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Paradise DOSsed? (Amstrad Action) | Parados parade (Amstrad Action) | ParaDOS HELP |
Richard Wildey barks the orders and watches how the Parados ROM responds. Attentionnnnnn! The Parados ROM has been around for a while but as the original review was over a year ago (AA99, page 55) it seems a re-review is necessary. This is because some people still haven't got the message that Parados is the large format operating system you should get. Simply the best No matter what system, if any, you are using, Parados will no doubt replace it with its ability to recognise 22 different formats, including RomDOS, MS800 and SDOS discs. It doesn't, however, recognise RoDOS discs, but then again not much does. Another incompatibility is that Parados doesn't work under CP/M Plus but does work under CP/M 2.2. You can, of course, use standard Data format discs under both. As well as acknowledging this myriad of formats from your initial CPC boot-up, you can read, write to and format across them. A stranger in Parados? Initially Parados is transparent to the user, taking up only six bytes in memory, until you issue an RSX to bring up the Parados disc utility. This is split into two windows with a pop-up menu running along the bottom row. The filename window takes up a large proportion of the screen. To the right of this is the information box, telling you what format your logged disc is, how many K are available on it and so on. This utility lets you perform just about every option you could require, except that there's no exit - you have to reset the computer to quit. You have two choices:
Go backwards to format The menu bar along the bottom shows a backup option which, in fact, was never implemented. You can format discs quickly - and backwards! Backwards formatting is a clever feature which is rarely used by other such disc utilities. This is where the computer starts formatting from track 39 and counts down to 0 which means that the directory of the disc is the last thing to be wiped. All is not lost Backwards formatting means that if you suddenly realise that you are formatting the wrong disc, which * happens all too often, you only lose the last few tracks. If the disc were not full all the files might still be intact, and at worst some should still be there. There are several occasions on which I could have done with this facility. There is nothing worse than realising you are formatting the disc in drive A instead of B just after you have seen the track number move up past 1, Looking at the menu In the files menu you have the power to:
On discs with more than 60 files you can scroll onto the next page. The names are displayed regardless of the user number or whether files are hidden or not. You can set Parados to read a single user if, in the unlikely event, you have very organised disc structures. You can, however, set this figure to 229 to view all the erased files on a disc, which you can then move into user 0 to unerase them using the move option. Play tag and win! To Copy, Rename, Erase or Change the attributes of multiple files you tag them and perform the operation in one go. For ease you can tag or untag a whole disc with one keypress. Copying multiple files is where the Parados buffer shines, on a 128K machine you have around 100K free memory for the buffer, it varies with the number of files on the logged disc. You may think that this is plenty but if you are lucky enough to own a silicon disc or any extra memory Parados recognises up to 576K which gives you a 550K buffer. This buffering minimises disc swapping and speeds up copying when you are transferring files. To sum up Parados is the best operating system of its type on the CPC. The utility is both powerful and apparently bug-free, but it does have a couple of irritating features. These aside, if you were confused as to which DOS to get you should now be convinced that there is only one worth considering. If, on the other hand, you've already got an operating system, is it worth upgrading to Parados? Yes! It is worth installing Parados even if you have the previous king of operating systems, RomDOS, (the original RomDOS, that is, not the bugged RomDOS XL). The Parados disc copier is an essential utility for RomDOS after all what other piece of software lets you copy from a RomDOS disc to an MS800 disc all in one fell swoop? So, throw away MScopy, MaxiDOS, RomDOS and all associated programs and let Parados do the lot for you in one package.
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