WE MAKE IT SO HARD

Datel Electronics are one of the country's leading hardware retailers. You may have seen their advertisements in CRASH or may even have bought something from them. If you are thinking of sending off for any of their products in the future WAIT! NICK ROBERTS has checked them out for you first and given marks out of five on the Nickometer!

Genius Mouse
£39.99

For all you budding Leonardos or Oil Freys comes the best graphics package imaginable for the Spectrum. The OCP Art Studio has been around for ages but the whole system is enhanced by the Genius Mouse.

Mice are used on 16-bit computers as standard equipment but with 8-bit machines there's been no such luxury - until now. In the Genius Mouse pack you get everything you could possibly want when using a mouse (no I don't mean a cage and a little wheel for it to run around!): you get the mouse in a neat storage box, a mouse holder to keep it in, a rubber mouse mat, and the Art Studio software.

I had only ever used Art Studio on the keyboard, so using the mouse gave the program a whole new dimension. You can now accurately draw freehand instead of struggling with fingers everywhere. The mouse has two buttons on the top. On an Amiga or Atari ST they do different things, but the Genius Mouse buttons both have the same effect, similar to pressing fire on the joystick. And if you have a joystick then the interface that connects the mouse to the computer has an extra bonus for you, a Kempston compatible joystick port.

Any serious graphics artist on the Spectrum should not be without a Genius Mouse, it's an essential piece of kit!

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.

GENIUS MOUSE
Datel/£49.99

Now, you too can play at being a 16-bit owner. Use this rather spiffy mouse to whizz a pointer around the screen in safety and comfort. Then, when you get bored with that, smile quietly because as a Speccy owner you've actually got programs that utilise the keyboard. But enough of this trumpery moonshine. The Genius Mouse is a high-quality device with a nice, easy-on-the-wrist action.

As a bonus, it comes complete with mouse mat and mouse house, the latter being a little plastic case that keeps yon beastie well out of the way when you've finished with it. The only snag is that unless memory has completely failed me, only two programs ever made use of the mouse. Considering that the snazzy OCP Art Studio is bundled with it anyway, and that the other program is also an art package (it's The Artist 2), that doesn't really leave much scope for making full use of the squeaky fellow, does it? Nice try though. And if you're a programmer, you should be able to use the scrappy info about port addresses to knock up a few fully-featured mouse-driven programs. Or something.

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…