| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ DISQUE ★ HANDY MAN (SIREN SOFTWARE) ★ |
HANDYMAN (Amstrad Action) | HANDYMAN (Amstrad Acción) | HANDYMAN (CPC Magazin) |
Manage your disks with delight Siren has come up with another marvellous piece of software. This is a package to give the disk user a wide range of 'housekeeping' utilities. The thing that immediately strikes you with this product is the new packaging and layout in general - a much more professional touch. This approach is continued with the program's menu systems: all prompts are very user-friendly, and confirmatory messages appear at appropriate stages. On loading Handy Man, you are presented with a fairly impressive list of options. Some very original and technically brilliant routines are available. These include a 208k formatter, an option to save the entire contents of a disk to cassette, and a very useful search routine for finding those Ascii messages on disk. One option causes an eight-page manual about Handy Man to be dumped to the printer. It's all very well if you have a printer, but what about those without? Not to worry: another option lets you read on-screen instructions for any routine.
Suppose you wish to transfer files from a data-formatted disk onto your new 'Sup' formatted disk. A program entitled 'Trans File' will do the job for you. 'Trans File' can cope only with program lengths of 38k or less - 30 unfortunately you are stuck unless you are in the know. 'Disk Release' has two options. One allows you to 'release the disk' while the other 'restores the disk'. Releasing a disk will cause its contents to be written to cassette. You are prompted for a disk name as well as the date (very handy, as these are quite easily forgotten). The data will be written at 3000 baud in 4.5k blocks. Therefore at least 20 minutes of tape will be required, as there can be up to 40 blocks, each taking 25 seconds to save. Restoring a disk will require an unformatted disk, or a disk whose contents you do not mind being over-written. The process is the exact reverse for releasing a disk. These two options are excellent, especially when disk space is at a premium. Searching a disk for a particular string (even control characters from 0 to 31) or a group of hex numbers couldn't be easier than with 'Disk Search'. Enter the string you wish to find, and the program will search each track. When it locates the string, Disk Search will enter its edit mode, allowing you to alter the contents of the sector being displayed. The search can be continued by pressing a function key. A maximum of 25 Ascii characters or 10 hex numbers may be searched for - more than enough for most purposes. File Search is a small offshoot of Disk Search. With this option, you can enter a filename and be presented with a hex dump of the first sector of the file, ready to edit. You can easily step on to following sectors. 'Menu Maker' is the final program in the Handy Man suite. This copies the file 'Menu' onto your disk. Run the program to 'ee its effect. It is actually a disk file manager, which allows 'selected'files to be displayed, giving the option to load or run any of them. Using 'Select' and 'Unselect' is handy if you select all loader files, and unselect all other subsidiary files. In this way, every time you run 'Menu', there is no confusion about which files can be run. Handy Man does take the drudgery out of disk management. AMSTRAD ACTION #15 (DECEMBER 1986) |
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