| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PROGRAMMATION ★ MAXAM ASSEMBLER AND EXPANSION ROM BOARD ★ |
| EXTENSION ROM MAXAM (CPC Revue) | MAXAM ROM (Computing with the Amstrad) | MAXAM ASSEMBLER AND EXPANSION ROM BOARD (Popular Computing Weekly) | MAXAM ASSEMBLER AND EXPANSION ROM BOARD (Home Computing Weekly) | Maxam – Im ROM unschlagbar! (CPC Magazin) |
To add Roms to the Amstrad machines it is necessary to have some sort of expansion board that plugs mto the disc port. At present the market leader has to be Amor - its Rom board is not only the first out, it also seems to be slightly cheaper than that imminent from Micropower which, so fax, is the only other company to have announced details of its Rom software. For £60 Amor gives you a very full 16K Rom, an extension board with a through port for the disc drive and a second socket capable of taking another, cheaper. Rom as a kind of cartridge. There are really three related aspects to the Maxam Rom - the core is the assembler/disassembler utility but you are also given an editor and some vitally useful Rom management commands. The full screen editor is a very useful thing to be able to call up instantly when you turn the computer on. Whilst designed to allow you to enter your assembler program, with useful default Tab settings, etc. you are also encouraged to use it for Basic or text files. It supports some quite sophisticated features such as printing a selected block, saving a block, merging a block at cursor position, etc, that go beyond the ability of the standard Basic editor, or even a utility such as Amsword. However, Arnor paradoxically seems to have left out one or two simple touches that make it less wonderful than it should have been. For a start there is absolutely no limit on line length - it keeps scrolling the screen from left to right as long as you avoid pressing £nfer. A novel idea, but not as nice as being able to set margins and have automatic word wrap. Secondly, printing from the editor does not allow you to directly control page length, page width, etc. However, pure assembler files can be listed to the printer or screen during the coding itself. These files can have some printer control codes such as Plen for page length embedded in them that do not appear in the print-out. This system of course can not be used to list mixed Basic and assembler or text files because you get line after line of assembler errors thrown out. Instead you must assemble a blank file containing nothing except commands such as Plen 60. The assembler is absolute magic - a fast two-pass utility with just about every feature you could ask for: conditional assembly, use of Z80 mnemonics as labels, parameter passing to Basic and so on. You are also given a disassembler that works on the normally 'hidden' computer Roms as well as Ram but will not allow you to look at Maxam's own coding. Monitor facilities exist, such as the insertion of breakpoints and register display, but these seem less comprehensive - there are no options for single stepping through the code or direct manipulation of the registers. Some compensation for this is the excellent full screen memory editor which includes the ability to search for hex of ascii strings, move and compare blocks, fill blocks with specified values and allows you to move screen memory around or edit sideways Ram if you ever have any fitted. Of course the advantages of having such things in Rom are tremendous - instant access to the assembler if your efforts cause a crash and almost no Ram lost so that full length programs can be disassembled. You can even to assemble source code held within a Basic program, as in the BBC. The weakest point is the documentation which is adequate, but tends to be brief and obscure at points. Still, if you are sufficiently serious about assembler to appreciate the worth of this board then you can probably figure most things out for yourself, with the possible exception of why Tolkien is included in the recommended reading list. On the whole it is a very impressive addition to the computer. Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly |
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