Four excellent utilities in the Salamander package, especially if you are writing your own programs and if you have an Epson printer to document them with. Even if you are a more passive user of your BBC then playing with the Sound and Teletext programs should prove most enjoyable and the Disassembler interesting if not too informative to the untrained eye.

The documentation is excellent and includes a cassette index for you to fill in and a template for the function keys which are made use of in the Mode 7 Editor.

Sound Shaper is a fairly friendly sound creation device with two main sections, one devoted to the SOUND statement parameters, the other dealing with the 16 ENVELOPE parameters. In this latter section, the graphical display is most helpful. The ENVELOPE ID is difficult to visualise without this sort of display. All the parameters are reviewed one by one, corrected or confirmed with Return. This makes small changes easy and quick to make. You can often do this while the sound chip is still carrying out the last set of instructions.

When the desired ENVELOPEs have been established these can be called by the SOUND section. Once again, it is very easy to change ot confirm the channel envelope, pitch and duration parameters. When selecting the Chords option, four SOUND statements appear. The full hexadecimal form of the "C" parameter may be entered. The Epson screen dump is a multi-shade dump for pictures in any graphics mode. First of all, it is essential to set up a text window to avoid the various messages that come on screen corrupting the picture you are dumping to the printer. After this, everything is straightforward. Various densitities, inverse and plotter modes are all simply selected, or confirmed by default. It is also possible to remove the picture around and change its height, width or overall size.

The teletext screen editor is an extremely useful piece of software and I can imagine a few title pages being drawn using it. The function keys access the different colours and flashing characters. Using the CTRL key with various others (D for double-height, G for graphics and so on) enables the various Mode 7 possibilities.

Naturally it remains necessary to insert a control code for each line of text but background colour is set simply with CTRL-X. A graphics character menu is available, from which it is simple to locate and choose the character required. The ASCII code and appropriate keyboard character is given and it's surprising how easy it becomes to flick between screens, inserting and deleting characters. Combined with some previous planning on teletext graph paper, this program should make for quick and effective picture creation.

Most importantly, there is a loading and saving routine for development purposes and instructions on how to use the pictures in your own programs.

The Disassembler is standard but quick. It allows examination of the complete memory address range, either using full 6502 mnemonics or in hexadecimal and ASCII format.