Label: LERM
Author: R. Evans
Price: £13.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

If you're still using the Sinclair microdrive - ha ha ha. However, those deluded enough to be devoted to the most unreliable storage medium known to Man will be interested to see LERM's latest collection of utilities.

Supplied with a backup cassette and a fifty-page manual, Micromate includes six sets of utilities. RUN can be copied to each of your microdrive cartridges, and provides a fast catalogue of Basic files, then allows any file to be loaded with a single keypress. FULLCAT/PRINTER gives a complete catalogue of the contents of a cartridge, can alter the Basic auto-run line number and provide a hard copy. TOOLKIT repairs free sectors and marks damaged sectors of cartridges, the provides a full status display.

BACKUP will format a cartridge with up to 104K of free memory, and will copy files from drive to drive and clone cartridges. TAPER copies Files from drive to tape, and MINITAPE from tape to drive.

A major annoyance is that the utilities will apparently not work on other LERM packages ."Do NOT attempt to use the package on LERM cartridges. Do NOT interfere with or attempt to copy your Micromate tape. Do NOT have any hardware devices attached (eg Multiface, Disciple, Specmate etc) other than a printer. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!" threatens the manual. If that's their attitude - you can back up other people's packages - but not ours - I'm inclined to tell them where to stick their cartridges.

RAGE HARD!

More like Rage Soft this month, as techno Phil Snout takes the first of an irregular series of forays into the best in hardware based software.

There are some people in the Spectrum world who think that technically speaking, Spectrum computers are a dead duck. No advances being made, except the +3, and no serious software. This point of view couldn't be further from the truth, as anyone who attends the frequent ZX Microfairs in London will attest, and I personally get sent a huge mound of interesting independent software every month. So, why not do a software special in the old Hardy page, I thought. No sooner said than written, old chums.

The sorts of things I get sent are mostly in the utility line, with disk-based material being on the up and up lately for blindingly obvious reasons. But the one thing I didn't expect was the Desk Top Publishing environment from Cardex.

WORD-MASTER AND TYPELINER
Cardex
£14.95 and £10.50

These are, I must say the most impressive pieces of software I've ever seen for the Spectrum. No kidding. The output of these programs, when put through an appropriate printer (and we're only talking Epson matrix with ESC "L" 120dpi graphics mode, here) is of such good quality that I had to look twice before agreeing that it could possibly have been originated on a Spectrum. WordMaster has been out for a while, and is a pretty good word-processor program in its own write (ho ho). But with the addition of Typeliner, an extension program which you load into WordMaster, it becomes a powerful page lay out program. Using easily remembered single letter commands, you can position blocks of WordMaster text on an A4 page on screen, using boxes and lines, and a number of excellent and readable fonts. This could be your chance to get into publishing. Using another program called Headliner (unfortunately not available at time of going to press), you can paste graphics into your page, too. So you could conceivably use pictures grabbed using the video digitisers we showed you a couple of months ago, just to add an air of professionalism to the output.

The program worked brilliantly on our office set up, which is quite amazing really, considering the fact that nothing works on our system, given the slightest reason not to! No crashes, nice bold output on the battered old Epson, and ease of page editing. Also, as well as some very nice fonts to play with, there's a font editor too, so you can either design your own fonts from scratch, or delete some of the less useful characters (/, {,},$.[.] etc...) to save memory. The grid on which you design the fonts is a massive 24 x 24, unlike the piddling 8 x 8 usual Spectrum font, which obviously makes for some more interesting typestyles.

There's a lot of work gone into this suite of programs, and in my opinion they're worth every nickel of the £35 you'll pay for the whole lot of 'em.

Z80 TOOLKIT AND MICROMATE
LERM Software
£7.99 and £13.99

LERM has been around for gawd knows how long now. I remember distinctly using one of its tape back up utilities in about 1983, and it working remarkably well. It's nice to know that small firms can survive with the right products. LERM is currently advertising a bewildering array of utilities for all flavours of Spectrum, notably in the line of tape-to-cartridge-to-disk type copying programs, but two programs which did catch my eye were its Z80 Toolkit and MicroMagic (now called Micromate).

The Toolkit is a full featured Assembler, machine code Monitor, Toolkit (of course) plus a full Disassembler. The aim of the package is to give you the facility to write and de-bug machine code programs with the minimum of fuss! As the cheapest Assembler/Monitor package would have cost you £15 until now, the Toolkit represents excellent value, and is actually quite well put together. Programmers used to using the ZEUS assembler for example, should note that the LERM Assembler in this package will load files from ZEUS with no trouble at all.

The screen editing is a bit like a word processor, allowing you to cursor key all over the screen and alter any bits of the files at will. This is nice, as the assembler I used to write on would only accept single lines and wouldn't let you fiddle with the lines of text so freely. The Monitor is pretty good too, allowing you to examine any area of the Spectrum's RAM or ROM. and edit the contents (RAM only). Using this facility you can alter machine code programs without disassembling them, and also inspect embedded text in programs... very handy for naughty people who can't finish an adventure game. (Shocking but true. Ed) The Disassembler takes a standard block of machine code and crunches it back down to its source code, an essential tool for potential game hackers. ZZKJ and Dave McCandless wouldn't be seen dead without at least one good disass about their person.

All this adds up to a brilliant package, with the toolkit functions letting you step through your programs to see the precise effect of each instruction. Z80 Toolkit is the best value for money in this line on the market, so look out for it.

The MicroMate is the perfect addition to any microdrive based system, doing jobs like supplying you with a fast CAT command, hard copies of directories, BACKUP files on m/drive, and a Toolkit facility for inspecting memory. There are also two excellent Tape-To-Cart and CartTo-Tape utilities for those of you who've recently upgraded to drive from tape, and would rather like to have copies of all your progs on cartridge. Full documentation is provided in the form of a sturdy 50 page A5 booklet, which gives details of all the functions of the program, and some handy hints and tips on how to best use them in your set up. A lot of quirky configurations are catered for, and incidentally you could use the programs with OPUS disk or DISCIPLE/PLUS D, as they both use the microdrive syntax, - LOAD* "m"; 1 ;"file" and all that... If you use microdrives, get MicroMate and speed up all your jobs. (Oo-er). Seriously though, using the functions of MicroMate gives you more power, without the price!

THASS ALL, PEEPS

And there you have it. The finest in technical software as we know it. I'll be looking at much more of this sort of thing in future editions of Rage Hard so don't stop sending it to me, programmers I've just received some +3 utilities from a firm called ZX Guaranteed, which look very good indeed. I'll be looking at them in the future edition of Rage Soft.

Next issue though, Rage Hard'll be back and I'll be looking at a pair of colour printers. Sound good? Okay then, keep it here and we'll see you next month, when we'll be back to our normal hardness. (Fnar).