ZXText

Personal Computer News

Features 2/5

Documentation 3/5

Performance 2/5

Usability 2/5

Reliability 2/5

Overall Value 2/5

Ted Ball 2/5

NAME: ZXText APPLICATION: Simulated Teletext display SYSTEM: ZX Spectrum, 16K or 48K PRICE: £4.95 PUBLISHER: Iain Stewart, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Basic OUTLETS: Mail Order. ... AND TEXT PLACER A stethoscope on your programs, and a teletext display facility. Ted Ball Peers at two packages. ZXText is a program for the ZX Spectrum which allows you to set up displays that mimic the teletext broadcast news and information services - Ceefax on the BBC and Oracle on ITV. The cassette received for review had a hand-written label, but was marked 'Test copy only'. The instructions consisted of seven pages photocopied from a typed original. They cover all the features of the program and how to use them, but a lot of space is taken up explaining how to use colour and graphics on the Spectrum, and you'd need to know this beforehand if you are going to use ZXText successfully. FEATURES Teletext is organised into numbered pages, each page filling the TV screen. With ZXText, to set up a page you have to write and type in the program lines needed to produce the page. This allows you to use all the Spectrum's colour and graphics features in the display, but you are limited to what you can get into nine multi-statement program lines. IN USE The top line of each page includes the page number, the day and date, and the time in hours, minutes and seconds. The day, date and time have to be entered every time you run ZXText. The day and date are not updated by the program, but the time is advanced while ZXText is running. The clock is about as accurate as you can expect from the Spectrum - comparing it with a digital watch guaranteed accurate to within six seconds a month I found that the ZXText clock gained four seconds in one hour. There is an alarm clock facility in the program. This uses the Spectrum's built-in beeper, but when it sounds the only way to stop it is to use the Break key to stop the program. When ZXText is running you can display any page on the screen by typing in the page number. You can also set it up to cycle through a selection of pages, but to do this you have to alter the program. Once you have your pages set up you can save them on tape using one of the pages provided. However, once you have called up the save page there is no way to get out of it without actually saving the program or using the Break key. When you have saved your pages the program waits for you to verify the tape, but there is nothing on the screen to tell you to verify. When you've done this the program automatically runs again from the beginning, so you have to type in the date and time again. VERDICT ZXText is rather difficult to use and includes very few error checking and user-friendly features. Invalid dates result either in garbage being displayed in the date field or the program crashing with an error message. Since you have to write the program code to produce the displays you want, you might just as well do the whole thing yourself and write the small amount of extra code needed to call up pages.