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I had the opportunity recently to try out Acorn's ROM filing system with a couple of games: Hopper and Snapper.

The Acorn Plus 1 can accommodate both cartridges at once, so I plugged them in to the sockets beneath the sprint loaded flaps on top and switched on.

A rather strangled beep is heard instead of the usual longer note, and by the time I had sat down Snapper had loaded. This is far better than the usual three or four minutes loading time of the cassette games.

The actual games themselves are no different to the cassette versions, but are far more convenient on ROM cartridges.

Whenever Break is pressed, or the Electron switched on, the game on the cartridge nearest to you is loaded, taking about 10 seconds.

To load the program on the cartridge furthest away, you press Break, and while the loader is being transferred Escape can be pressed to abort the process.

The ROM filing system is still active, *CAT printing a list of all the files on both cartridges. The other game can then be loaded and run with CHAIN"name".

If you want to load a program on cassette, the cassette filing system must be selected with *TAPE and the program loaded in the normal manner.

The ROM filing system is great, and I can't wait to get my hands on a paged ROM such as Lisp, or Forth if it comes out.

My only criticism is that the cartridges cannot be left in all the time. This is because whenever Break is pressed, the software on the nearest cartridge is loaded, which could overwrite an important program you were working on, and whenever you switch on to use the Electron for something a little more serious, the game loads immediately.

It's too hard to resist not having one more go...

Roland Waddilove