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Ultra Mon (Amstrad Action) | Ultramon offers control (Popular Computing Weekly) | Bubble Bus Monitor (CPC Magazin) |
About a year ago something unusual happened in the software industry - a program was released that redefined the standard of a commonplace computing tool, a program that was such an improvement over anything that had been seen previously that it was confidently expected to outsell all of the opposition. Ocean IQ, the utility label of software written by Oasis software, had produced Lasergenius, an assembler, dissassembler and machine code monitor package that received universal acclaim. The monitor was particularly powerful in that it allowed you to go beyond the normal 'breakpoint' system and set extremely complex conditions which, when met, would trigger a break in the program or a slow running mode. It revolutionised error trapping. Since then I have been forced to conclude that Z80 assemblers and associated utilities are extraordinarily easy to write, and extraordinarily easy to unload on an unsuspecting public. There have been at least five such releases for the CPC, many from leading software houses, each of which has duplicated the boring features offered by a dozen others. Congratulations then to Bubble Bus for producing the first new package that can match, or rather complement, Lasergenius. Ultramon is fairly standard in its memory editing, disassembly and debugging features, although they are implemented in a pleasingly complete and flexible way. The program's greatest strength is that it offers outstanding control over the inner workings (of the Amstrad) hardware. It can handle Roms, Rams and Input/Output ports with ease. In particular, the program merges the facilities offered by a monitor and a disc editor and therefore becomes a hybrid that goes beyond the usefulness of either. Ultramon seems specifically designed to cope with all of these little routines that, in the name of protection, software authors use to safeguard their code. For example it provides facilities for editing the directory of discs such that they autoboot when |CPM is typed (anyone who has bought a games disc recently will have seen a similar system). Alternatively you can choose to format only selected tracks of a disc at a time and even handle discs that have been formatted to hold 41 tracks instead of the normal 40. Tape headers or data blocks can be read, edited or created from scratch. You even have the ability to read Spectrum format tapes on your CPC or tinker around creating entirely new and alien loading formats.
With this degree of control you do of course gain the ability to do wildly damaging things to your discs and tapes but on the whole anyone with a reasonable understanding of machine code and who wants to learn to recreate the secrets of professional programmers should buy this program. Tony Kendle, PopularComputingWeekly870219 |
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