THERE ARE MOVES TOWARDS TECHNICAL END OF MARKET

John Gilbert reviews a new development in publishing but discovers there is still a great deal of room for improvement.

We forecast two months ago that books about computers would become more technical towards the end of the year. That has happened but a large gap is still left in that part of the market.

Ian Sinclair's new book, Inside Your Computer, is an example. It provides a general introduction to what a computer is made of and how it functions but offers little new information, the author was accurate to describe it as being aimed at beginners, because it could not be recommended to anyone who has had a computer for more than six months and has read any computer magazines.

Although it is a simplistic introduction there is little wrong with what it preaches. Sinclair has taken a diverse set of subjects and put some structure into them. The result is a clear definition of both the hardware and software of a machine.

The author refers to specific machines several times but that is not often sufficient. The ZX-81 and Spectrum are dragged into the explanations twice but some of Sinclair's descriptions are difficult to understand because one cannot visualise the machine he is explaining. The book compensates for that deficiency to some degree, however, with photographs and diagrams. For a technical book for the beginner there are too few illustrations, although those which are included provide some degree of expansion and enlightenment on the text.

On the whole the book is disappointing, because from the taster on the back and the picture on the front the reader could be led to expect more. It can be recommended to the complete beginner who has just bought a computer or to someone who has no computer but wishes to know how one works. The book is published by Granada Publishing and costs £4.95.

First Steps With Your Spectrum, by Carolyn Hughes, is another book for beginners dealing only with software. It is published by Armada, a company which specialises in children's products and a first attempt at breaking into the computer field has worked. The book contains a satisfactory combination of text and illustrations. Unlike many other publications which bunch straight into an explanation of a computer language and how to use it, the author takes time to explain what a computer can do and why it would be useful.

Written in a style anyone should understand the book would be equally useful to an adult who knows nothing about computers but wants to learn.

The author has included several programs designed specially with beginners in mind. Some of them, such as the fruit machine, are predictable but others, such as Elephant, where you have to build an elephant, and Morse Mole, where you have to find a bleeping rodent, are brilliantly simple and perfect for beginners.

Well worth recommending, it can be obtained from Armada Original Publishing and costs £1.25.

Spectrum Adventures, by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell, is a sight for sore eyes and it also fills a very important gap in the computer book market. It fulfills two functions. First it provides a guide to playing adventure games. It gives a general history of adventure gaming and provides details of some of the major adventure games available on the Spectrum, including The Hobbit and the adventures A, B, C and D from Artic Computing. That part of the book provides some good tips for the old and new adventurer alike, without revealing too much.

The second function is to show how an adventure game is written. The example, The Eye of the Star Warrior, was written by Carnell, who also wrote the Black Crystal and, like its counterpart, it is a graphics adventure.

The book provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in dungeons and dragons. Its authors have made the book interesting and exciting and have provided a complete text book for that aspect of software. It can be obtained from Sunshine Publications for £5.95.

Just as esoteric but much more complicated is Z-80 Machine Code for Humans by Alan Tootill and David Barrow. The title is unfortunate as the book seems to be a regurgitation of others which follow the same lines. It provides concrete examples of what can be done when you and not the Basic operating system control the microprocessor.

The unfortunate aspect is that it is difficult to tell whether it is a machine code trainer or if it is a book for programmers who know how to use the language but do not know what to do with it.

There are several machine code routines in the book, including printing a string of text on the screen all the way up to drawing high-resolution lines.

The book is not machine-specific but most of the routines should work on the Spectrum and some of them on the ZX-81. Any reader, however, should make some allowance for the fact that Sinclair machines use a Z-80A processor and not the Z-80. In most cases there is little difference but you should be careful to check.

Granda Publishing, PO Box 9, Frogmore, St Albans, Herftordshire, AL2 2NF.

Armada By Fontana Books, 8 Grafton Street, London, W1X 3LA.

Puffin Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.

Sunshine Publishing, 12-13 Little Newport Street, London WC2R 3LD.

BREATHING LIFE INTO FANTASY

Richard Price examines aids for adventures

After the last goblin has been offed or the top secret plans recovered from some rusty casket in the quicksands, do you sit back with a mild feeling of dissatisfaction and wonder whether you couldn't do just as well yourself?

Even if you can barely manage to program a nested loop in Basic it does not mean you cannot translate your feverish imaginings into electronic reality by creating your own adventure. You could be surprised to find your own game design is at least as exciting as a lot of the average and uninspiring offerings now on the market.

Don't kid yourself, though, that over a weekend you're going to churn out a program that will knock spots off the The Hobbit. Whether you write your programs or use tailor-made utilities, design and careful planning will require a great deal of time and paperwork before you even get started on the keyboard. Assuming you have a theme and a convincing setting the first priority will be a location map and its accompanying descriptions.

Drawing the map is a time-consuming process and it is best to use graph paper, leaving plenty of space between each box for notes, messages and so on. Print 'n' Plotter make a handy Adventure Chart with pre-drawn location boxes which should help simplify the task. The size of a large sketch pad has been produced primarily for players, but should be just as useful for games design.

Once a preliminary map is completed you will feel your fantasy world is taking shape. Adding descriptions will help put living flesh on those bare bones and, if the text is inventive, informative and atmospheric it will increase the game's playability enormously. Take a look at the superb Level 9 games to see how detailed text can add to the overall effect.

A word of warning - if you are a complete novice don't attempt a giant scenario with hundreds of locations. It's easier to practise on adventures with few locations and simple plots. Remember, too, that the Spectrum memory is limited and may not be able to cope with your dramatisation of War and Peace or the two thousand page Chronicles of Ganglewoop you have written in your spare time.

The next step is to work out all the likely interconnections between the locations, listing them meticulously. Objects and treasures - some obvious, some hidden - must be scattered around and you must decide what purpose they will have for the explorer of your world. It is probably that area of design which produces most difficulty as a game will stand or fall on the originality of its problems and puzzles. If they are too tough or obscure players are likely to give up in disgust. If they are too simple there will be little challenge or incentive to continue.

If you realise that a deduction problem will be impossible without help then put cryptic clues in the descriptions or the Help data. Anyone who has played Mountains of Ket will remember the magic word 'Polo' which gets you past the wall in 'mint condition'. Touches like that increase a program's attraction. Once again, you must keep track of all puzzles and the objects or conditions needed to solve them.

Next you face the task of developing the game vocabulary. It is essential to provide a variety of synonyms wherever possible. That increases versatility and should mean that players will not constantly see 'I can't do that' or similar reports on screen. It is occasionally useful to include an action which can be achieved only by a particular word combination but there is nothing more aggravating to the adventurer than searching through the entire Oxford English Dictionary for some obscure synonym.

Having created that large interlocking network of places, characters, objects and actions the major problem of getting your creation into the computer then pokes you in the eye. Don't panic. The market is well provided with books and programming utilities to help you. If you have little programming experience it is essential that you do some preparatory reading and practise. Many routines used in adventure are standard and, once learned, can be re-used time and again with new data.

Not all books on adventure programming are as useful as they may claim on the back cover. One of the simplest and clearest is Write Your Own Adventure Programs from Osbourne. Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth have made no assumptions about their readership and write in an uncomplicated style, taking you step by step through the entire process. The book is not Spectrum-specific but includes a section showing all the necessary conversions into Sinclair Basic. ZX-81 owners will find that they also have not been forgotten. Like most other books it takes a model adventure as its base and uses pleasantly daft illustrations to demonstrate the various processes. At £1.99 the paperback is extremely good value and contains as much information as many of the more expensive tomes on the shelves. However, because it is not machine-specific it does not run a section on graphics - as if they mattered anyway.

Spectrum Adventures - Sunshine Books, £5.95 - by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell is more sophisticated, more expensive. Like many of the large books it includes a history of the computer adventure whilst the main body of the book concentrates on the creation of a graphic adventure.

It is not to be recommended for beginners but if you want hints on the use of graphics it may prove useful. It contains information on combat sequences, in true Carnell D & D style, and has the full listing of a 48K game.

Adventures do not always stick to the preset location style. Robert Speel's paperback New Adventure Systems for the Spectrum - Fontana, £3.95 - gives listings and advice on a number of formats. Speel makes things easier by slicing up the programs into sections, each of which can be added to a foundation program. He tends to gloss over how the routines work and the use of Sinclair printer listings makes reading a bit daunting.

One of the best and most user-friendly guides is Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K - Duckworth, £6.95. The three sample programs are pure text games and the author discusses data handling concepts with clarity and some sympathy for those who wriggle in panic when phrases like 'numeric arrays' are bandied about.

As a general guide, beware of books which contain vast listings and precious little else. Those programs take time to type in and will not necessarily teach you much about the structures they use. Always go for books which provide adequate explanations.

If you are not prepared to devote the time required for developing programming skills you will have to obtain a commercial adventure-writing program.

The Quill is now justly famous and can produce machine-coded games of high quality and fast response. At £14.95 cheap it isn't but it offers the embryonic games designer a means of creating complex scenarios quickly and slickly without any programming knowledge at all. The program is menu driven and includes a comprehensive instruction booklet, and though the style is sometimes difficult it is worth persisting until you understand it.

Although a simple graphic set is included in the package The Quill is not intended for games needing complex graphics. You will find that there is room for about 30K of data, enough for lots of locations and fine detail. With imagination you will be able to make commercially viable adventures as others have done already - look at the software ads and you will see.

Dungeon Builder from Dream appears slightly more user-friendly than The Quill. It features a graphics capability using a sketch pad style to draw screens. The functions are manipulated by menus and the location map is shone on screen using a system of interconnecting cells. Regrettably, its available memory is quite limited - around 10K - and that is a disadvantage in creating large adventures.

The Dungeon Master - Crystal Computing - is a different kettle of fish. This game program allows you to create a monster-bashing scenario set in an underground labyrinth. All the hazards, treasures and options are predefined and give little scope for exercising your own imagination. You will not be able to use it to make standard text adventures but you should find it entertaining if you enjoy a bit of hacking and smashing.

It is often said that computer gaming is an essentially passive occupation, stunting the imagination and critical faculties. Anyone who has played adventure will know that to be an unjustified and sweeping generalisation. If you decide to go further and create your own adventures you will certainly extend your imaginative range and logical skills. You might even trawl a little brass on the way.

BOOKS DO FURNISH A GAME

There are books, computer books and - increasingly - computer adventure books. John Conquest put on his lorgnettes and had a good squint at some latest examples of this rapidly-growing literary genre.

Along similar lines, Sunshine's offerings are SPECTRUM ADVENTURES by Tony Bridge & Roy Carnell, COMMODORE ADVENTURES by Mike Grace, and ATARI ADVENTURES by Tony Bridge, all sub-titled "A guide to playing and writing adventures" and £5.95 each (some mistake, surely?). The first (playing) half has a very high flannel content and, in the Atari book, you can almost hear Bridge's sigh of relief as he opens the second half with "Now at last we're getting down to some serious programming!" Not the most fluent writer in the world, Bridge is on much firmer ground when he gets down to the nuts and bolts of creating dungeons, monsters, combat systems, graphics, movement and menus.

If you're looking at the choice between Atari, 64 or Spectrum books, Duckworth's certainly spend more time on the actual programming, 167 pages to Sunshine's 42, with another volume to come. But this may be an unfair way of looking at it. Gerrard spells everything out slowly and carefully, while Bridge assumes the reader can keep up.

What all the above have in common is an inordinate amount of padding, duplication and downright waffling - both Duckworth and Sunshine could use a good editor.

NOVEL ADVENTURES

Obsessed by adventure, Peter Jackson girds his loins and boldly goes where few reviewers have gone before - to the shelves of the local bookstore. His mission? To discover what goes to make a prime adventure tutor for the Speccy.

Adventure n. - Remarkable happening: enterprise; risk; bold exploit; commercial speculation.

- Collins Gem English Dictionary.

To start with, here's a small competition for adventure game players: spot the bit of the above definition that rarely crops up in the dungeons. Correct. Part two: spot the bit that has brought us so many books on Spectrum adventures. Correct again.

But the commercial speculation in the adventure book world is more subtle than the usual bandwagon-jumping that's done by authors and publishers, though that is certainly going on (note Melbourne House's tome explaining The Hobbit 'help' messages, for one). No, these books are also an appeal to reader's commercial interests. You won't find this group of Spectrum users rubber-keying its way through multi-K adventure listings in Basic just out of curiosity - or just to play the resulting game when all the answers are in the listings anyway. What these readers want is to learn how to produce adventures that they can sell for vast amounts of money.

Take the final few paragraphs of Keith Campbell's Computer and Video Games Book ofAdventure for example. "If you now have a game popular with friends and family, you might consider the possibility of getting it published," says Campbell. And a few lines later: "I... look forward to playing and possibly reviewing your adventures in the future!' (Campbell, like many other writers in the adventure field, is addicted to exclamation marks. It gives some ersatz excitement to the prose, like this!!!)

At least his book gives some useful advice about the real purpose of writing your own adventures. The others under review are a little more coy, with one of them remarking vaguely that the author is "sometimes tempted to think that the mercenary attitude shines through on occasions!" (note that '!'). Perhaps several months should be spent writing an adventure just to amuse family and friends and to impress them with your programming prowess and resistance to boredom?

It's interesting to note that Campbell and most of the other authors in this book batch have had adventures published by some games house or other. Peter Gerrard, for example, is described in the blurb of his Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K as the "author of two top-selling adventure games for the Commodore 64" (?). And Roy Carnell, author with Tony Bridge of Spectrum Adventures, has his own eponymous adventure software house.

THRILLS FOR SALE

To paraphrase Dr Johnson; "Sir, no-one but a fool ever wrote an adventure except for money." So - fair enough - I decided to examine the five books from the point of view of making money; to be honest, I'm by no means immune to the temptation of writing a 'top-selling adventure' myself.

One thought struck almost immediately - the programming in adventures is not very difficult. Long, certainly; convoluted, yes; but not actually difficult. The main purpose in adventures is to understand the player's typed input and relate this to stored information about objects, locations and problems in the fantasy world created by the programmer. (At least, that's what I think it is. We'll be coming back to what some of the authors think it is later.) Programming this requires a bit of string slicing, a lot of checking against arrays, some setting and testing of flags, and a whole raft of IF - THEN - GOTOs and ON-GOTOs. The main problem is continuity, the linking together of locations, objects and actions, but that's a debugging and play-testing problem rather than a programming one.

What stops people writing adventure programs, then, is not so much difficulty as problems of scale. Adventures are so darn big that they can daunt the beginner, warnings in the books about what you can do if you run out of memory are more frightening when you have 48K than when you only have 16K. All the authors have addressed themselves to this confidence problem in various ways - and with varying degrees of success.

THE SHAPE'S THE SAME

Despite differing approaches to the actual programming, all the books seem to follow a set pattern. First there is an explanation of fantasy and role-playing games and that's followed by a description of Dungeons and Dragons with all the obligatory copyright and trademark blurb from TSR. Then comes an outline study of the original mainframe adventure, descriptions of the early micro versions, and eventually the author gets into his own programs.

About the weirdest candidate for this stock structure comes in Spectrum Adventures by Bridge and Carnell. The usual stuff about Crowther and Woods, Scott Adams et al, is just as expected, and there are descriptions and examples of such classic text adventures as Colossal Cave and Level 9's Dungeon Adventure. There's even a separate chapter on The Hobbit. Then the authors start programming and the game they have chosen to illustrate adventures is a pure graphic, 'move about on the screen and belt monsters', arcade-style thing that bears little relation to the heritage they are claiming. It's called Eye of the Star Warrior, and those fearing the mammoth task of typing it all in will be pleased to learn that it's also available on cassette.

Chapter six of Spectrum Adventures offers some self-justification for using a 'graphic adventure' (the phrase is theirs, I'd prefer 'arcade knockabout') to demonstrate adventure programming technique. "In this way we can present the maximum number of techniques", it says. "The second reason is simple - a text adventure, while being a lot of fun to play, is not much of a surprise after being typed in from a listing!", it goes on. Leaving the exclamation mark aside, this seems to me like turning a bug into a feature. The most famous adventure programs ever are all pure text (leaving aside The Hobbit which is a very mediocre adventure indeed without the pictures) and giving the thrill-thirsting public something that isn't really an adventure at all is a bit much.

Pardon my continued ranting, but if this book was meant to describe arcade games it should say so in the title. It will not do for the authors to say, as they do in Chapter six, that "the section on generating the room complex will be just as valid in a text game, as will the movement routines", particularly when the 'complex' consists of a three-level array of identical cubicle rooms differing only in their monstrous graphic contents.

Similar criticisms, only less spiteful, can be made of a book I haven't mentioned before: Andrew Nelson's Creating Adventure Programs on Your Computer. We're not told whether Nelson has his trotters in the published game trough, only that he has spent "the last 18 months devising, programming and playing computer Adventure games". But it seems safe to assume that he's in it for the moolah, just like the rest of us.

Be that as it may. his book is the only one in the stack that doesn't follow the standard pattern. There's no history lesson, but before jumping headfirst into the programming. Nelson does provide one or two interesting sidelines. First he gives a little non-computer adventure game, reminiscent of Penguin's Fighter Fantasy Gamebooks in its programmed learning course layout. This forms the basis of his first game listing, Werewolves and Wanderer, and he also shows a printout of the program actually running - a feature other authors should copy.

Nelson gives three games listings, all based on the same techniques and increasing in complexity through the book. Only the first has its programming described in detail, with the code split into short sections and explained. It's left as an exercise to the reader to figure out how these techniques are used in the later games, but there's nothing too difficult. All three have much more in common with the adventure classics than Bridge and Carnell's example.

But that's not to say that Nelson's work is entirely kosher. As the sample runs show, the aims of the games are to explore an environment, pick up treasure and kill monsters. True, the room descriptions will be more familiar to the old-timers, but the player's vocabulary is limited to a set of one-letter commands and the puzzle-solving aspect of adventures is sadly neglected in favour of 'slash and bash'.

All three games were created on the IBM PC, but since they are text-only there are few problems in converting them to run on the Spectrum (or anything else for that matter), and the largest of them only sucks up around 18K.

Nelson's book is published by Interface - which made it quite a surprise to find another Interface book in the stack, and one sporting a similar title: Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum. It's writ by our own Peter Shaw along with fellow infant prodigy, James Mortleman.

This is the most lightweight of the quintet, the bulk of the book being taken up with the listings of several simple adventures. But these are what I would call real adventures, with puzzles to solve, equipment to figure out, and other stock situations. At least Shaw and Mortleman have resisted overburdening the pages with explanation of the straightforward programming required; the listings tell the story themselves. And the listings are also short enough to run through without fear.

THE WINNERS

And finally, we come whizzing back to Keith Campbell and his Computer and Video Games Book of Adventure, and Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K. To my mind, these are easily the two best books in the batch. Both written by published game authors, they are traditional in the type of game they describe and they clearly and succinctly explain each stage in the programming of a traditional adventure.

Both follow stock format, with history and brief descriptions of published games at the front, followed by programming details for one game on three machines (Campbell), or three games on one machine (Gerrard).

But Gerrard's book wins it, and not just because he has the advantage of being able to concentrate on the Spectrum alone. Demo or no demo, Campbell's adventure program is trivial, and if you produced a similar game using the techniques given you'd be laughed out of every software house waiting room in the land. Gerrard's, on the other hand, are the real thing. They're of the right commercial scale and - once again - it's no surprise to find the games available on cassette from the book publisher, with changes in locations and objects you could well have a sellable game on your hands. Gerrard also gets high marks for providing a set of scenarios that the reader could use to get a foot in the door of those mirth-ridden software houses.

One final point (and really an admission of prejudice) both Campbell and Gerrard produce 'real' adventures and their books have also proved a few points to my satisfaction. First, lots of the adventure games you come across are nothing of the sort. Second, writing adventure programs is a lot more difficult to start and finish; the actual coding seems a piece of cake. And third, I now know that I could write a wonderful adventure game if I only had the time... or perhaps a good adventure book?

One last gripe from someone who is within 'the biz'. Any publisher who allows the sort of production cock-ups that have marred all the five books here - typographical errors, misspellings, misregistered printing, misbound and repeated sections of pages, and mis-just-about-everything-else - would not keep my valued custom. And yet all these books cost more than a reasonably good adventure cassette. 'Commercial speculation' is right, and so, nearly, was Dr Johnson.

PUBLICATIONS OF VARYING QUALITY AND QUANTITY HAVE GONE ON SALE DURING THE YEAR. JOHN GILBERT LOOKS AT THE GROWING BOOKSHELF AND SELECTS SOME TYPICAL EXAMPLES OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS.

YOUNG AUTHORS GET OPPORTUNITY.

John Gilbert assesses publishing.

The Computer publishing market has developed so quickly this year that publishers have been desperate to lay their hands on anyone who knows something interesting about Sinclair computers, programming techniques, or who has some programs they want to sell.

Some publishers have even asked teenagers to write books because insufficient adult writers have been able to get to grips with the subject. That kind of move sets a precedent in the publishing industry. No other sector has ever sought young writers with such vigour. If you can write and you have an above-average knowledge of computers there is a good chance that a publisher will contract you for at least one book. The problem is, and has always been, that young writers know little about the publishing industry and, through no conscious fault of the signing company or the young author, writers do not obtain everything they should. Fortunately that does not happen often but it is a side-effect of the market growth and the urgency with which publishers seek titles. The youngest writer of the year must be Patrick Bossert, author of the Penguin You Can Do The Cube. In August, Penguin released one of its first micro-computer books by the 14-year-old. Unfortunately Micro Game: was little more than a book of listings, a stage though which many companies such as Shiva Publishing, Interface and Melbourne House passed earlier in the year.

Penguin seems to have relied on Bossert's fame with the Rubik Cube and that the puzzle and computers share the same intellectual image in the public mind. Just because Bossert can do the cube, however, does not make him an automatic genius at computer programming.

The concepts for most of the programs in his book existed earlier in the year when all you could buy in terms of the Spectrum were books of listings. There is little that is new in the title - a pity, since it is from Penguin, a publisher renowned for its quality of output.

Books of listings were popular at the beginning of the year when the ZX-81 had more of the limelight than the Spectrum. Authors such as Tim Hartnell were having at least one book published a month. Most of those books were for the ZX-81, as most publishers had not yet advanced to the Spectrum, although it was launched in April, 1982.

Before the beginning of 1983 the only publishers to try for something extra from the ZX-81 were Interface, Melbourne House and Shiva. All were still small but it is a mark of their innovation which shows their success and expansion to date. Now all three have a large share of the publishing market where Sinclair machines are concerned.

By May all three companies had done something different for the Spectrum market. Machine code programming for the Spectrum was a subject which would sell books and the big three publishers knew it.

Shiva produced Spectrum Machine Code, by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones. It was launched as part of the Friendly Micro series and, although it did not cover the area in as much depth as some of the American books about the Z-80 processor, it provided an excellent grounding in machine and assembly language. It also added a humorous element missing from many other books with 'bug' cartoons spread throughout the pages.

The other publisher renowned for its stock of titles on machine code is Melbourne House. It has two machine code titles which cover the ZX-81 and Spectrum. Both are similar in approach and it seems as if the Spectrum version was edited from that of the ZX-81, with extra examples showing colour and sound added.

The other range of machine code books from Melbourne House is by Dr Ian Logan and, in the case of The Complete ROM Disassembly, written with Dr Frank O'Hara. The books are excellent value and contain a good deal of necessary information for the machine code programmer.

Because of his knowledge of the Spectrum ROM, Logan was asked by Sinclair Research to write the routines for the Microdrive ROM. As a result, and with the blessing of Sinclair Research, he wrote the Spectrum Microdrive Book. It includes much information about the drives, Interface One and the possibility of adding or patching-in extra commands to the Basic.

The emergence of the book resulted in a rash of similar texts from publishers trying to keep in the race for the most up-to-date information. In most cases the follow-up texts represented a rearrangement of the original but, unfortunately, that is not so with the new Microdrive texts from Interface and Sunshine Books.

When first exhibited at the Personal Computer World Show in September, the Interface book was little more than a slim cardboard-bound photocopy. It was planned to use it as the basis for a 'proper' publication. The Sunshine effort, however, was better-presented.

The author of the Sunshine Master Your ZX Microdrive is Andrew Pennel, a friend of Logan. His book contained information which Logan's could not. One reason was that he was not limited by what he could say. Although Logan speaks with an authority which is difficult to match, Pennel's book is slightly better as it contains information which Sinclair Research did not want used in Logan's book.

Even with the restrictions, however, the Logan book is good value so far as money and information are concerned.

The release of the Microdrive texts has introduced a new area to the computer publishing market. We have had books on machines, books of listings, and books showing software techniques but there had, until then, been no books on one specific peripheral for a machine.

The Microdrive seems to have opened an area which could soon include how to get the best from your sound generator or using a disc drive with a Spectrum. Book titles such as that may seem absurd now but with the way books are becoming so machine-dependent, and with the search for new areas to write about, such titles may become available.

The information in the Melbourne House book on the Microdrive contains a good deal of machine code. The publisher is still determined to introduce machine language anywhere it can and the release of another machine code book for the Spectrum was inevitable before too long. The new book is Supercharge Your Spectrum and many pages are occupied by machine code listings. They include routines to search for strings in programs, re-number lines, and delete blocks of lines. It has proved extremely useful to Spectrum owners who know nothing about machine code but who want toolkit routines without having to buy several cassette-based programs.

It is useful in another respect. It is possible for someone just learning about Z-80 machine code to read the program listings and get an insight into how programs are structured and the way in which some statements can work with others. It also provides an incentive to use some of the routines in your own machine code programs.

Not all publishers are interested in machine code and the market has plenty of support from companies with other ideas. Yet another new type of book was launched for the Spectrum by Sunshine. Until the release of Spectrum Adventures, by Roy Carnell and Tony Bridge, computer owners interested in adventure games-playing or writing had to rely solely on magazines.

The new book improved that situation, however, and showed the reader how to write graphics adventures. Little is said about decoding player responses or generating textual adventures but the book still marks a new area for publishers to exploit.

While the areas which belong to the games and utility sector have developed by leaps and bounds, the business and education markets are still nothing more than a mess. Little has been done in book form to aid this ailing though very important part of the industry. There have been a few general books on business applications, such as Databases for Fun and Profit from Granada, but little business-orientated work has been done.

The same is true of the education market, although some publishers, such as Granada and Longmans, are starting to see the potential. The object seems to be to produce as many programmer-orientated books as possible. Unfortunately that leaves the market for the computer user who does not want to be bogged down by technology as undeveloped as it was early in the year.

Several new areas in the publishing industry include machine code programming and programming techniques. They are over-developed and that is proving expensive to the other users who want to use Spectrums at home or at school for accounts or homework.

In the end that can only do the market and, indirectly, computer manufacturers, a good deal of harm. The areas in which computers can be used, such as education and business, will be under-developed. Many children will know how to program but very few will have ideas on how to use those programming talents.

Interface, 44-46 Earls Court Road, London W8 6EJ.

Melbourne House, 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London SE10.

Puffin Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.

Shiva Publishing, 4 Church Lane. Nantwich, Cheshire CW5 5RQ.

Sunshine, 12-13 Little Newport Street, London WC2R 3LD.

Grenada, 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA.