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OUR APOLOGIES must go to Nordic Keyboards for our news story last month where we stated that Nordic had 'gone under'. Dennis Rowlands, managing director, phoned to inform us that Nordic was alive and well.
The confusion arose when Turngrade Electronics - the company which assembled keyboards for Fuller - went into liquidation with £70,000 owed to them by Fuller. Turngrade originally formed Nordic with CMC Ltd. Nordic then moved from Turngrade's premises and British Telecom was instructed to place a redirect to their new telephone number. Rowlands explains the mix-up, "BT in their wisdom placed a redirect onto a line which did not exist, which is why people couldn't contact us."
Roy Backhouse now runs a computer shop in Dale Street, Liverpool, where keyboards manufactured by Nordic were sold. "Nordic is receiving a lot of mail which should have been sent to Backhouse in Dale Street. Monies sent in for keyboards were cashed but no goods were sent out. Dissatisfied customers then contacted Nordic saying that we were responsible," says Rowlands, "Roy Backhouse has nothing to do with and has never been employed by Nordic."
For four months after the takeover, Nordic honoured the guarantee on Fuller keyboards. That situation has now changed and there is no reference to Fuller on the new Nordic keyboards. Nordic no longer hold themselves responsible for keyboards bearing the Fuller name.
Nordic has moved from its old premises at Randles Road and all correspondence should now be sent to Nordic Keyboards, c/o CMC Ltd, Merseyside.
Dennis Rowlands sums up the situation. "We are a very reputable company and want to provide a good service to the public."
And the good news - the price of the Executive keyboard is now £49.95 - a drop of about £10.00.
MELBOURNE HOUSE has recently released Starion, in which you have to alter the outcome of various incidents in Earth's history.
You start off in space, fighting aliens in superfast 3D action. The game is divided into a series of time grids containing 243 time zones in blocks of nine.
The idea is to kill the aliens in each time zone and as they die they release an alphabetical letter. When all the aliens have been exterminated you will be left with a string of letters, which when unscrambled will form a word - the name of a cargo.
Armed with the word, you must fly through a time warp to find the timegrid and decide which of eight neighbouring time zones in the Earth's history your cargo belongs to. You then fly to Earth and see if your cargo will set history right.
You will then be transferred to eight new time grids where more battles and word puzzles take place to alter history in that time block. The process is repeated until all 243 zones have been altered and you gain the title of Creator.
Starion is not just an arcade game. It demands a general knowledge of history, the ability to make sense from a jumble of letters and an element of luck.
The game is incredibly fast with superb 3D wireframe graphics. It is available at £7.95.
INTREPID but youthful tricyclists may never have to buy petrol in their life, according to Sir Clive Sinclair. Announcing plans for further models, he described today's young teenagers with C5s as the first of the 'electric generation'.
Clive anticipated the launch of a two-seater C10 model within two years, which would have double the speed and range of the C5. That is to be followed by the pièce de résistance, a pear-shaped four-seater machine with a top speed of 80 mph and a range of more than 200 miles.
In the meantime, interest among retailers appears to be growing as discount chain Comet has agreed to stock the machine. "The initial response from our stores around the country has been extremely good," says managing director Jerry Mason. Comet joins an increasing gallery of outlets including selected branches of Woolworth.
Following on from previous reports of C5s going down well on oil-tankers and holiday camps, the latest original use of the trike comes from Pontypridd in South Wales.
Local driving schools there are using C5s for pre-driving tuition, especially with older learners who suffer from 'car-fear'.
LOGIC 3, which used to run a cut-price software club in addition to publishing its own programs, has gone bust. The club side of the business has already been sold to Mr Software Ltd.
The telephone number for Mr Software is 450586. Nobody was answering the phone at the time of going to press, but members of the club with outstanding orders might care to try for themselves.
SELECTED strategy games from Lothlorien are to appear as part of the Argus Software Mind Games series.
Roger Lees of Lothlorien said the wargame specialists will continue to sell other products in their own right.
Lothlorien believes the marketing support available from a large group such as Argus can make long-term survival more secure.
The first game to appear under the new deal will be The Bulge, a recreation of the last great German offensive of World War Two.
SOFT-AID, the compilation games tape sold in aid of the Ethiopian Famine Appeal, is proving a smash hit in the shops. The game has rocketed up the charts, and Lee Guinty of Microdealer UK, which distributes the tape, says sales totalled 35,000 by the second week of March.
"Demand is outstripping supply," he says. "It is difficult to put pressure on duplicators when it is for charity, and I keep running out of copies. Even little shops, whom we asked to take a minimum of ten copies, are re-ordering."
The compilation, which includes 10 chart hits sells for £4.99, of which £3.00 goes to Bob Geldof's famine appeal. Geldof also allowed the organisers to release the hit single Feed the World on the tape as an added bonus.
Retailers Dixons have gone so far as to buy the game at the full £4.99 retail price, and donate every penny to the appeal. However, as with the Band-Aid single, the Government will levy VAT on the product, which amounts to 65p for each copy.
"Personally, I feel the Government could make a gesture on it," says Mark Tilson of Quicksilva, one of the main organisers of the campaign, "however the game's going very well indeed."
THURNALL Electronics is withdrawing its current disc drive from the market because of lack of interest from customers.
A spokesperson for the Manchester-based company said, "We didn't get the response we needed to make the product viable."
She added that the company had no plans to introduce new disc drives for the Spectrum.
OWNERS of faulty Spectrums will no longer be able to get a new one over the counter due to a change in the guarantee issued by Sinclair. The warranty still runs for one year, but unless you return the machine to the retailer within 30 days of purchase it will have to be repaired by Sinclair Research rather than replaced from existing stocks.
"At the moment shops will replace Spectrums over the counter even when they have been brought in after an 11 month pounding," says a spokesman for Sinclair Research.
The Sale of Goods Act does not fix a precise time limit, but if your Spectrum goes down after 30 days because of a manufacturing fault, you still have the right to your money back or a new machine.
The point was emphasised by a spokesman for WH Smith. "We are honouring the guarantee as offered by Sinclair," he says, "but that does not prejudice the customer's basic rights under the law."
Disappointing profits were again dogging Sinclair Research at the beginning of 1985. The figures for the nine months before Christmas show a pre-tax profit of £7.9m, against £14m for the preceding period.
A spokesman for Sinclair Research explains that the figures include a 'highly conservative' estimate based on bad debts and other provisions. Those include £1.5m against post-Christmas returns of Spectrums, £1m due to the demise of distributors Prism, £1m on advertising in Germany and £1m from cutting prices on the Spectrum Plus after Christmas.
Nevertheless, Sinclair Research has decided to reschedule production of the Spectrum Plus. "The Spectrum sold very well over Christmas and also in January," says a spokesman, refuting reports of a slow new year. "However, most of those sales came out of large stocks because retail outlets over-ordered before Christmas. We felt it would be ridiculous to add paraffin to the fire and continue the same production levels." Stocks at the beginning of March were said to be worth £34m, and Sinclair Research has ceased buying components for new production for the time being.
While Sir Clive is clearly confident that the situation is of short-term significance only, a meeting of shareholders was called to explain the situation, given the company's expansive plans in other areas. Whether or not Sir Clive's optimism is justified, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the planned flotation of Sinclair Research on the Stock Exchange has been abandoned for the present.
LIKE a phoenix from the ashes, Imagine, in name if not in spirit, returns from the past with new software titles. Ocean supremo David Ward, who acquired the rights to the name last October, has set up Imagine 84 to market two new arcade titles, World Series Baseball and Wizadore.
World Series Baseball is shortly to be available on the Spectrum, and is said to mimic the 'live pitch and throw of real baseball'.
In the meantime, work proceeds on the Frankie goes to Hollywood game, and a new project, based on The Neverending Story, the popular fantasy classic by Michael Ende. The hero is young Bastian Balthazar Bux, and the story follows his adventures in Fantastica as he tries to save the princess Moonchild.
"We anticipate the game will succeed on the same scale as The Hobbit," says David Ward. "The storyline and scenarios have a surreal fascination."
NEWS coming in about The Fourth Protocol suggests that the game is likely to be as big a seller as the novel, written by Frederick Forsyth.
The game has three parts, and access to parts two and three is only possible with a code word hidden in the previous section.
Part one is an icon-driven adventure in which you, MI5 investigator John Preston, runs a surveillance operation from your office. With the help of memos, files, voice prints and telephone calls you piece together the jigsaw of Plan Aurora, a Soviet plot to undermine the stability of Great Britain.
The graphics are accomplished and generated instantaneously, and there is an innovative and imaginative use of windows.
Part two is a search sequence in the traditional adventure mould, where you travel the UK and abroad in a race against an unknown deadline. In part three, an arcade game, you arm your SAS troops for a shoot-out with the KGB.
Having successfully completed all three phases, you will find yourself face to face with the Soviet nuclear device, with only 30 seconds to defuse it. To do so correctly you must remember a fragment of information chanced upon earlier in the game, and which at the time seemed unimportant or meaningless. Depending upon your success and speed in neutralising the weapon, there are several apocalyptic climaxes to the program.
Published by Hutchinson, The Fourth Protocol is to be released on May 23, and will cost £12.95.
QCOM, the QL modem package, appears to be in dire jeopardy following the demise of OEL, which has called in the receiver.
OEL also manufactured the VTX5000 modem for the Spectrum which was marketed by Prism, also in receivership. Prism Communications which handled the modems, has been bought by Modem House and that company is now selling the Prism stocks and extending its own repair service to cover all VTX modems, whether bought through Modem House or not. If the modem was not supplied through Modem House, a charge will be made, which would be unlikely to exceed £25.00.
Spokesman Keith Rose says the company has enough stocks to serve the market for an 'indefinite' period, although with customers in 16 different countries the situation could change. "Now we're in the retailing area we will have to change our marketing strategy," he says.
"We are in a position to manufacture modems, and talks are underway concerning OEL. In an ideal world they would continue manufacturing, but the situation is very fluid."
Rose is pessimistic about the chances of QCom. "OEL cannot get the plastic to make it and it owes a lot of money to the supplier," he says.
Modem House is anxious to dispel any idea that it will simply bail out OEL, assuming it decides to become financially involved at all. "There is no point in buying OEL in its present form," he says, referring also to OEL's links with its financial backers.
For details of the repair service contact Modem House, Devon.
THE revolutionary new wafer scale chip is to be produced by Sinclair Research itself. The decision represents a significant change in policy by the company, which has always preferred to hire others, such as Timex, to manufacture its products.
In the case of the wafer scale chip, Sir Clive Sinclair has decided to set up a factory to manufacture the product himself.
Production schedules are geared towards 300,000 chips a year by the end of 1986, rising to 1 million in 1987. One of the first products to use the new chip will be the QL Wafer drive peripheral, but a spokesman said other companies will be able to buy the new chips if they wish.
The project will not be headed by a Sinclair man, but by ICL chairman Robb Wilmot. Wilmot's initial task will be to raise £50m in venture capital, within or without the UK. "Clive and he have known each other for a long time," says a spokesman, "we value his credibility and experience."
Wilmot will continue as chairman of ICL, but has also taken on a non-executive directorship at Sinclair Research.