★ HARDWARE ★ MICRO POWER ROM BOX|Popular Computing Weekly) ★ |
| Micro Power ROM Box |
On the cards Micropower are producing an extremely extensive selection of Roms for the CPC machines to be released over the next few months and the inevitable corollary of this is that you need somewhere to plug them in. Amor's ROM board, in its present form, will not accept free standing chips.
It doesn't make sense to buy both systems - leading to an expensive, and jumbled spaghetti of cards in the back of the CPC, no matter how good the rival programs are. The only serious omission from the Micropower product is that there are no ROM management commands as provided by Arnor - these can be used to interrogate the commands of all the Roms and turn off selected ones if they use parts of Ram that conflict with programs, etc. The price can be mitigated somewhat - if you order quickly you will be entitled to a free ROM containing Micropower's game Ghouls. It was a big hit on the BBC and it runs much better on the CPC than the majority of conversions. The other consideration is that Micropower's board is well made and has the support of an established company. It comes in a well finished box and wins the prize for the peripheral that fits best into the back - absolutely snug with the computer casing and no sign of wobble at all which is more than Amstrad themselves seem able to do. There is, of course, a through bus for the disc drive. Documentation is also good - explaining how to fit the chips, the way in which the computer allots priority to a given Rom, how to lower the priority of the computer's Basic, etc. With the potential of their range of Roms that will be appearing, my feeling is that it could be one of the most important add-ons you could buy. Tony Kendle , PopularComputingWeekly , https://cpcrulez.fr
|
