RAGE HARD!

More hard software for Phil South to write home about, as he encounters not only a new Basic for the Plus 3 but also a whole new language.

Locomotive Software
Allen Court
High Street
Dorking
Surrey RH4 1YL
Phone: (0306) 885529

This month, before we get into doing some tricky little hardware things again, I thought we'd cover just one last bit of software. This is a very special disk for the Spectrum Plus 3, which turns your unassuming Speccy into not one but TWO new computers. Included in the package is Locomotive Software's Mallard Basic, a new version of Basic (surprise!), and CP/M Plus, a natty version of Digital Research's CP/M language (Note: interesting fact that CP/M stands for Control Program for Microcomputers!). Now then, people are always pretending to turn the Spectrum into a so-called 'serious' machine, so how does this obviously technical package took in the light of reality? Pretty flippin' good actually.

Although the idea of turning my nice colourful Plus 3 into a monochrome CP/M machine filled me with dread, it's actually a rinky idea. I can now run programs for the Amstrad PCW and CPC machines on my Spectrum! Which opens up a whole new world of serious computing I can tell you, with a torrent of professional spreadsheeting and databasing programs at my disposal. There's games too, not the sort you'd find on the old Speccy in ordinary circumstances, but games nonetheless.

CP/M PLUS

CP/M is one of the most widely used operating systems in the world, apart from a thing called MS-DOS. If you don't know what an operating system is, then let me explain. An operating system is there in the computer to run programs and organise your data. There are lots of interesting things you can do, like telling a series of programs to execute one after the other, or telling a file to take its data from another file, or even from another computer down the phone line. Basically, your Spectrum becomes a blank sheet of paper, on which you can write anything you like, or make it become any kind of computer you need. This all sounds pretty heady stuff, but what does it mean in the real world?

Before you run anything in CP/M, you've got to load the CP/M startup disk. You do this by simply slapping the system disk into the internal drive and pressing ENTER, to select the loader option on the Plus 3's starter menu. The operating system toads up automatically and presents you with the standard CP/M prompt:

A*

This tells you that the computer is ready to accept a command in CP/M, and that the current drive is drive A, or the internal drive. Each drive has a number where you assign to logical device names like a: or t: for drive A or Tape. (Notice the trailing colons or symbols. These indicate a logical device name). The same goes for CP/M.

Oh, by the way, I was well wrong about this version of CP/M being in black and white. You can use all the colours that the Speccy can produce, but only two at a time. The other interesting thing about the screen display is that most CP/M programs run on machines with a 24X80 display. So to help you run other people's programs on your Speccy there are two alternate display modes to try. The first is a 24X51 mode, which prints up the screen in smaller characters, or the 24X80 mode, which gives you the full display in two overlapping slices.

Also included with the disk are some utilities, which perform all kinds of interesting functions for you. Like LANGUAGE, a command which changes the character set to any international language, such as French, German, Danish or Swedish. ST SERIAL allows you to configure the serial port to do anything you like, and before you say it, YES, you can use the system for comms work (Even better than that, Spectre Communications has put a special offer coupon inside for its compatible comms package). There are also ways to define keys to do certain keystrokes for you, which could, for example, save you time in programs like Wordstar*, where you have to remember a load of control codes to format your documents.

Now then, about running all this interesting software for other computers like the PCW and CPC ranges. Yes, you can run them, but they may not always do what you expect. They might not control the screen and the printer properly, and all kinds of other problems might befall you. So it's advisable to 'install' all software for use on the Plus 3. Don't panic, there is a special installation program which converts programs to work in the Plus 3 environment on the disk. Huh! And you thought you'd get away with just zapping a PCW disk in the drive and booting it up. eh?

So all this is very well, but is it art? I ask myself. As an environment to work in, CP/M Plus is as good as most OSs and as a platform to launch interesting programs onto an unsuspecting world, it has no substitute in the Speccy community.

MALLARD BASIC

Basic is my own preferred language to get things done. Look, I know machine code is fast, and I'm sure that after a while learning C or Pascal I could turn the Speccy on a dime. But I've been programming in Basic for over 10 years now, and I think I'm just starting to become an expert.

Speccy Basic was a good tool for getting the Speccy to show off what a spanky little colour computer it was, but for maths and business applications you could just forget it. You had to write these types of programs in machine code if you wanted to get the best out of your Speccy.

Until now, you had to look a long way beyond the Spectrum Basic to get sleek, arithmetically fast programs. In short, you were looking at 'serious computers' (it's that word again!) But it's true. If you wanted to do something in Speccy Basic like, for example, calculate the number of stars above the horizon, plot their positions or draw a starmap, you would be greyer than my dad's dog before the first pixels began picking their weary way onto the screen. But now here's Mallard Basic, a program which runs under CP/M (which is kinda lucky since it appears on the CP/M Plus disk) and produces very favourable benchmarked results. Take a look at the comparison using the PCW standard benchmark programs:

BENCHMARK 1
Mallard: 0.76
Plus 3 Basic: 6.46

BENCHMARK 2
Mallard: 2.92
Plus 3 Basic: 13.2

BENCHMARK 3
Mallard: 7.98
Plus 3 Basic: 24.7

BENCHMARK 4
Mallard: 8.23
Plus 3 Basic: 20.3

BENCHMARK 5
Mallard: 8.94
Plus 3 Basic: 27.5

BENCHMARK 6
Mallard: 15.6
Plus 3 Basic: 68.9

BENCHMARK 7
Mallard: 24.8
Plus 3 Basic: 102.9

BENCHMARK 8
Mallard: 28.9
Plus 3 Basic: 246.9

So, depending on the problem you're setting the computer, it could be running up to five times faster than the same program running on Plus 3 Basic!

The other good feature about Mallard Basic is that it's a disk based interpreter, so it has some features which would not be available if it had to be resident in memory all the time. One of the key advantages of programs written in Mallard Basic, is that unlike Speccy Basic they can be moved across to a range of other computers, with little or no re-writing. This means you can write a program for any computer supporting Microsoft Basic, and it will run almost as it is.

Alright, so the emphasis is on file handling and data processing, but this is it's advantage rather than a minus point. It's fast because it doesn't have any truck with all those pretty colour graphics that S Basic handles soooo easily. For those of you with a home business, you can write your own application programs with ease, and because of some unique facilities of Mallard Basic, allowing you to index data stored in a file, and automatically keep this data in alphabetical order.

AND SO TO BED...

This is a first rate piece of software. I've not seen such a well presented and powerful program for a very long time. The program works flawlessly, and the manual is beautifully laid out and easy to read, giving you access at once to the fabulously complex and powerful facilities the program offers No wading through yards of dry text. It's roll up your sleeves and get dirty time.

If you're a hacker, like me, and I mean this in the old fashioned sense of the word, you'll love CP/M Plus. And for the asking price, I don't see how anyone who calls himself a serious Spectrum user can refuse. It's worth much more, so snap it up before Locomotive software changes its mind!