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TWO sophisticated accounting programs have been put on to the market by Hestacrest with the intention of improving the efficiency of routine accounting at low cost.
The programs are written for preparing accounts from incomplete records of a sole trader and a limited company. They are written for use mainly by accountants but they can also be useful to the small trader with a little knowledge of accounting.
Figures can be entered into the accounts in the usual forms, including cash payments and receipts and bank payments and receipts. Using a system of coding, the accounts are then built-up from those, printing-out all the records of interest to the company.
The programs are available from Hestacrest, Bedfordshire, cost £17.50 each or £25 for the two.
MINE of Information has produced what it claims to be an improved version of its game Othello. The improvements include more features for a lower total price of £6.90, better loading and easier use.
All input is said to be crashproof and loading problems have been overcome by a hardware modification to generate a strong, clean, original signal and tape duplication using a signal enhancement process.
The new features include the ability to replay moves at any stage, both forward and backward.
The new program, known as version 3.5, was shown at the ZX Microfair at the beginning of April and lost only one contest out of 30 when playing at half power.
Othello is available from Mine of Information, Hertfordshire.
ALGOR has produced two adventure games which are different from anything else on the market. Shelob's Lair is a 13K Basic and machine code game which gives a 3D image of your location and shows all the exits in perspective.
There are plenty of monsters and treasures, represented in words rather than graphics, scattered around the 180 rooms.
The room displays are generated using code and are impressively fast. The layout and the contents of the rooms change only if you reach a different level, in which case a set of tougher monsters and more valuable treasures is generated.
The other program is Mines and Monsters, which allows up to four players to play at the same time. It is a 13K Basic game in which all the locations, treasures and monsters are generated randomly at each turn.
It is not very exciting but is entertaining enough and useful, if only to avoid family arguments about who can use the ZX-81.
Both programs cost £3.50, Shelob's Lair being packaged with an economy simulation game and Mines and Monsters having a two-player stock market game.
A CASSETTE to help children with GCE O level French examinations has been produced by Rose Cassettes, which specialises in educational software for the ZX-81. For use with the 16K RAM pack, it covers grammar and vocabulary. On the first side, there are three sections dealing with verbs, pronouns and adjectives, with lessons followed by tests. The second side deals with vocabulary, with 345 nouns, more than 190 verbs and about 290 common expressions.
The cassette is available from Rose Cassettes, West Midlands at a cost of £4.50 including postage.
WHAT IS said to be the first ZX-81 version of the popular arcade game Puckman has been produced by DJL Software. Called Zuckman, it runs on the ZX-81 with the 16K RAM pack.
It is very user-friendly, giving complete instructions for playing. Written in machine code, it is a fast and interesting game and requires a quick appreciation of how to move the figure.
Zuckman is available from DJL Software, Wiltshire.
FOR THE intrepid fighter against all things alien, Astro-Invaders is the lead game in a pack available from John Prince Software costing £3.65.
According to the company there is no superior version of the game on the market at such a competitive price. In machine code, it runs automatically on loading and involves 54 manoeuvring aliens which are knocked out by photon-firing torpedoes. As the game proceeds the attack rate increases.
The other games in the pack are Grand-Prix, Penalty, Golf and Swat.