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Honeysoft Romboard and Britannia Romplus (Amstrad Computer User)

Super Romplus (Amstrad Action)

SuperROM Plus (Happy Computer)

★ Ce texte vous est présenté dans sa version originale ★   ★ This text is presented to you in its original version ★   ★ Este texto se presenta en su versión original ★   ★ Dieser Text wird in seiner Originalfassung präsentiert ★  You may feel there are enough romboards around to fill your wardrobe and that a new one would just add to the pile without much noise. However, Britannia's board fills an annoying gap in this type of technology. It comes with a ROM already installed and is reasonably priced. Super Romplus ("plus" is by now a rathe: tired buzzword in computer-talk) comes cased in a grey plastic box perfectly matching Arnold's colour scheme. A plug dangles from a ribbon cable and fits the edge-connector on the back of any of the CPC machines. A further edge-connector juts from the left of the board. Now, this causes some problems if you have a 464 and need this connector for disk drives: you will either have to place your drives to the left of Arnold upside-down, plug together a conglomeration of add-ons till you can position your drives sensibly. Or have the drives standing upright in front of your keyboard. No position is ideal, but with fiddling you can set it up satisfactorily. A single screw holds down the lid. Under it are 15 ROM sockets. One of these is already occupied by ARCS (auto-rom control system). The ROM sockets are numbered 1 to 15. Great, but you can't have a ROM zero. "What's the big deal?" you may say. Well, plenty if you want a foreground ROM to take complete control of the machine whenever you power up. This could be a language other than Basic or a utility such as an assembler. Any of the CPCs can have 15 roms on the board. This was previously impossible on the 464 due to Amstrad's great wisdom. Way back when the 464 first breathed, Amstrad thought seven background roms would satisfy anyone. The 464's firmware checks only for a maximum of seven background roms (foreground roms can number up to 252, though). Britannia has rewritten that part of the firmware: it's all present in ARCS. Perhaps if you tickle Britannia under the cliin she may sell you a copy of ARCS to use with another make of romboard. But I doubt whether you could get a setup quite as cheaply as Super Romplus. Switching on your machine with Romplus inserted means ARCS takes control not that it's a foreground ROM. mind. Confused? During start-up, switch-on, morning-time or whatever you call it. Arnold will initialise all roms. The roms themselves have their own initialisation routines which among other things display copyright messages and if necessary reserve some memory. During this period ARCS will force itself to take control, popping up with a display of all on-board roms: background, foreground or extension. From here you can switch on or off required roms, enter Basic or allow any other foreground ROM to take control. One particularly nice feature with the ARCS system is that background and foreground roms can be inserted into any position on the board. If that doesn't get your blood surging, you can always call up a graphical representation of Romplus showing where the roms are fitted. You can even catalogue files, display a list of all ARCS bar-commands or perform functions on sideways RAM. Sideways-ram chips are extremely handy to have on a rom-board. You can load binary files into them and use them as roms a necessity when writing your own ROM software. On entering Basic from ARCS you will find a host of useful bar-commands: |HELP displays all roms along with their version number and type. |UPLOAD, fn, n loads a binary file fn into RAM unit n1, |BUFFER, n1, ... will let you use up to four of your sideways-ram units as a printer buffer. If you own an Epson-compatible printer you're in for a treat: Britannia has included several RSXs that give you easy access to your printer's control codes: |BOLD, |CONDENSED, |ELITE and |ITALIC are a few. The Super Romplus romboard (tongue-twisting besides) is excellent in terms of ROM control and positioning, value for money and usefulness. It will most certainly become a prominent feature on my Amstrad - even though my disk drives are on edge. SERIOUS SOFTWARE If loading programs from cassette puts you to sleep and even disk makes your thumbs twiddle, then what you need is your software on ROM. Or maybe it's not speed you want. Perhaps seeing yards of ribbon cable with a black box attached gets you going. Whether you like plugging things in or speeding things up roms and romboards are the order of the day. Confused? Here is a list of common terminology when using multi-legged silicon creatures and their resting grounds. And a new romboard and an eprom programmer are reviewed in depth. ram This stands for random-access memory. "Read-write memory" might be a better name, but you couldn't pronounce the acronym. 64k of it is resident inside Arnold - plus in the 6128 a second bank of 64k. The computer can read or alter data held in RAM. The Amstrad's RAM is known as dynamic ram; this means that tiny electrical pulses must be sent to it every few nano-seconds if it is to retain its data. Another form, static ram, does not need this constant refreshing. Static RAM is not very much used in today's computers mainly because it's so expensive. rom Read-only memory. Data, once written, can be neither erased or rewritten. Your CPC contains a rom: a 32k ROM which acts, due to some address-fiddling by Amstrad, as two separate 16k roms. They are known as the upper and lower roms and contain Locomotive Basic and the operating system. The term sideways probably comes from memory maps drawn with roms such as Protext or Maxam bolted alongside locations &C000 to &FFFF. This is where Basic usually lives, but at a simple command any of the other roms can shift across into action like the substitute in a football team. eprom Erasable programmable read-only memory. An eprom can be "blown" or programmed using an eprom blower (see below). It can also be erased using ultraviolet light - and that's the main reason for the stickers you so regularly see covering their 'window': protection against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Eproms can be blown and erased several times; after four erasures they may become unreliable. There are two common eprom types used on the CPC machines: 2764s and 27128s. These can hold 8k and 16k of data respectively. eeprom Electrically erasable programmable ... An eprom that can be erased with electricity rather than ultraviolet. prom You may encounter this word during your travels through computer books: simply a programmable read-only memory. Once written with data it can not be erased. romboard Amstrad envisaged that 64k of RAM and 32k of ROM would be a limitation for some users, so it was made possible to extend the CPC's memory with sideways RAM and roms (or eproms). These creatures reside on special circuit-boards called romboards, usually dangling from a ribbon cable at the back of the keyboard. During the computer's life a multitude of romboards have become available. Most offer similar features, but there are notable exceptions shining above the crowd. For instance, AA 10 reviewed the Rombo, from Rombo Productions: offering eight sockets and dip-switches to select them easily. As a shining example we review Super Romplus from Britannia Software on these two pages. eprom blower A hardware device with which you can transfer your own software to ROM. John Morrison's eprom programmer, for example (see review). eprom eraser These devices come in a variety of shapes and sizes - not to mention costs. They erase data on eproms by directing high-intensity ultraviolet light through the little windows. On value for money, the Uvipac eprom eraser from Solidisk is as good as any. Retailing at £20 it can erase up to three roms at a go it's rather like putting them in a little solarium oven and closing the door for 15 minutes. Amstrad ROM types There are three main ROM types on the Amstrad: foreground, background and extension. Up to 252 roms can be added to your system - but I am hard pushed to find 15 useful ones. Each ROM must be given a number. The internal Basic ROM normally has slot zero and by default takes over the machine. Other foreground roms can be given any number and called when you want them to take over. If another rom, a different language possibly, sits in slot zero it will bypass Basic and take over the machine on switch-on. It is even acceptable to have 64k of homogeneous foreground program by using four 16k roms - the extra three are called extension roms. Background roms can be called into action on a temporary basis to support a foreground routine. A utility such as Utopia is a good example, its offerings typically in the form of bar commands or RSXs. Background roms in the 464 must be given numbers in the range 1 to 7. The 664 and 6128 machines can have numbers from 1 to 15 - for the reason see the Britannia review. AA

CPCrulez[Content Management System] v8.7-desktop/c Page créée en 499 millisecondes et consultée 5631 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent  du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko.