Trouble with this tape to disc system
WHEN you have experienced the luxury of having disc drives on
your computer, the prospect of loading in programs from tape again
tends to be rather alarming. The tapes seem to take longer than
ever to load.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to transfer those games to disc?
Unfortunately, most commercial software is loaded in several modules
to prevent it being copied, which also prevents them being transferred
to disc.
The Disc Executor could be the answer to your problems. It allows
programs to be loaded from tape in several modules and then run
from disc.
The disc itself cannot be copied nor can the programs you copy
onto it as they are stored using its own conventions rather than
the standard Acorn disc filing system. So, when the disc is full,
you have to buy another one.
To use the Disc Executor system, place it in the drive and press
the Shift and Break keys simultaneously.
The system is menu driven and you are given a choice of saving
a program to disc, deleting a program from disc or running a program
previously stored on disc.
The names you give the programs can be up to 20 characters long
as opposed to the maximum of seven on the normal filing system.
Full instructions are supplied and the system works in a logical
and simple manner.
Well, that is the theory. How did it fare in practice?
When I first tried the system it would not work as I had the
Watford DFS installed in my machine.
So I took it along to my second machine and again it did not
work as this had a Telextext ROM installed in it. I removed this
and the system came to life, and I successfully transferred a
copy of Snapper (Acornsoft, as if you didn't know).
Unfortunately, this was the only program I possessed that would
work with the disc. Let me quote from the supplied documentation:
"Although Disc Executor allows the majority of tape-based
software to be run from disc, it is impossible to do this for
all programs".
This statement I found did not match my experience.
Programs I found would not load were Planetoid (Acornsoft),
Tree of Knowledge (Acornsoft), Atlantas (UK software), Chess (Computer
Concepts) and four different educational software packages from
ASK software.
I might have been unlucky, but most of the programs have been
around for quite some time and I would have expected any package
worth its salt to cope with at least some of these.
The documentation claims to be able to transfer the program
Countdown To Doom (Acornsoft), so that would make two programs
it could transfer, but I do not own that one so I couldn't test
the claim.
No doubt claims will be made in future months for new and improved
versions of the program and others of the same ilk.
It remains my opinion that no automatic disc transfer system
is going to be able to cope with a program that has one ounce
of sophisticated protection. The Disc Executor did nothing to
change my opinion.
Disc Executor is produced by Vision Software and costs £11.
Mike Cook
