(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

ANOTHER AMSTRAD CRUSHER

Simon N Goodwin finds another fine disk interface in MGT's Plus D and gets rhythm with the SpecDrum System Two.

If you're planning to upgrade your Spectrum, the new Plus D interface from Miles Gordon Technology - MGT - is definitely worth a look. It's well-designed and amazing

value for money.

For £50 you get a disk interface, parallel printer port, sophisticated software to control both these, and a simple snapshot device that lets you print screens or save

programs of any size to disk.

A 780K 3.5-inch disk drive costs an extra £80 if you buy it at the same time as the interface. You can use any standard 40-track or 80-track drive, but you'd have to

be very well-connected to beat the price of the MGT drive.

The Plus D was designed by Bruce Gordon, who invented the popular Disciple interface two years ago. That was a competitor for the grandfather of all Spectrum

interfaces, Sinclair's aptly-named Interface One. The £90 Disciple is still available from Rockfort Products.

The Plus D might be viewed as a cut-down version of the Disciple, but that would be unjust. The Plus D is a complete, coherent product. It lacks the Disciple's

through-port, joystick and network connections, but still works with the many programs that have been converted to use the Disciple's disk and printer interfaces.

FITS ANY SPECTRUM

£49.95 buys you a plain black metal box, not much bigger than a single cassette case. An edge connector protrudes from one end of the box, and plugs into the back of your computer. Two ITC (bed-of-nails) sockets are flush with the other end of the box: one connects to the printer, the other to one or two disk drives. A red light

and a small reassuringly rubbery button garnish the top of the box. That's it.

The Plus D fits any type of Spectrum, as it pokes out from the back of the computer rather than vertically upwards. You need about 12cm of clearance at the back of the

computer; it's best not to use the legs at the back of a Spectrum + or 128K, as they would leave the Plus D hanging precariously by its connections.

The metal box isn't just there to make the unit feel chunky - it also acts as a heat sank, keeping the Plus D cool and shielding it from radiated interference.

Inside, there's a neat double-sided circuit board holding a custom PAL chip, a standard 1772 disk controller, 8K of ROM and 8K of RAM. a latch for data being sent to the printer, and eight 'glue' chips to tie the rest together. Two of these chips have been soldered piggy-back style on top of other components - this looks ugly but

shouldn't cause any problems.

The RAM holds part of the disk-control and printer-control code, and is loaded from disk or cassette when you turn on the system and type RUN. This arrangement makes the Plus D flexible, though arguably it's unnecessary. You don't need to reload after a reset, unless the system has crashed or been turned off since the last load.

Clever hackers can even run short routines in the Plus D's internal memory without disturbing the main programs.

MANUAL AND MAGAZINE

The Plus D comes with two A5 leaflets - a user's manual and a 'free introductory issue' of FORMAT, the magazine of the Disciple and Plus D users' group. The main

manual is 24 pages of daisywheel type, stuffed with useful information, readable but very dense. There's no index.

This manual is filled with useful practical tips that stem from experience, but it does not document the Plus D completely - some of the error messages are not listed,

and several technical features are only mentioned in passing. It's a good manual, but would nevertheless benefit from a rewrite.

The magazine FORMAT is a gas, with a great mixture of technical articles, advice and gossip. Subscriptions cost £10 a year, and if I were buying a Plus D as a present

I'd be sure to include a subscription. User groups like this one make the purchase of add-ons fun, rather than a risk.

GETTING STARTED WITH CLIFF RICHARD

When you first get your Plus D you must load a cassette to tell the interface about your set-up. The program loads after about three minutes, displays a neat animated

screen and BEEPs out Cliff Richard's sixties Eurovision hit Congratulations! Three tidy screens of text follow, and you're then asked to specify the details of your

disk drive and printer, in a non-threatening question-and-answer sequence.

There are some memorable printer options, like a facility to print Spectrum user-defined and block graphics. There's a fast screen COPY option, and a slower shaded

printout. The program initially assumes you've got an Epson printer; it's easy to customise the control codes sent, as long as you've got something similar and can

find your way around its manual.

When all the questions have been answered you are invited to put a blank disk in the drive so that the machine can format it and stash away the system details. After

making extremely sure you've put the right disk in, the little light on top of the Plus D goes out, to show that the disk is busy. It takes about a minute and 40

seconds to initialise a 780K disk.

THE MAGIC BUTTON

The easiest way to use the Plus D is via the magic button on the top. You can load games or other programs as normal, and then press the button at the point at which

you want to SAVE them. The button freezes the program temporarily and fills the border with a pattern, while the system waits for you to press a key.

The digits 1 and 2 print the screen out, in either format. Key 3 saves the screen as a disk file, 4 saves an entire 48K program, including the screen, 5 saves 128K,

and X restarts the program.

This snapshot mode is relatively simple. You cant choose file names, enter POKEs or check if a disk is full. Beware, even if you think there's enough free storage to

hold a program - the Plus D can fit no more than 80 files on a disk, and it this limit is exceeded attempts to save will fail and give no message.

When saving a 128K program, you must tell the interface which of the two possible screen displays the program was using, so the right one is picked when the snapshot

reloads. If the picture changes part way through the SAVE, you must enter Y to tell the Plus D to choose the other screen; otherwise, type N.

The manual says that a 48K program saves in 'just over three seconds' -in fact I measured the time, including a period of directory-searching that precedes most file

actions, at about eight seconds, or 16 for a 128K file. Loading takes about half this time. Speeds vary a bit depending upon your drive and what's already on the disk,

but Plus D Snapshots should be fast enough for almost anyone!

Snapshot files are not compressed as they would be by the Multiface, but you can still fit 16 48K snapshots, or six 128K ones, on a single disk. I couldn't find any

programs that could not be saved at the press of the button, but programmers and hardware-designers compete constantly in this area, so there are probably one or two resistant games around.

The Plus D is fairly compatible with programs designed to work with microdrives. It recognises the same BASIC commands as Sinclair's Interface 1 and also handles the

hook codes that machine-code programmers are supposed to use.

Sadly Sinclair made rather a mess of these codes, so many existing programs jump straight into the microdrive code. This works OK with Interface 1 or with a Swift Disc

as long as you've got their Emulator loaded so the disk code mimics the microdrive very accurately. Unfortunately such jumps usually crash the Plus D.

Beta BASIC and all the HiSoft compilers are among the programs which work without problems. I found that Laser Genius and Cheetah's Sound Sampler were painlessly converted to run from disk by their microdrive loaders, but the Sound Sampler couldn't LOAD or SAVE to disk. Laser Genius would SAVE and LOAD files, but the CAT command crashed the system, as did references to microdrive 2. If you want to use software designed to work from microdrive with a Plus D you ought to ask MGT or the user group about it first.

DISK BASIC

The Plus D recognises Interface 1 commands, and many useful variations of its own. It allows microdrive syntax, to suit existing microdrives and the Plus D at the same

time. Alternatively, you can use MGT's own simplified syntax.

LOAD and SAVE work with all the usual file types, and SAVE D1 "namel" TO D1 "name2" lets you copy files around a disk, or from one drive to another. Unfortunately this won't copy snapshots or files created with the OPEN command. Copying is quite fast, even with a single drive, but it overwrites the program in memory, so you should SAVE that first.

There are two types of CATalogue: one lists disk filenames in three columns, while the other gives full details of each file including its number size and location,

line by line.

If you're after a quick getaway you can load any snapshot by just typing LOAD, followed by P, followed by the catalogue number of the file. This trick doesn't work for ERASE, the command to delete a file, because that would make it too easy to delete a file by accident.

You don't have to supply full filenames, even so. Most commands work with wild-card symbols - for instance, a question mark stands for any letter, and an asterisk

stands for any sequence of character, so

ERASE D2 "Snap*"

erases all the files with names starting 'Snap' on drive 2. This will include all the snapshot files, which are given arbitrary names when the system creates them.

Later you should rename them with a command like

ERASE D1 "SnapC1A" TO "TechTips"

OPEN and CLOSE set up files, accessed with PRINT and INPUT or INKEY$. The normal microdrive syntax is extended so you can explicitly say whether you want to read or write a file, but you can't use random access to skip around a file at will unless you're also using the latest version of Beta BASIC - a fine add-on for serious BASIC programmers, but £16 extra.

As compensation, everyone gets direct access to the disk surface, in 510-byte lumps, via the hacking commands LOAD@ and SAVE@. POKE@ commands let you change the system configuration as a BASIC program runs. LLIST and LPRINT send programs and data to the printer port of your choice, and SAVE SCREEN$ copies the display to the printer.

MOVE transfers data from one stream to another. 128 BASIC crashes if you try to MOVE a file to the screen, but 48K BASIC lets you MOVE data to any device.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

At its £129.95 total price (including the 780K-capacity 3.5-inch disk drive), the Plus D system is strongly recommended to anyone frustrated by cassette loading. It's

even worth considering just as a printer interface, if there's a possibility you'll want disks in future.

Sixword's £150 Swift Disc system (reviewed in CRASH issue 44) is still competitive, particularly if you're interested in upgrading from a microdrive system. Both the

Swift and the Plus D have unique features, and they're much closer in price than any competitors.

Amstrad's Spectrum + 3 has serious compatibility problems and needs a £45 Multiface 3 before it can even approximate to the performance of an older Spectrum with a third-party disk.

Post-Christmas trade rumour has it that the +2 sold quite well but the +3 bombed, in the absence of much software on the slow and pricy three-inch disk format. It

won't be surprising if there's a further big cut in the price of the +3 soon, following the £50 cut to £199 in September. Even so, I don't think it will tempt many

people who already own Spectrums - in particular 128Ks - away from the Plus D or Swift systems, which are superior upgrades.

AS GOOD AS A +3?

Roy Stead investigates Miles Gordon's +d - the new disc drive interface threatening to superceed the +3.

Product: Plus D disc/printer interface
Supplier: Miles Gordon Technology, Unit 4, Chesterton Mill, French's Road, Cambridge, CB4 3NP, 0223-311665
Price: £49.95, or £129.95 with 3.3" disc drive. 5.25" drives also available.

Got a Spectrum which isn't a Plus 3? Join the majority. So what are you going to do about getting your tape software onto ultra-post disc?

When Baron Alan Sugar d'Amstrad launched the Plus 3, everyone became aware of the advantages of disc. It's faster than tape; it's more reliable than tape; and with a disc you can do clever things like loading a specified program from any position on the disc, or searching for programs and data files using "pattern matching" sorting techniques. For games players, the main advantage is that you can sort your huge piles of cassettes into a few fast-loading discs.

The Plus D is an interface which connects any Spectrum except the Plus 3 to a 3.5 inch or 5.25 inch disc drive. Bear in mind that these aren't the same as the 3 inch drive built into the Plus 3, so it won't allow you to use any software released for the Plus 3.

Like the various microdrive interfaces on the market, the Plus D allows you to take "snapshots" of the Spectrum's 48K or 128K memory, or just the screen, and save it to disc. On a double-sided disc you have 780K of storage space, so you could get two 128K snapshots, eleven 48K snapshots and the odd screen file onto one disc. Handy, yes?

When you first plug in the Plus D, you need to let it know what type of disc drive or printer you are using. This is done by loading up a system program and answering a handful of questions on its set-up menu.

From then on, all you have to do is load your favourite program from tape, press the reset button to zap it onto disc, then reload any 48K program in about three seconds!

Since you can transfer the program at any point, this allows you to save games at high levels if you don't want to go trudging through the early stages every time you play. You can also dump graphic screens directly to the printer, or save them to disc for printouts later.

The manual is written in plain English, and the syntax used to control the disc drive is very much like that of the Microdrive. The Plus D is compatible with the Disciple, an earlier product which also features joystick ports and various other widgets, and both can be used with a number of "werious" packages such as Tasword 2, Devpac Assembler, The Last Word, Masterfile and many more. Kempston is currently working on an Amiga-like window/icon/mouse desktop system using the Plus D.

The command syntax is dead simple. There are two ways to load a program from disc; either use Load d1 "Program Name", or use Cat 1 to produce a list of all the programs on the disc together with a file number, and use Load p(number).

It's also easy to use the Plus D as a printer interface; the Poke@ command is used to set line length, spacing, margins and so on, and Llist, Lprint and Save Screens are used to produce normal or large-size screen dumps.

But it's as a disc-drive interface that the Plus D really shines; it's ideal for beginners or advanced users (as you can examine discs sector by sector if you wish), and there's an excellent support service from the independent Disciple and Plus D Users' Group (INDUG).

At £49.95 for the interface, or £129.95 for the interface and a double-sided double-density 80-track disc drive, it won't cost you much more to invest in a Plus D and drive than it would to sell your old Spectrum and invest in a Plus 3. The Plus D is an excellent system, and unless someone brings out a product which allows you to transfer tape software onto Plus 3 three-inch discs, it's the perfect choice for anyone who is fed up with waiting five minues for their games to load.

Product: Plus D disc/printer interface.
Price: £49.95
Supplier: Miles Gordon Technology MGT
Address: Unit 4, Chesterton Mill, French's Road, Cambridge, CB4 NP. Tel: 0223 311665

DRIVE FOR PERFECTION

The Plus D Disc/Printer Interface costs only £50. Should Spectrum owners deny the Disciple. Chris Hankins Decides

The Plus D by Miles Gordon Technology sells for slightly less than £50. It contains what I would say are the more vital features of the Disciple. Plus D has a disc interface which can handle 3.5in., 3in. or 5.25in. drives which can be singleor double-sided and Plus D allows one or two drives to be used.

The system is set up from a cassette-based program which is not so strange as it sounds, because it allows more flexibility in choosing disc drives. Once you have answered the simple question asked by the system file program it will create a system disc for you. The system can then control your disc drive and your printer.

To run the disc operating system you must enter run either in 128 or 48 mode. This boots the system which is stored in the Plus D, so it is not affected or lost if you reset the Spectrum via its switch.

The disc interface is compatible with Interface 1 and can handle all Microdrive syntax commands. You can load a file by entering LOAD *"m';1;"filename". It also has its own commands which are much simpler to use, LOAD D1 "filename". Files can be Saved, Loaded, Renamed. Catalogued and Erased - wild cards are allowed but not when choosing a filename.

FILES

Files can be copied but not Snapshot files. This is a built-in safeguard against pirating. The Snapshot function is simple to use; it will transfer virtually any piece of software to disc. You can take snapshot saves at any point in a game, which is very useful for adventure players.

There are three types of Snapshot file. After pressing the Snapshot file option, if you press key 3 a Screen save is made, saving only the current screen. It is just like taking a photograph for posterity, perhaps of your all-time high score.

Pressing key 4 will initiate a 48K memory save, saving a 48K program, and pressing key 5 will do the same for a 128 program. One thing I found annoying was that you are not given the opportunity to name your Snapshot file. The system does this for you, calling the file Snap A, Snap B and so on, and when you can have up to 16 Snapshot games on one disc it can be confusing. The Plus D system, however, allows renaming of your files at a later stage, so you will not be completely lost.

A 48K program will load in about three seconds and when you have been used to waiting up to 10 minutes for a program to load this seems like instant loading.

The Plus D printer interface is a standard Centronics/parallel type. You will need a BBC-type 26-way ribbon connector cable. The Plus D has default settings for Epson-compatible printers, enabling it to work automatically with those printers. The system program used when you make a system disc also asks simple questions about your printer. If you choose to answer the questions the printer wilt be ready for use every time you boot-up the system.

It is possible to configure the printer interface to a non-Epson-compatible printer. You will need to answer the questions asked by the system program by using information from the printer manual but, if this defeats you, you can get help from INGUG, the independent users' group. Printing can be from standard basic syntax or from programs such as Tasword 2, making serious word processing possible. You can also produce screen dumps of normal size or double size. This is done via the SAVE SCREEN$ command - SAVE SCREEN$ 1 for normal size and SAVE SCREEN$ 2 for a much larger format.

SERIOUS WORK

Programs for serious work which are known to be compatible with Plus D include Tasword 2, Omnicalc 2, Power Print II, Disc Manager, The Last Word, Word Manager, Small Business Account, Pascal, Devpac and many more.

The quality of the steel-cased interface with its power/indicator light and positive feel Snapshot button is excellent and the 3.5in. Mitsubishi drive supplied as a special limited offer of £129.95 for the pair performed well and gave no disc errors. The system is a reliable alternative to tapes and a definite alternative for any Spectrum owner thinking of upgrading to a Plus 3.

RAGE HARD!

You wanna know what's hardest in hardware? Once again YS whips out the magic screwdriver in our first hardware round up of '88.

It's been ages since we did a really ripping hardware spread, so we thought it was about time. After a bit of barking at Phil Snout to get his screwdriver out and look at these beasts, we've pulled together a positive cornucopia of hoopy hardware and super software, to turn even the most soft-boiled trainspotter into a hard-boiled egghead.

The star of our show is Miles Gordon Technology's Plus D disk interface, the only real alternative for tape users to upgrade to a +3, from the designers of the Disciple. Check out the review further on.

Other contenders for the hardware crown are the Multiface family from Romantic Robot, the plastic pal who's fun to be with; a couple of wacky Multiplugs for those of you who work all your household appliances from one socket; an aerial switch so you can plug all your computers, game consoles and videos into your telly at the same time; and Computer Cupboard's nifty little Trojan Light Pen for you to scribble on your screen. Worra lorra lorra stuff.

As well as all this hardware, we've got a brain-boggling selection of the most fascinating hardware-based software. So, let's cut the babbling and launch into the reviews.

FAX BOX
Product: Plus D disk interface
Price: (Plus D only) £49.95, (with drive) £129.95
Supplier: Miles Gordon Technology, Unit 4 Chesterton Mills, French's Road, Cambridge CB4 3NP

A year ago Rockfort Products was marketing a sort of Interface 1 shaped disk interface called the Disciple. It was a very fancy bit of kit, as it goes, with a couple of joystick plugholes, a snapshot button for saving off screens or games, and a parallel printer port. This wangy little peripheral was actually the brainchild of Cambridge based Miles Gordon Technology. So when MGT decided to upgrade the Disciple and market it themselves, they looked very carefully at the mail they got about the Disciple and what people said about it.

The result of their research is the new slimline, MGT Plus D. The joystick ports are gone, and the device no longer looks like an Interface 1. Actually it now looks uncannily like one of those flat joystick interfaces, with a button and power light on the top, and two flat IEEE type ports on the back for the disk and printer plugs. If you buy the unit as a package deal you also get a three and a quarter inch disk drive which is very slick and efficient.

The Plus D is, to adopt the most massive critical cliche, a joy to use. It's fast, efficient and wholly reliable, and although it's rumoured that there are certain games it won't 'backup', so far we haven't found one. (Incidentally, info about what the machine can't do will no doubt be featured in the independant Disciple User Group Magazine, FORMAT, in the coming months.) The Plus D handles microdrive syntax (even the hook codes), so it can be used with a program which reads and writes to microdrives, without having to rewrite it. Using the button on the top you can print out a screen to your printer, save it to tape, or save the whole program in 48K or 128K modes.

Some of the nicer features of the gadget are the ability to rename files, and boot a file in one of three ways; the usual microdrive way with all those asterisks and semicolons; using a LOAD D1 'FILENAME' format, the D1 bit meaning Drive 1; or by typing LOAD Pn, where n is a number. This is a special function of the Plus D, where each file has a number on the directory, and LOAD P1 loads the file numbered 1, LOAD P2 the one numbered 2. As well as this the computer can suss whether the file is a SCREEN$ or CODE or a Basic program from the entry in the directory. Neat, eh? Another item which should have been a feature of microdrive syntax in the first place (ahem!) is the wildcard. Basically, the Plus D can be as easy or as complicated as you want, and should fit into anybody's current setup, making it faster, more powerful and most importantly, a lot more fun. This really is, price-wise and facility-wise, one of the best alternatives to a +3 system yet devised.

In summing up, it's nice to see so many good British products in this hardware lineup. There's not many computers you could say that of, and fewer that could match the quality and design of the peripherals represented here.

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.

+D DISK DIRVE AND INTERFACE
Datel/£129.99

Lovely, lovely kit. Basically, if you're fed up with lumbago-inducingly long tape loading times (and who isn't?), you should invest in this disk system. With a DOS so clever that user groups have sprung up to worship it, the +D is the Speccy peripheral that should have come with the machine. The £130 version comes complete with a 3.5" disk drive, but if you have a suitable device lying around the house, you can buy the interface system alone for £60. For those of you still hoarding stone age equipment, the interface will work quite splendidly with 5.25" drives.

The +D itself is a cunning item. The real fun of it lies with the programming side of things. Even if you're not inclined to go wibbly at the knees at the mere mention of the words "hook codes," a superfast disk drive makes dunking your way through your latest listing a heck of a lot easier. There's an old computery proverb that runs, "After you've used a disk drive, you'll wonder how you ever got along without one." N'er a truer word spoken, Specchums. Those old computer users, eh? What a bunch of brainies. (Mind you, the proverb continues, "And be sure to turn three times widdershins beneath a full moon to banish those embarrassing sector errors," so sometimes we wonder.)

The best bit is, if you don't fancy delving inside the new operating system and doing things to programs that only Billiard Lamps with his impressively bizarre imagination could dream of, you can just use the +D's snapshot button to blow your favourite games onto disk. Mercenary in under twelve seconds! Eee, luxury.

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…

+3 KILLER

Switch to the Plus D and save £105?

After last months unveiling of Miles Gordon Technology's alternative Spectrum SAM - IAN CULL now reviews MGT's alternative to the +3, the Plus D disk drive add-on. Deepening Amstrad's woes further Ian also disparages the +2A, while updating his DICE review and looking over yet more techie mags.

Due to Amstrad's predictable refusal to offer hardware for Spectrum owners wishing to upgrade to +3 standards, the only option might seem buying a completely new computer. In fact, this is far from the case thanks to Miles Gordon Technology. Their solution to the problem is the Plus D interface and 780K 3.5 inch disk drive for £139,95 in kit form, (available from MGT, Lakeside, Phoenix Way, Swansea Enterprise Park, Swansea, SA7 9EH).

Comparing a 48K or 128K Spectrum with Plus D fitted, to the official disk machine, the +3, is an interesting exercise. The Plus D is a flat, but long, interface, that when fitted to a Spectrum sticks out enough to almost double its length. A cable connects it to the metal-cased disk drive, which has a separate power supply (another cable). There is a built-in parallel printer interface, but no serial ports. This obviously means a lot more desk space is taken up.

Another slight problem is that your Spectrum isn't designed to access the disk drive. When powered up the Plus D interface has only minimal internal software - enough to 'boot' a disk, which loads in the full program. However, a configuration program, supplied on tape, allows the specifics of your particular disk drive set-up to be programmed into a system file, which is then stored on disk for future booting - the tape will probably never be needed again. Booting takes only about 2.5 seconds. While the +3 obviously does not need this, the MGT drive offers much more storage space, 780K in all, or four times as much as can be held on a +3 disk without manually flipping it over. The drive is also very fast, the SAVE of 16K took 4.6 seconds, the LOAD just 2.2 seconds. Formatting, however, takes a very slow 110 seconds (18 for the +3, but you need to do it four times to get the same amount of disk storage space).

The Plus D can also emulate the Microdrive syntax, making it reasonably compatible with Spectrum business software (the +3 emulates tape loading/saving, but little else), but also has a simpler syntax (still not as easy to type as the +3 though). Another +D advantage is a builtin 'magic button' (saving the cost of a Multiface 3) which allows screen dumps, and 48K or 128K snapshots for copies of programs) to be taken. Also on the plus side is that true disk data files can be created - it is thus possible to open streams to files, and PRINT to, or INPUT from, the file via the stream .It would be possible to write programs handling 390K or more of data in this way!

Snapshots cannot be loaded until the disk has been booted, so loading a 48K snapshot (Advanced Pinball Simulator) takes about seven seconds, and five key presses (using the LOAD p5 shortcut). The +3, using Multiface 3, takes 19 seconds (and ten key presses) to load the same game - however, there is a little extra 128K-specific code to be loaded. The one bonus is that Multiface packs the games on disk, allowing more to be fitted on the disk (e.g. 60K for a 128K game on the +3, as against 128K on the Plus D). But then, the Plus D has more space available on the disk.

You should also remember that the +3 is quite incompatible with older Spectrums (except the +2A), and much hardware and some software will not run on it. Fitting a Plus D to your old Spectrum will save you £105 (+3 and Multiface 3 = £245), and run everything you already own (NB: the Plus D is NOT compatible with my Alphacom printer or Multiface 1, though).