Everyone's playing the game. We can't move today without bumping into sequels - the BBC+, Rambo II, Superman III, Tory Government II - there's no escape! However, some sequels or updates are more welcome than others and it is encouraging to see Clares take the time and trouble to double their utility ROMs size to 16K. The original BROM was reviewed in A&B Computing, July 1985 and there is not a great deal I can usefully add to that generally complimentary review.

The original Brom added 21 commands to the BBC, the most acclaimed being a full screen program editor, with a Wordwise Plus scrolling action. This, together with other programming utilities like commands to shift program lines or replace strings, made Brom a natural competitor to rivals like Caretaker or Toolkit. Which you chose depended a great deal on your purse or the mood of the moment.

A useful warning in the (preliminary) documentation suggests great clashes between Brom Plus and Disc Doctor- well, what doesn't? The suggestion is that DD corrupts workspace but I've had a number of problems with Brom Plus on it's own and it does seem more susceptible than most ROMs to a precise position on the board. The new commands added are a fairly standard run of utilities - memory editor, string search, disc sector editor - none of which are likely to compel you to rip other utility ROMs from your board to make room for Brom Plus.

What may make this worth your closer attention is a number of disc utilities which, as a suite, are well-constructed and useful. *MENU, for example, will present you with a menu of files in directory '&', which can then be run or toggled between running and examining a short description of the file. This would allow you, together with other utilities within the ROM, to save commercial games (within the constraints of the copyright laws, of course) plus a descriptive file of keys used, etc. Anything, in short, that might have been useful on the now-discarded cassette inlay card.

A selective file copier/deleter, a cross referencer listing reals, strings, integers, etc in a program together with program lines, a simple way to close all open files and some standard ROM utilities (listing, switching on and off, etc) all are welcome additions and there are several other handy utilities here too.

A complaint levelled against the initial Brom was that its £34.50 price was a little out of touch. Good news then that this has now dropped to 20 with the release of Brom Plus, with upgrade facilities. The new ROM takes the old price and it is certainly much better value.

However, despite the doubling in size, there doesn't seem to be a great deal that's been added worthy of dancing in the streets. Brom Plus is a good, solid utility ROM that may provide a useful entry system for disc users and BASIC programmers looking for some fairly standard commands. It's not one I'm likely to keep on my expansion board but (faint praise indeed, I'm afraid) I can't really put my finger on what is unsatisfactory. A lot of people bought Brom and were very pleased with it - despite Clares' claims of user demand for extra features, however, I can't really see a lot of people rushing to upgrade. But, if you're looking for a good utility ROM that covers most command areas adequately, then Brom Plus should certainly be on your shortlist. A case perhaps of too little, too late.

Yet another new, improved chip has appeared to tempt the wallets of Beeb owners - this time the greatly expanded Floppy-Wise Plus from Software Services. And, for once, I think it was worth the time and effort.

The original Floppy-Wise ROM was widely seen as a set of useful utilities which had been assembled to a precise formula: to provide those useful disc commands missing from the highly regarded Disc Doctor from Computer Concepts. As such, it was recommended as good value for 14 commands on an 8K ROM.

The Plus version has doubled in size to 16K (for the same price!) and now offers an extra 26 commands, with all but three of the Disc Doctor utilities now duplicated. As such it must be in the running for the Super-ROM title the advertising claims for it.

The original fourteen commands are repeated on the new ROM and range from standard formatting, verifying and disc/RAM copying to a range of more unusual commands. Notable are a conversion utility allowing 40-track discs to be reformatted to 80-track, with data intact, an autosave option which saves a BASIC program under development to disc every four minutes and a dual-utility disc protection facility.

These were welcome at the time and are still all valuable, as are the Help tables for ASCII and disc error display. However, it is the new commands that are of particular interest now.

An extra 26 commands are included in this updated ROM which, as I've said manage to make Disc Doctor largely redundant. These include the (by now familiar) abilities to search and edit both discs and memory, sector editing, tape to disc copying (and vice versa) and Bad Program recovery.

The commands which go beyond Disc Doctor are all related in some way and, usefully, allow the examination in some detail of ROM and sideways RAM memory - either for the presence of strings or as saving/loading utilities. It's fairly unusual to have sideways RAM utilities on a general purpose toolkit ROM (as opposed to something like ATPL's Index for their sideways RAM board) and they are all the more welcome here for that.

A couple of extra look-up tables have been included also - the value of tokens and the amount of memory free. Finally, quick and easy means of clearing variables or memory are also present.

Fully Tube-compatible, this is an excellent all-purpose ROM. The additional commands have been well thought out and implemented and Floppy-Wise Plus has to be a very strong contender for the one ROM to buy if your budget should only stretch to one.

I have some minor complaints, though. It's a bit annoying that the commands duplicated from Disc Doctor should also have duplicated in most cases the same star command names - a fair bit of ROM management is needed to sort out which one you'll want. The claim that this is 'the ultimate BBC micro utility' is perhaps a little strong but I would agree that this is excellent and I recommend it very strongly to you.

The name put me off for a time. Memories of over-active advertisements for the latest 'mega-game' which turned out to be megadross set my personal trash-meter sensing the air. Could Chalice Software possibly deliver the goods promised by a toolkit chip entitled Mega-ROM?

I think they may well have done. Admittedly the BBC ROM market is fairly well supplied already with toolkits and programmers' aids, but Mega-ROM does usefully combine many of the features I commended in their earlier Scythe and Master, reviewed last December.

Fitting instructions are clear as usual, although it's suggested that Mega-ROM has as high a priority as possible.

The 16K ROM has, as I say, 67 commands covering the following areas: ROM Management, Operating System, Filing System and BASIC/programming aids. These are all adequately described in the accompanying manual and I intend to give only a flavour of the total in this review.

These eight commands are all fairly standard in other ROMs and Mega-ROM does not offer anything outstanding here except the very useful *KEEP. This is a variant of the usual ability to turn off particular ROMs - useful when they clash with either each other or with software - but its global effect is a nice touch: it cuts out everything except BASIC, Mega-ROM and the DFS chip. A good time saver.

Other commands allow you to save ROM content to the current filing system, load it back into sideways RAM, display all ROMs, etc.

Mega-ROM offers twenty OS commands covering machine code, memory manipulation and other more general utilities. Again, there is nothing too extraordinary here except for the sheer number of options. Scrolling through memory, disassembling to the current filing system, searching or shifting memory are all useful functions, if rather unspectacular these days.

Of more interest are the little touches that make life easier: such as *BASE, which displays any number in hex, decimal or binary; *CHARDEF, which displays in hex or decimal the definition of a character; and *VIDEO, which will invert the colours of the video screen in non-teletext modes - helpful for 80 column word processing on a black and white display.

Next, nineteen commands for disc users and for general manipulation of the filing system such as closing all open files, displaying free space on a disc, formatting, loading or saving particular disc sectors and so on. Good solid implementations of this range of commands are always welcome.

Interesting commands here could well be *SCRAMBLE, which will encrypt a file to an unreadable state without the relevant password and *SCOMP, one of a range of utilities useful for compiling graphics. This you could use to cut down on the time a BASIC program takes to draw a complex graphics screen.

The final twenty commands are all ones that the BASIC programmer will need at one time or another, if only to cut down on work. If you don't already have utilities to repair bad programs, to search for strings, to append programs, to flush integer variables or to renumber globally or selectively then these could be most useful.

Again we have a couple of unusual commands, such as *KENVELOPE, which will display all envelope definitions and a different method of handling errors in BASIC programs, *XON. This will print the relevant error line to be displayed at the top of a Mode 7 screen together with the error message - a nice touch.

I'm still somewhat in two minds about this ROM - what it does, it does competently and certainly there is a wide variety and number of commands on offer. However, none of them are sufficiently superior to compel me to make room on my overcrowded board, except during program development perhaps.

If, like me, you have a number of toolkit ROMs already then I suspect you'd find the same to be true for you. The obvious purchaser of Mega-ROM, on the other hand, is perhaps the owner without a ROM board who needs an all-encompassing toolkit ROM to sit next to a word processor and graphics or music extension ROM in the limited space of an unexpanded Beeb.

That may sound a little harsher on Mega-ROM than I intended. It is a good, general purpose toolkit, almost embarrassingly endowed with commands and at a price that is a bargain for the sheer power and ease of use it will bring you.

0 Floppy-wise PLUS (C) Software Services 1985 16K
1 SLAVE (C) 1985 J.Aughton,G.Pennington,I.PiumartaHJJJJ J.h) 16k
2 BASIC Extensions (C)1984 R.T.Florance & R.J.Harrison 8K
3 WORDWISE-PLUS (C) 1984 CC 16K
4 Tape to Disc 'TD' ROM (C) 1985 Vine Micros Written by R.P.D Mallett. 8K
5 BROM-PLUS (C) 1985 Bill Harley 16K
6 Enigma DISC Imager (C)1985 Altra, M.D.Yell/1.J.Wilson 16K
7 FIRST AID 1.1 (C)1985 ALTRA / M.P.Hudsan 8K
8 Nova Micro Systems CAD (C) 1985 Nova Micro Systems Ltd 16K
9 SLEUTH (C) 1985 Beebug 8K
10 MEGA ROM (C)1985 Chalice 16K
11 EXMON II (C)1984 Beebug 8K
12 DFS,NET (C)ROFF 16K
13 Upgrade II 8.39 (C) 1984 R T Clayton BK
14 *BASIC (C)1982 Acorn 16K

Disk Errors

>*MEMORY
OSHWM&1A00
PAGE&1A00
TOP&1A02
LOMEM&1A02
HIMEM&7C00
First from
location &1A02
Memory free &61FE
Variable space &0
Program size &2

>*CHARDEF 123
Character :123
00001100 &0C 12
00011000 &18 24
00011000 &18 24
01110000 &70 112
00011000 &18 24
00011000 &18 24
00001100 &0C 12
00000000 &00 0