Postman In Cross-Channel Cheek Shock!!

Another disc doctor/utility type program, this time from West German Bernd Knechtel Software, for the Dragon with DragonDOS. Two versions of the program are available: version 1.5 is for DragonDOS 1.0 to 1.2, and version 1.6 is for DragonDOS 4.0 (Eurohard's ROM). In terms of options, both programs are identical.

I first saw a pre-production version of this program some months ago (it was called Disk Doctor then). Since then, Knechtel has added a few new options and removed a couple of completely useless ones. So, for software which has been so long in development, which do you get?

A completely menu-driven, very user friendly (almost to excess suite of utilities called by BOOTing the disc. The first options allow a disc to be formatted - nothing very special in that, except that it will also put a loading utility on the disc which allows a program to be loaded and the DOS then shut down: useful for programs like Telewriter.

The second option is a 64K backup program which can also be used on Dragon 32s if you are lucky enough to have working 64K RAM chips fitted (these were on the later Dragon models). Single drive users can use this option to backup a disc with only eight swaps.

Similar to Backup is the next option, 'Filecopy'. Rather than copy the disc sector by sector, it copies it file by file. This allows you to append files to a disc from another, or backup a disc with some bad sectors.

A printer directory can be output using the next option, including information on start, length and entry addresses for machine code programs. Of course, from Basic a normal directory listing can be output by typing POKE 111,254:DIR.

Option 5 is called 'Re-write'; and reads in each sector before writing it back out to the disc. The manual says it is 'used to refresh the contents of the disc', and if you believe that...

The 'Rename' option allows files to be renamed, as in Basic, but also allows the infamous 'null named' file to be renamed.

More useful for single drive owners is section 7, 'Single Drive Copy'. This works the same as the DragonDOS COPY command, but with a single disc system - copying individual files between discs.

The back up directory option simply copies track 20 (the directory) to track 16 (the backup directory). This is very simple to do from Basic, using SREAD/SWRITE.

The majority of directory errors are caused by 'CC' (cyclic redundancy) errors on the directory track, so an option to copy the backup directory to track 20 would have been useful. Unfortunately, the nearest you get is 'exchange directories' which does the job, but fails if either track cannot be read!

Finally, option 10 allows you to access Basic and DragonDOS commands (or some of them!) such as CREATE, KILL, PRINT, etc.

Overall, there are a few useful options available in this software, such as the FORMAT/LOAD utility and the single drive file copy. There are also a lot of utilities which can easily be done in one line of Basic, such as the directory copy and the directory print.

I mentioned earlier that the program is very user friendly, which is useful to begin with but tedious when you have to confirm that you want to execute a particular option several times over.

Originally, this software was priced at £15, which, it seems, even Knechtel has now realised is too high. At half the price, it is worth considering, but there are a lot of other disc utilities around which offer comparable or better features. Knechtel states in the manual that if you get a faulty disc, then return it with a postal order for £3 to get a replacement. What a cheek! (A supplier who supplies faulty goods should replace them free of charge, including post and packing - Ed)

Brian Cadge