Dear BBC User, HELP is nigh, throw your User Guide away. Gone are the hours of searching through well-thumbed, tatty pages looking for forgotten syntax and operating system commands. On second thoughts, you'd better rescue it from the bonfire because there is a limit to the amount of information one can squash on to an 8K eprom. However, the writers of this chip, using sophisticated compression techniques, have managed to cram a remarkable 13,000 characters of information into it.

HELP gives instant information on most of the topics to be found in the User Guide and by giving the user a mainframe style on-screen help facility, program development time can be reduced.

HELP covers the following topics: BASIC keywords, sound, colour, teletext, VDU commands, FX calls, GCOL, screen modes, memory usage, PAGE/HIMEM.

One omission is information about the ENVELOPE command, but this is deliberate because any worth-while information about this complex topic would have used up most of the available space.

The utility can be entered at any time during the development of a program by typing *H <topic> (RETURN), after which ‘LIST’ will return the user to the program.

Interrogation of HELP can be by subject which gives all the information relating to that topic or the Information can be made more specific by calling for a. sub-topic, using *H <topic> <sub-topic> (RETURN).

Another facility included in this ROM is a string search which can be used when the exact command is not known. This facility is enabled by the command *H @ < string > (RETURN) which displays specific occurrences of the string.

For example, to find out all the information relating to PRINT, the command *H@ PRINT (RETURN) would be given and all sub-topics which have any reference to PRINT would be listed. However occurrences of PRINTER or PRINTED would be ignored.

In order to make the string search more general the command *H <string>. (RETURN) is given, the difference being the full stop after the string. For example *H @PRINT. (RETURN) will list all sub-topics with occurrences of the words PRINT, PRINTER, PRINTED. However, *H @TEXT. will not find TELETEXT.

HELP not only gives direct information about a particular topic but also lists all the related information. For example if *H DATA is entered, information on RESTORE and READ will be listed as well as information about DATA itself.

HELP can be entered in any mode but Mode 7 gives the best screen display. The information is colour coded; topics in yellow and all other text in cyan.

The package comes attractively boxed and includes an operating manual with full fitting instructions.

J.D.