Many of the commercial style games for the BBC micro do not allow joystick control and some of you may be thinking that the constant keyboard bashing will damage it for ever. This ROM - imaginatively named the JOYROM - aims to solve all your problems by allowing you to run games which do not support joystick control to be used with the standard Acorn analogue joysticks or Atari sticks (in the latter case, The Wizard Interface must be purchased separately).

Being on ROM, it can be called up immediately by typing *JS (RETURN). Then you can follow the on-screen instructions from there; or so the little leaflet leads you to expect. Unfortunately, you have to be rather experienced to get even to this stage because the instructions on fitting and using this ROM are very ambiguous and downright misleading in places.

The instructions casually tell you that LINKS33 needs moving from WEST to EAST to enable the JOY ROM to work in IC100 or IC101. I'm sure that inexperienced users would be rather confused already. Some of you might have realised that this is necessary because Joy Rom is a 4K ROM instead of the normal 8K type. You might also know that this change means both IC100 and IC101 can only accept 4K ROM/EPROMs which effectively means that one of the sockets can not be used. The instructions fails to tell you this.

Worse still, the actual software isn't much better either. There is no way of setting the sensitivity and there is no protection against BREAK. Also, as far as I can tell, it only caters for games using negative INKEY. To top it all, I have a sneaking suspicion that this ROM will not work on a sideways ROM board. Definitely not recommended.