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1995-02-16
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• 42M removable hard drives − Oak Computers are now selling a 42M
removable SCSI drive for £1185 + VAT (£1190 inc VAT through Archive)
including a SCSI podule. Remove the data cartridge for security reasons
or for portability from machine to machine or for durability in transit.
Extra 42M cartridges cost £99 + VAT (£105 through Archive). These are
true hard drives, not the slow “Bernoulli” type. More details in the
SCSI Column on page 43.
3.11
• 512M SCSI drive − Oak Computers are now selling a 512M external SCSI
drive for £4085 + VAT (£3990 inc VAT through Archive) including a
podule. This is actually a 640M drive but Acorn’s software can only
access 512M per logical drive − but see SCSI Column on page 43.
3.11
• A3000 memory prices down again. Morley boards are down to £100 and
£265 for the 1M and 3M respectively and Atomwide are down to £90 and
£365. The Atomwide 3M board has not gone down in price as much as we had
hoped, as the price of the 4M bit chips is still staying fairly high at
the moment.
3.11
• A3000 memory boards − Computerware have now entered the A3000 memory
board market with one which uses the same (excellent) philosophy as
Atomwide. The idea is that it has 8 chips only. If you want a 1M
upgrade, you put eight 1M bit chips in (same chips as A410/1 memory
upgrade at £60/Mbyte) but if you want a total of 4Mbytes in your
machine, you use eight 4M bit chips. (Sadly, it does not give you a
total of 5Mbytes because the internal 1Mbyte is disabled − the existing
MEMC can only address 4Mbytes of ram.) The current Archive prices are
£35 for the unpopulated board, £90 if it is populated with 1Mbyte and
£365 with 4M.
3.11
• A310 memory upgrade prices are not falling at the moment except that
we have some Watford boards we are selling off: 1M at £290 and 3M at
£490. Ring if you want either of them.
3.11
• A410 memory prices down again − A410 − We have now got the price of
the memory upgrade ram for A410’s down to £60 per Mbyte.
3.11
• Alien Invasion − Alien Images, Dabs Press’ games software arm has
produced an Archimedes version of the classic space invaders game. The
game play is identical to the original black & white game that I used to
play on my 2k Acorn Atom but there are 1,000+ levels, a sprite editor,
speed control, etc. £14.95 from Dabs or £14 through Archive.
3.11
• ArcComm is back − After several months of being unobtainable, ArcComm
communications package is back. It has some new features and a new price
of £29 + VAT (£31 through Archive). Tim Saxton is having a look at it
and I hope to have his comments in next month’s magazine.
3.11
• ArcLaser − A direct rival to Computer Concepts’ Laser Direct is now
available at £899 (+VAT + P&P) compared with CC’s £999 +VAT. It uses the
same Qume laser engine, so the difference is in the podule hardware and
the driving software. We hope to do a direct comparison soon. The price
was £799 but that was only an introductory price so when you add
carriage (£12.15 + VAT) you get a total of £1047.82 which is getting
pretty close to the allinclusive Archive price of £1080 for Laser
Direct. Unfortunately, Calligraph will not give sufficient dealer
discount (unless I buy 10 at a time!) to offer a discount through the
magazine so you will have to order direct from Calligraph.
3.11
• CadMust − Complete design system for digital and analog circuits.
CadMust Schematic provides schematic diagram drawing and CadMust PCB
gives a PCB layout facility. Both are available from USARC in Amsterdam.
3.11
• ChangeFSI − A new RISCOS version is available from Wild Vision for £22
+ VAT. Their press release says that Acorn “has decided against placing
this program in the public domain and it is being distributed under
licence from Acorn.”
3.11
• Deeva from Calderglen Computers Ltd is a sideways scrolling
‘shootemup’ program for £19.95 inc VAT.
3.11
• EPROM Programmer − Racing Car Computers have produced an EPROM
programmer for the Archimedes including multitasking interface software.
It costs £149.95 inc VAT, handles standard CMOS & NMOS ROMs from 2716 to
27512 and is available in two forms: an external box with its own p.s.u.
that communicates at 19,200 baud via the serial port and a parallel
version at the same price which takes the form of a podule with a ZIF
socket on the end of a ribbon cable. They are also doing adaptor boards
that will allow it to program microcontrollers.
3.11
• Fan speed controller − Ray Maidstone, who has been investigating the
idea of slowing down the fans on Archimedes computers to reduce the
noise to an acceptable level, has come up with a circuit board which
does just that. It fixes onto the fan powersupply connector and sits at
such an angle that it also acts as an airflow deflector to ensure that
the air which is drawn in actually goes to the parts of the board that
need cooling. He has used temperature probes to research all this, so it
isn’t just a madcap scheme. He will be selling them by the time you read
this. For more details, contact Ray Maidstone, 421 Sprowston Road,
Norwich NR3 4EH.
3.11
• Hostages from Superior Software, £19.95 (£18 through Archive) is an
action graphics adventure aboutÉ hostages.
3.11
• Inertia − A new game from 4th Dimension £19.95 (or £18 through
Archive). Explore two huge, colourful landscapes in your highly
sensitive craft negotiating ramps, jumps and various hazards. Includes
two soundtracks.
3.11
• Interactive Video − British Nuclear Forum have produced three
interactive video discs for use with the Archimedes. One of them has won
a ‘Nebbie’ award. (It’s an award from an international interactive video
disc organisation in Lincoln, Nebraska.) The idea is that you control
the video by clicking on the screen with a mouse and the Archimedes
controls the video disc. I played with an Apple Mac version of this sort
of thing at the Science Museum in Amsterdam when I was there on my hols.
It was great fun and has a lot of educational potential but until it
gets going there is no incentive for producers to do the videos and
until there are some videos there’s no market for the video controllers!
3.11
• Jiglet from 4mation is a junior version of Jigsaw at only £29+VAT (£30
through Archive). Aimed at younger Archimedians, it gives a choice of 16
pictures made up into 4, 6, 9 or 12 piece jigsaws.
3.11
• Memory Magic is a game from Cambridge International Software based on
an Indian game where you have to remember the contents of a dish having
seen it for a certain length of time. (Kim’s game, we used to call it.)
The price is £15.95 (£15 through Archive) and it is due for release at
the All Formats Fair on August 4th.
3.11
• MicciMouse is a mouseandicon driver front end for the Pineapple
Digitiser, providing facilities for monitoring, capturing, manipulating
and arranging images. The basic version is available for £4 from
Chessfield Software. An enhanced version with much more comprehensive
facilities is available for £21, also from Chessfield.
3.11
• MicroDrive − a golf simulator (yes, another one!) from Cambridge
International Software. Full 3D view, no power meter but a full use of
mouse keys to control the swing. The price is £19.95 (£18 through
Archive) and it is due for release at the All Formats Fair on August
4th.
3.11
• NStore − National Curriculum recordkeeping and reporting for primary
schools from HS Software (£24.95) stores records on all the Statements
of Attainment from levels 1 to 6. Provides various facilities for
graphs, level summaries, ranking, etc.
3.11
• Ovation demo disc − for £5 from Beebug Ltd, you can get a demo disc of
their new DTP package, Ovation. It’s probably worth having anyway, even
if you don’t want to buy Ovation because on it are Acorn’s Outline Font
Manager and a couple of Beebug fonts. The cheapest way to get the font
manager otherwise is to buy Acorn’s Font Starter pack at £47! The fonts
and the manager can then be used with !Draw (free) and FontFX (£10) to
very good effect for ultracheap semiDTP.
3.11
• Shareware 31 − now available containing an editor for use with C,
graph plotter, desktop magnifier, quacking good demo, funny mouse
pointer, ‘Secret Garden’ adventure, Taipei Chinese game, BASIC program
compressor, DFS reader, complete DOS filing system, BASIC access from
desktop, computer shutdown from desktop.
3.11
• Shareware 32 − now available containing a whole load of lineart from
various sources plus various utilities: sprite to GIF, sprite to TIFF,
!Translator, Teletext to sprite, sprite mode converter, util to display
info on screen modes, Impression key shortcuts, convert spooled text for
Acorn DTP, Textonly printer driver, keystrip for !Draw, palettes to
improve LC10 and Integrex colour output quality.
3.11
• Snippet from 4mation is a screens workshop for £29+VAT (£30 through
Archive). It provides loading, saving, printing, carouselling, etc of
screens. It can add borders, change colours and do special effects.
3.11
• WorraCad, Oak Computers’ precision CAD system, is here at last − well,
it will be by the time you read this. Oak have gone through several
rewrites of this software in order to really get it right as far as
importing and exporting via multitasking are concerned. It will work
properly with Draw, Paint, Impression, Euclid, Genesis, PipeDream, etc.
It is objectoriented and uses floating point arithmetic to 18 signifi
cant figures. It has tools for generating geometric constructions such
as tangents and normals, and other facilities including hatching,
dimensioning, scaling, mirroring and rotating. Even with all these
features, it will run on an unexpanded A3000. From what I saw of it at
the Econet Conference, it is a very impressive piece of software and, in
my view, grossly underpriced at £75 + VAT (£80 through Archive). Mind
you, they say that this is an “introductory price” although they give no
indication of when it will be going up in price. The only bit of bad
news, some would say, is that it uses a dongle (identical to the
Impression dongle). If you have already got Impression, you can either
put the two dongles together or send them back and get a single dongle
that will work with both pieces of software.
3.11
• XRun is a yet another vertically scrolling shootemup program from XFM
Software (£9.95). It is described as having “20kHz sampled sounds,
excellent graphics 18 levels, multiple powerups etc.” Having tried out a
review copy, it is very similar to YAIG on Shareware 16. XFM are
offering a ‘special price’ to Archive readers of £7.95 − just quote your
subscription number.
3.11