PROGRAM THAT WE CHOOSE
Music by MITCHELL
(C) Fes'kov Kuzma, Abakan
Hello, dear
edition!
Over the last few years, all my undertakings in the area of
Spectrum accompany your books and magazines. Something has
changed over the years in better, something is very,
today is my letter will be
relate to your project called "Author's program."
From room to room in the ZX-Review, we
can see the publication titled "The computers that we
choose, but at present
day, in my opinion, the need arose, and under the heading
"Programs that we choose. "This theme
pretty long been discussed in
various kinds of electronic journals, more commonly known,
however, talk about it carefully, while the provincial
publications are not stint on the various epithets. Therefore,
your silence on this issue is somewhat incomprehensible, all
waiting for your words.
My proposed topic is not watering your dirt, and
a review of the relevant gaps and
also comfortable working with
distributed by your program, once you have made
such an important and necessary work,
follow it qualitatively. As
known, the best tester - is
people. I did not call to speak with the words "this program
behaves strangely, but also
"I enjoy working with this program, thanks
author.
In order not to be unfounded, I
offers the first performance test for this column, though, is
it not very flattering. Thus,
PROGRAM THAT WE CHOOSE
It's about the program "Spectrum emulator, more precisely,
the version 1.2. This is, without doubt, good, and most
importantly - the desired program. But if the first version
left a good impression, then Two ...
We begin, in order:
The first thing that catches your eye - a complete loss of
the built-in assembler. Monitor works
normal (I did not notice errors)
but that's when you try to enter any program from the keyboard
Emulator hangs forever, and
You can only get out by pressing
button RESET. This is extremely unfortunate and makes use of
the monitor unusable for debugging. Yes, the author says that
bug fixed switching pages, more precisely, the screen is no
longer redrawn. At first
think this is true,
screen is not flashing, but it works for
This emulator is so slow, and
because I have a PENTIUM 120 (the speed drops to 10-20 percent)
that this error can be assumed not corrected, but concealed. To
return to the integrated monitor and one of its functions
(Write blok) allows write to the hard drive contents
memory. Yes, it really
lets do it, but only in
the first version of the emulator, the second version of this
program is totally unusable. Let me explain: recording unit you
ask him name, address, start and length of the block,
but whatever you asked as a parameter to the block length, it
always equal to 8 kilobytes with a minor, and do you have with
it can not do anything. I read the description: "completely
rewritten a piece of software works with disks. Perhaps this is
so, the rate of read / write really increased, and the wheels
began to read better, but at the same TR DOS has got new errors:
because of errors MAGIC-functions is not
run programs that use them (all versions of the STS and
others), with frequent writing to disk you after a while find
that TR DOS disable and responds to your commands, the message
No disk. Also TR DOS (in both versions) hangs when you try to
take the sector with the number 160 and further, although it
uses a subroutine Rom. The new version of the author introduced
port switching pages, expanding the memory up to 1 Spectrum
megabytes, use the standard
PROS while running at the same time
minimum number of programs
but I have quite a lot.
The only thing I have achieved,
so it messed up the disc when you try to copy his copyists
for the pros. And finally the last one,
most insignificant, but at the same
time encountered an error
emulation mode high-brightness (bright). Under certain
combinations of colors, he is always 0, even if you do it and
turn. Try downloading any graphics editor and set such
parameters: paper 0, ink 7 and then turn on all
pixels, ie Colour the screen
color ink, then turn
mode pattern, and you do not
see! This error is the first time
made me very jittery.
However, the emulator has got, in my opinion, extremely
useful and much needed feature, as the creation of virtual
discs. Are also extremely pleased me that the author has
removed restrictions on the segment address.
*
