Facilities For Management

It's always seemed rather odd to me that Acorn designed the Operating System of the BBC Micro to copy with up to 16 Sideways ROMs, and then only provided space on the main circuit board for five. Even the 'improved' B+ only allows for six (and there aren't many 32K ROMs kicking about!). Most users who want to take advantage of the convenience of ROM software will therefore ot for an add-on ROM board. Once this is getting well populated, they may well be in the market for one ROM to manage the other 15.

Slogger Software would have you consider BeebMan for this function, and it certainly offers most of the facilities you're likely to be looking for. It's probably safe to assume that anyone wanting a ROM management chip will know how to fit one, and, once installed, you can call up a help menu or read the 21-page manual to find out more about the sixteen new star commands provided.

The manual is well written and clearly set out. It includes separate sections on abbreviations, commands, delimiters, etc, which are often skipped over, or omitted from the software altogether. You can abbreviate all BeebMan's commands to two or three letters and use any one of the characters ! " £ $ % & ' ( ) * + - or / as delimiters. This may seem a luxury, but you aren't likely to hit a wrong 'un and you can use quotes to delimit ROM names with a space in them (such as "DISK MAN" or "WORDWISE PLUS").

The commands themselves allow you to display information about each ROM, to disengage or 'kill' any ROM and to shift ROM images to Sideways RAM (and hence to tape or disc) and back again. In addition, the ROM includes a hex dump, a multi-character 'poke' command and a function key editor.

The two levels of ROM disability are *OFFROM and *KILLROM. The first of these prevents clashes between ROMs which offer different commands under the same name. The second removes the ROM electronically from the micro, so that the MOS won't recognise it. Both methods of disabling ROMs may be reversed by the *ONROM command.

It's a shame these facilities weren't combined with the ROM status display, which shows which ROMs are in the machine, their lengths and whether they are disabled or not. It would have been nice to be able to move a cursor around the display and select or deselect any ROM from there: BeebMan seems fond of splitting functions in this way.

There are two function key commands, *PKEY and *KLIST. The first prints out the ASCII strings attached to each key and the second displays whether the key is in use or not! I would have thought the first display makes the second redundant!

Each ROM controlled by BeebMan can be sent a command directly, by prefixing the command with the ROM's name or number. Thus to send a *FORMAT command to your Floppy Wise ROM in socket 12, you may type *FORMAT 0 80 FLOPPY WISE, or *FORMAT 0 80 R12.

BeebMan seems to provide most of the facilities you would want from a ROM manager, but some are carried out in a rather convoluted way.

Simon Williams