| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ DIVERS ★ GRADUATE SOFTWARE CP/M ROM V2 ★ |
CPM Plus V2 on ROM (Amstrad Action) | GRADUATE SOFTWARE CP/M ROM V2 (CPC Computing) |
AS you will have seen from the news story in last month's issue. Graduate Software has released version 2.3 of CP/M Plus on ROM. This is a development of the original version which I reviewed in the June issue, and has made an already good product superb. You may now enter CP/M conditionally with the command |OP, which provides you with a list of programs on the disc in the default drive. Pressing the spacebar steps through the files in the directory, and a quick dab at Return runs the program. Should you have inserted the wrong disc or found that the .com or .sub file you require isn't there, hitting Escape twice returns you to Basic with everything intact. If you wish to continue with a Basic program which was running when CP/M was called, you just need to hit a key because |OP seems to have the same effect as pressing Escape once. I find this invaluable, as I often manage to put the wrong disc in the drive. It's not the only useful feature however, as V2.3 also allows accessory roms to be used under CP/M. What this means is that you can have, say, nsweep.com blown on to ROM and it is available for instant loading. The pre-production accessory ROM that Graduate supplied for review came with nsweep, format, pcw, run, unera, and d. Nsweep is well known to CP/M users, while the others provide functions that are often useful, but necessitate tedious loading from disc because they are not built-in transients. PCW.COM is useful if you need to read PCW format discs, unera is self explanatory, and d gives an extended disc directory similar to dir.com, the transient version of DIR. Format works in exactly the same way as the Utopia bar command of the same name, and again is very useful. No more messing about with long-winded disckit3. Coming back to the two main roms, Graduate has now built in support for the KDS 8 bit printer port , a facility I was, unfortunately, unable to test. As before, any profile.sub file on disc in drive A will be acted upon, giving auto-boot capability in a fraction of the time normally associated with CP/M start-ups. The only minor bug in the review copy concerned Turbo Pascal. V2.3 of the roms is none too happy with this program, as it uses illegal calls. However, Roger Bamkin - Graduate's MD - told me that this has been rectified in the latest roms, so it should present no problems. If you regularly use CP/M Plus and didn't order these roms when last they were reviewed, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you don't go out and get a pair now, I despair for your powers of perception! This CP/M user has ordered his, and will be using them every day by the time you read this. I'll also have had some of my favourite files blown on to accessory roms. Might I suggest you do the same? If you did buy version one, an upgrade is well worth the extra £9.90, and will give you a host of new facilities. Dave Dorn , CPC Computing |
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