Britain's number two home micro maker is in deep trouble. What brought Acorn to the brink, and where does it go from here? What difference will the crisis at Acorn make to BBC and Electron owners? We untangle the strands to put you in the picture.

• Acorn Searches For Way Out Of Crisis
• In Brief
• Plus/4 At
• Half Mast As CBM Swings Axe
• Vive Oric! French Move In With Bid
• Atari Puts 800XL In To Cut-Price Packs
• Basingstoke Boost For QL Disks
• Frankfurters Go Cold At Old Boy's Reunion
• Cresta Run - Moon Cresta
• Atari Pushes Jac To Upstage Commodore - View From America
• New Attractions Pour Forth For Macintosh
• Audiogenic Offers Spreadsheet Trial
• Fuji Crams 1Mb Onto 3.5" Floppy
• Once Upon A Modem
• Pass The Hat For Our Friend Acorn - Homefront

More problems solved by our panel of experts.

• C64 Character Set Confusion Squared,
• Compatibility Query On C128 Upgrade,
• Kempston Interface Brings No Joy,
• New Printer Puts A Spanner In The Works,
• Putting My Toshiba To Productive Use, and
• Releasing The RAM Held Inside Oric.

How to win friends, influence people and earn money - share your hints and tips here.

• Use UDGs For Taller Characters,
• Avoid Spectrum Caps Lock Side-Effects,
• A Change Of Speed For Beeb Basic, and
• Disguise The Atmos ASCII Codes.

Get out your pens or priinters and unburden yourself on our letters page.

• An Unpleasant Kind Of Experience,
• A Change Of Distributor For Samna,
• Viking Erik's True Place Of Origin,
• Enterprise - Taking More Points On-board, and
• Why A Memotech Isn't Top Of The Pops.

• Spectrum Sprites
  If you want animated graphics, sprites are just what you need - and you can have them, free, with this great utility program.
   
• Amstrad Scrolling
  More on graphics - this time for your Amstrad CPC464. Now you can take off in all directions.
   
• Crazy Caverns Part 3
  The final parts of our great Tony Crowther game should have you off and running - once you've typed it all in.
   
• BBC Variable Find
  A search utility can make debugging and updating your programs a lot easier. Try this one with our compliments.
   

• Tandy M1000
  The 1000, Tandy's latest business system, offers IBM-compatibility and more. Check it out here.
   

• SPDOS Disk Interface
  Another alternative for those in need of mass storage - an interface and disk drive from Watford Electronics.
   

• It's All Go - Go and Microgo 1 (BBC Micro/Electron)
  Go is one of the oldest games in the world - but we look at two packages that bring it bang up to date, just you against your BBC Micro.
   
• Software Preview
  Our weekly round-up of the software you can expect to buy soon.
   

Bob Chappell's on the track of murder - or was it suicide? - in Deadline, the latest disk-based adventure from Infocom.

If you can't try before you buy, take the next best thing - our regular software reviews.

• Quarterback (Spectrum 48K),
• 1985 (Commodore 64),
• Cadcam Warrior (Commodore 64),
• Mutant Monty (Amstrad CPC464),
• One-On-One (Commodore 64),
• Congo Bongo (Commodore 64),
• Splat (Amstrad CPC464), and
• Brian Bloodaxe (Spectrum 48K).

Ups and downs in the crazy world of computers.

PCN's bargain basement where you can buy or sell.

It's goodbye from us... but we, at least, shall be back next week. Plus Datelines and Syntax Errors.

Thanks to XXX, YYY and ZZZ for sponsoring the creation of this issue