Memory: 48K
Price: £8.95

One of the disadvantages of the Spectrum is that its character set, along with the built in UDGs are worthy but not particularly exciting for use in one's programs.

ISP has produced a program which, while it offers six sets of characters, allows you to design a full set from scratch, save it to tape and then put in your own program by using two simple POKEs to call it when required.

The Character Generator is a very user-friendly program, menu-driven, with good screen prompts and simple keyboard drills. It will appeal to even the most unconfident programmer as it produces impressive results quickly and easily.

Characters are defined by cursor movements on an 8 x 8 grid. With a full erase or fill capability, endless doodling and re-shaping is possible. Individual characters can be displayed separately or you can view the full set. UDGs are defined in the same way.

In your programs, a set can be used in conjunction with the standard Sinclair face and can be switched in and out at will by two POKEs. The six sample sets vary in quality but the Gothic script is particularly impressive.

USEFUL

MAKER: ISP Marketing
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £17.95

Useful little package from those awfully nice Scope people that enables you painlessly to design UDGs as either graphic symbols or lettering sets. The advantages of a new character are of course modest but they'll certainly add some of that elusive professional polish to your BASIC progs, particularly Adventures. Surprisingly impressive onscreen effects can be created simply by alternating between the new character set and the built-in one. A couple of POKES are all that's required.

Six pre-defined sets (love the Algerian) come ready to use so tired listings can be revamped immediately and as you might imagine it's compatible with Big Daddy Scope as well as other machine code software. I jazzed up a Quill game with it to great effect. Worth checking out even if it is priced a quid or so over the odds.