leg it back. 9.28am - After more coffee we connect the 4-track into the setup and turn the power on. Good start. Nothing blows up. Okay, let's boot up the Speccy. We resolve to try the Ram Electronics Music Machine first, plugging it into the user port and loading the driving software. It doesn't take long, and soon we're listening to the demo tune. Mike listens closely to the drum sounds. He's a veteran SpecDrum owner, and looks suitably impressed. "That's not bad. I like that. Can we program it?" I select the Drum Editor screen and tap a few pads experimentally. Mike taps in one of his own rhythms and we listen to the bar over and over again. It sounds good so we resolve that it'd make a good start for our tape. By now it's after ten so we have a sound check and prepare to lay down the first track. 10.12am - We begin to record the first sounds, the drums from the Ram Music Machine, onto track 1 of the 4-track. Mike programs a rhythm that has a lot of cowbell in it. "Hmm. Why do sampled cowbells always sound like saucepans being hit with a wooden spoon?" he says, wincing. So, we decide to sample a sound and incorporate it with the sequence. After much experimentation, we settle on the sound we get from tapping the TV screen with the tip of a pair of scissors. It takes a few seconds to set up the Music Machine to sample the sound. Then, with a bit of judicious editing a new cowbell is born, and not a vet in sight. 11.00am - Mike wants a special drum effect (called a 'fill-in' in the trade, 'cos it fills a gap). He's going to do this fill using the SpecDrum, so he sets up the pattern he wants, using a specially edited kit from the Kit Editor, and triggers it at the appropriate beat. The speed of the two drum patterns is easily synchronised by matching the beats per minute figure, in this case 140. Then when the end of the bar comes around again, press the button and brrrum buh bum bum ba bup bup bup b-b-b-b-b', instant 'thumbs aloft worra nice geezer' Phil Collins! 11.52am - In the absence of a bass guitar, we decide to do the bass line on the Casio CZ-101. Nice little synthesiser the CZ-101; digital, cheap at £300, and lovely sound, what more do you need? We thumb the preset buttons and select a bass sound. Hmm, not quite right. I change the sound a little to make it more percussive and thumpy, like a guitar. In the mix it sounds just like the real thing. I play the riff through the entire track just to try it out, and record it so we can hear it back. It sounds so neat (breathe on fingernails and polish on shirt) Mike decides to leave it in. 12.30pm - Kay's been working on a lyric all this time, with the title of 'Too Late Mary'. She writes her lyrics as poems, with no thought of scanning the words to fit specific lines, preferring to mate the words to the music as she sings it. 1.45pm - We break for lunch. It's been a long morning, and Kay and Mike's pasties have been crushed to debris (by a fat lady on the bus). 2.30pm - Much refreshed, we troop back into the studio and link Mike's guitar into the system. A few experimental wangy twangs later, we have it sounding right in the headphones, and Mike's left strumming his guitar while I steal Kay away to the video room. We're going to lace together images from the digitiser to make a video to accompany the music; some stuff from old horror movies, Frankenstein and King Kong, plus some magazine pictures. 3.15pm - Mike has recorded the guitar track and we sit and listen to the finished 'backing track' (a track without the vocals and twiddly bits on) with looks of awe. It's amazing how different a piece of music sounds when you've put all the different parts in it. Having nodded approvingly at the quality, we commence the 'mixdown'. This is where you mix a track down in stereo onto another tape, and then play it back in stereo onto two tracks of the 4-track. You then have two tracks of the 4-track playing all the music you just had on four, leaving two tracks free for extra 'overdubs'. 4.10pm - Vocals time! Kay clears her throat and carefully positions the headphone strap into her hair. (Fashion hint: v. trendy pop stars use headphones upside down, so as not to ruffle their quiffs!) The searing vocal is fed, via the Ram Echo function to provide some 'slapback' echo, into the first of the spare tracks. Was Mary too late? Was it all her fault? Is she to blame? I dunno, but it sounds brilliant. 5.00pm - Mixdown! The final act in a recording session is to mix down your tape in stereo onto a 'master' tape. Mike looks worried. "I dunno. It sounds a bit rough to me." Maybe it's the 4-track, we're not used to it? "Possibly. I might have to redo it on my own 4-track." Well you could take the 4-track tape and the stuff and remix it, Paul Hardcastle style? Mike grins. He reckons it'd be a good idea. 5.55pm - A few piccies later, I'm helping Black Mist get their gear together. (Sniff) I even wave my hanky as they run up the street to get the bus! If you want to hear how the Black Mist megamix turned out, you can hear it on this issue's Digi'T'ape. Their own demos, containing six of their hits including Dead Mouse, Shade Shade and Hurry Along Timmy can be obtained by sending a measly £1.25 (inc p&p) to Black Mist, [redacted]. Cheap at half the price! *and we're gonna use it! LOVE MACHINE FAX BOX Device: Ram Music Machine Price: £49.95 Publisher: Ram Electronics Contact: Ram Electronics (Fleet) Ltd, [redacted] The Ram Electronics Music Machine is less of a sound sampler, more a way of life. At least, that's what it feels like after you've used it for a while. It's more of a MIDI equipped Sound Sampling Sequencer, actually. You can sample sounds and sequence them, at normal pitch like drums, or sequence them in a piece of music, on a musical stave. All the facilities are very easy to use, and have a lot of potential for musicians, as well as complete novice users. All the functions are accessed by single key presses, indicated by the Main Menu. There's a superb editing facility whereby you can cut the sounds to fit your memory and reverse or fine edit them via the zoom function. The Tune Editor allows you to write music on a stave, and play it back using on the sounds in memory. The Drum Editor enables you to make drum patterns on a sixteen beat bar, just like professional drumboxes. Sampling is easy, with a visual display of the sound as you're sampling it, removing the possibility of overloading and distorting the sample. Mike: I liked the on-board drum sounds, but what I might do when I remix the track is sample some of my friend's drum kit instead. That sort of thing's very easy to do, too. Being able to play the keys on the Speccy like drum pads is fun, although they're a bit close together for really fast playing. Oh, and I don't like the fact that you have to type a long line of 1's if you want patter 1 to repeat over and over again! Kay: Being able to play the sounds from a MIDI keyboard would be great fun, but we couldn't get it to go. I haven't got a synth anyway, but I might like one in the future, so it's very nice to have it there. It's a good all round machine. For fifty quid you can't go wrong. Brilliant. RANDOM SAMPLING FAX BOX Device: Sound Sampler and SpecDrum Price: £44.95 and £29.95 Contact: Cheetah Marketing Ltd, [redacted] The Cheetah range grows by the minute, first the SpecDrum, now the Sound Sampler and MIDI interface. The SpecDrum was the first cheap digital drumbox on the entire Earth, and has cleaned up in both the financial and critical acclaim stakes. You can sequence real drum sounds, playing them up to three at a time, in any pattern you like. As well as the sounds you get with the SpecDrum, Cheetah regularly releases new 'kits' of different drum sounds; currently there are two, the Latin/African set and the new Electro (Simmons style) kit. At the PCW show it released the Sound Sampler. Although you can't sequence your sounds, or play them through MIDI (because you can't have MIDI and quality sampling in a Z80) the quality of the sounds you get is quite good. Although not as versatile as the Ram Music Machine, when Cheetah has worked out the bugs in the system it should be a fine little sampler. The bandwidth is a startling 17.5Khz, which considering that a Compact Disc player has a bandwidth of 22Khz, is pretty good quality. Also included are a number of useful sound processing programs like Echo, Harmoniser, Fuzz, Reverb, Chopper and Bubbleiser. Mike: Hmm. Yeah... very nice... it's very good quality, but what can you do with it? Not very well thought out as a musicians tool, I'd say. You can sample a sound. Fine. It sounds pretty good. Great. You can play it up and down the rubber keyboard of the Speccy. Yeah. But what do you do then? There's no retrig so it's unusable as a 'keyboard' instrument. You can't MIDI it so you can't sequence it either, not even in conjunction with the SpecDrum, which is a real shame, 'cos it's such a brilliant drumbox. Kay: I expected better from Cheetah, but no, I don't like it. Just a sampling engine, really, and definitely for fun use only. The Utilities program is really funny. Most of the sounds are like a helicopter taking off in your amplifier. Good for fun I s'pose. I liked the Electro Kit for the SpecDrum though. Just like a Simmons Kit for the SpecDrum, although I'm probably not allowed to say that. (No you're not. Ed). DOUBLE DUTCH FAX BOX Device: Data-Skip Video Digitiser Price: £69 Contact: Data-Skip, [redacted]. Double Dutch was a popular skipping dance craze, and Data-Skip is a Dutch firm who makes video digitisers. The version we received was a prototype model, but the only difference between that and the finished one will be the casing. The software is will error-trapped and the thing practically runs itself. A digitiser scans a TV picture, or image gathered from a TV camera, and puts the resultant data into a computer screen. The product of the process is a saveable SCREEN$ which you can use in the same way as any other screem, as a title/loading screen, as a part of any movable graphic in a game (like T'zer's picture in Strike Force Cobra or Sam Fox Strip Poker), or as an image source for another medium, in this case video. The digitised pictures can then be treated and coloured with a painting program like Rainbird's Art Studio. Mike: I think this is brilliant. Very clever. And it makes the picture from the telly look so good. They all come out in black and white, and you can adjust the tones of grey produced by turning the knob on the top. Really good fun. Kay: Very simple to use and a lot of fun. I chose the images for our video from the old black and white movies, 'cos that's more in keeping with our music than a story video or pictures of us playing. I want one!

King Kong pouts seductively for the Data-Skip (from the 1933 original) in Black Mist's computer generated video. Fay Wray scream your heart out!

The Yamaha MT1X 4-Track in petulant mood.

The mighty Casio CZ-101 digital synthesiser.

They're mean, they're moody, they're dressed in black! Kay and Mike look pretty serious too.

GLOSSOLIA 4-Track: Tape recorder which can record on four tracks. Demo: Demonstration, especially of a band's rough tapes. Sound-Check: Quick test to see everything's working. Lay Down: To record an instrument on a track. Track: Either a channel on the tape recorder or a song. Sample: To digitally record a sound into the computer. Fill-in: A beat on the drums that fills a boring space. Drop-in: Add a short section to an already recorded track. Mix: To blend the tracks together. Remix: Re-blend already mixed track with new sounds. Mixdown: Mixing the four tracks into finished stereo tape. Riff: Any musical phrase. Digitiser: Scans TV picture and reproduces it as SCREEN$. Overdub: Record something whilst hearing previous track. Slapback: Strong echo with audible heavy repeats. Retrig: Retrigger; sound restarts when key pressed again.

HOW TO MAKE A VIDEO In order to make a video using graphics from your Spectrum you must connect the output from the Speccy to the BNC (Video in) bayonet style plug at the back of the video recorder, taking the video signal from the user port, not the RF output which usually goes to the TV. (See diagram). The images were moved by two methods: 1 Using Andrew Pennell's Movin 'n' A'groovin' program from Your Spectrum (Issue 19), and 2, a specially written program by Max Phillips which flips four screens. The resultant sequences were videoed on a Ferguson Hi-Fi video recorder, and the track dubbed onto the soundtrack in Dolby stereo.

MULTITRACK? If you're not familiar with multitrack recording, let me explain. On a stereo tape recorder you have two tracks running side by side, one for each speaker. But some bright spark reasoned that if you made a recording head with four pickups instead of two, you could make an elementary multitrack tape recorder, like a scaled down version of the 24 track machines in pro recording studios. The upshot of all this is that you can record a voice for instance on one track, on the next track a guitar, on the next a bass, and on the last track a drum kit. Then you can play them back simultaneously, making it sound like they're all playing together! Brilliant, eh? Especially if you don't actually have a band at your disposal. Recording all the parts yourself, you can then hear them carefully blended together.

Name: Michael Jones Age: 20 Place of Birth: Cardiff When did you get your Speccy: January 86 in an effort to give up smoking. (No luck) Musical Influences: The Cure, Birthday Party, Big Flame, Three Johns. Why you use computers: Because there aren't many drummers in Cardiff, and it's quieter to use a drumbox. Name: Kay Ann Helen Jones Age: 21 Place of Birth: Cardiff Musical Influences: The Cure, Siouxie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cocteau Twins. When did you get married: One year last August. What do you think about sampling: We must play the machine, not the other way around.

ON THE RECORD Having written the next Number 1, what then? How do you approach a record company with your product? What do they want to see? We asked an A'n'R Man (talent spotter to you). "It's a common mistake for bands to send three songs which are all different, to sort of show off how versatile they are. This isn't what your average Artists and Repetoire Man wants to hear. He wants three songs which show the band can produce a recognisable style time after time. He will also, before he lets any band near a contract, want to hear them play live, even if it's just a rehearsal. A video is an asset, because it demonstrates that the band have an image they want to project, and can do so. Build up a relationship with one record company and, if you can blag your way through the receptionist, ask to see the A'n'R man personally. Most will agree to see you." What receptionists say to you off speaking to A'n'R men: "He's in a meeting..." (He's not. Try again.) "He's on the other line at the moment..." (They haven't got one.) "Can he call you back?" (He won't! You call him.) "He's gone to lunch..." (He has. Phone back.) "What was it concerning?" (Don't tell her. Say you'll call again.) "Could you send your tape to us?" (You might as well bin it.) "We like your stuff, please keep in touch..." (You're amateur.) "Can I take a message?" (No, you'll call back.)