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 protec tion. The Disc Executor did nothing to change my opinion.

Disc Executor is produced by Vision Software and costs £11.

Mike Cook