As you may have gathered from the previous episode, dear reader, there is no such thing as a standard Electron, no standard upgrade path, and no agreed 'best' use for the Elk. This muddy situation is compounded by a handful of suppliers who persist in manufacturing a range of excellent addons at entirely reasonably prices with the service to match. Just to increase any uncertainty you may be feeling, the spectre of 'compatibility with other Acorn machines' is trotted out at the drop of a checkbit. [Wossat? - Will]

Unfortunately, the very real problem of pros and cons for each piece is only considered after the event, potentially leaving with novice with a technically wonderful but useless piece of kit for their application.

The platform outlined in the previous article - Elk, MRB, Plus 1 and disk - should serve you very well for games play, programming, work processing (WP) or even as a basis for hacking more tackle and applications onto the beast. If you have not already given thought to what you want to do with your Electron, now is the time to do it, because some further upgrades can actually militate against other uses of your system!

An outstanding example of single purposeness is the Pres E00 ADFS which does exactly as claimed (i.e. maintains PAGE at &E00), but requires two banks of 16K RAM, usually provided by Pres' own excellent Advanced Battery-backed RAM (ABR). Thus, once both the disk interface and the ABR are installed, you are denied the use of the remaining cartridge slot for cartridge-based software and are restricted to games or BASIC/Assembler programming. You can get round this by putting ROM images of your favourite cartridges into RAM chips, but unless you already own a Slogger Rombox or wish to invest in a Pres AP6 upgrade (See below) for your Plus 1, this can prove expensive when the cost of the required RAM chips is taken into account.

In fact there is something to be said for only buying an ADFS system for business-like applications such as WP and Spreadsheets. The memory loss does not affect WP in the same way that it can stop some games, and ADFS offers an intelligent filing system well suited to business use. For programming or gaming, you need as little interference from the filing system as possible.

One of the disadvantages of either disk system is the dearth of games or any other disk-based software for the Elk. The truly adventurous will find their own way of converting tape software to disk but by far the easiest is Slogger's "T2-" range of ROMs. They are easily installed in the disk interface (or any other ROM holder) and work with the vast majority of games. The filing system is handed back to cassette after loading, thus overcoming the problems of ADFS workspace or any calls to *TAPE in the program, but this does mean you need a cassette for datafiles for games like Elite or applications like Desk Diary.

A good way of overcoming the loss of a cartridge slot to a disk interface is a Pres ABR. This neat little device is the same as an Acorn cartridge, but contains two banks of 16K RAM complete with the necessary software to load, save, lock or unlock any RAM bank (If you don't have it already on Slogger's Expansion 2.0 ROM), as well as ROM building.

This means you can save a copy of a ROM or cartridge image to disk or tape, then load it at will into one of the two banks of ABR and configure it as ROM to overcome the protective writeback habits of ROM-based software. Being battery-backed means the image stays in place with the machine is switched off, and of course you can enjoy View and Viewsheet, or any two ROMs in the one slot. Slogger have a similar product doing the same job.

If you have an Acorn Plus 1, not a Rombox, and fancy permanently mounting your collection of ROM chips, Pres provide the AP6 for fitting up to six ROM or 16K RAM chips which can be configured as ROM using the above methods. It requires an upgrade to the Pres Plus 1 but this is easily done by anyone capable of using a soldering iron. The drawback with an AP6 is that it requires the Plus 1 to be disengaged, and the lid removed, every time you want to access the chips. The Rombox, although it seats fewer ROMs, is much easier to use. An alternative is to use empty Acorn cartridges for mounting up to two ROMs in a cartridge slot.

Software applications for the Elk are readily found and include the excellent Acorn View family of Word Processor (View), Spreadsheet (Viewsheet) and Database (Viewstore). View and Viewsheet come in Electron specific releases while Viewstore was not originally intended for the Elk and is a ROM chip. Slogger are responsible for the impressive star twins of Word Processor (Starword) and Database (Starstore), both can also be used on the BBC Micro and require chip mounting hardware.

If you want a gentle introduction to the world of Word Processing, Database, Spreadsheets and Data-display graphics without getting a Plus 1 first, look out for the Electron (tape) version of Mini Office. This was an award-winning software package in its day, but its main strengths now are as a typing tutor and gaining experience of school or office-type applications. [Mini Office may be hard to come by these days, so if you can't find it, write to me and I'll have a look through my box of second-hand goodies! - Will]

In contrast, Viewsheet is quite capable of casting the financial runes for a family, club or personal business, while View and Starword offer the features of modern Word Processors without distracting the novice user from the typing practice!

Finally, the matter of 'compatibility with other Acorn machines' is not worth getting into a lather about. The other machines in question are the BBC Master 128 and Archimedes range. All non-Electron specific kit (e.g. Pres ABR and Slogger STAR- ROMs) will commute happily to the BBC Master. All the ASCII text files you have (and that's everything but machine code) can be read from tape or ADFS for the Master and ADFS for the Arc. Your own programs may be a little trickier. The BBC Master is an 8bit machine and will probably accept your programs with a little tweaking, but the Arc is 32bits of a different matter and you can expect to recode.

By now I hope the newcomer will have a grasp of what is available for the Elk and will actually talk to the suppliers in detail.

Christopher Chadwick, EUG #6