Melbourne House, 1K
The programs on this tape were designed to work with 1 or 16K of RAM. Toolbox, in machine code with five graphic and three programmer utilities, locates itself above RAMTOP and is accessed through USR statements from BASIC. Records and Directory are short BASIC programs with machine code routines located in REM statements and were both written by Dr. Ian Logan, whom many consider as the foremost independent expert on the Sinclair machines. Records and Directory are examples of sophisticated programming which bypass the system. Records allows you to create, save and load data files independent of program files. In other words, you can store data on tape without a program attached, and can retrieve the data without overwriting the program that calls it up. Directory reads and lists titles from a cassette and greatly facilitates finding programs. Both are transportable to your own BASIC and aside from being useful, they can be educational to the novice and advanced programmer.
On the other hand, Toolbox is of doubtful utility. Programs of this type are generally four to eight kilobytes long, which might be more memory than you are willing to spare. This one is only 144 bytes long and takes a dozen seconds to load. It’s hardly noticeable in memory. This is its main quality, but it has so few features that it is questionable whether you need it at all. The graphic routines may be impressive to those unfamiliar with machine language, and are quite simple to write. They are not directly transportable to your programs and if you managed this, you could probably have written them in the first place. The three programmer utilities (Renumber, Search & Replace and Free) can only be used in specific ways for a single task. Renumber, for instance, renumbers all the program lines without changing the GOTO and GOSUB destinations. This might be tolerable for a 1K program but is more trouble than it is worth for longer ones. If it were not for the two programs supplied by Dr. Logan I could not recommend this tape to anyone including those who have only 1K of RAM. For those who have ever had trouble finding a program on tape or have been frustrated by the whole tape filing system of the Sinclair computer, these two small utilities offer some relief. If you are interested in machine language, do what I did — take them apart to see how they work.