WIMBLEDON MAY be over, the players gone and strawberries out of season, but QL Match Point from Psion should take you through the winter months.

The game is a conversion from the Spectrum but the authors have used the full power of the QL to make it faster, brighter, and a brilliant follow-up to QL Chess.

Centre Court at Wimbledon is shown in all its 3D glory. The crowds might not move their heads as rallies are played but the ball boys, line judges and umpire all move when necessary.

At the start of the game you can decide whether you want to play in the quarter finals, semi-finals or finals. The speed of the action increases as you move through the championship league table. You must also decide whether you want to play with a friend or do battle against the computer.

The computer generated player is almost infallible even in quarter final matches - and has all the ability of Boris Becker. It can knock a ball across the court which, even at full run, you will not be able to return. As a beginner, I found it difficult to win one game against the computer, let alone a set.

A joystick is a necessity when playing the game. You have to use the cursor keys to move in four directions and the space bar to swing the racket. I was all fingers and thumbs. It is impossible to respond to the swiftness of the computer generated player using the keyboard.

Psion has another QL winner. The quality of the game is superb, and the authors have handled the limitations and sophistication of the machine's graphics with professional skill.

JOB CONTROL, memory management and file handling are just a few of the tasks which can be handled with Adam Denning's new EPROM cartridge.

Extensions to SuperBasic include commands to activate jobs, invoke QDOS traps, program the function keys and reset the machine, without pressing the usual button at the side of the QL.

The games player and graphics designer have not been left out either. High score tables can be set up using a routine which produces a table of results in memory and commands have been included which provide information about the screen and windows which are active on it. Denning has also implemented routines which will copy the screen to a device such as a microdrive or compatible printer.

Many of the extensions, however, are rather esoteric for a Basic programmer and of little use to a machine code programmer who would no doubt use an assembler and monitor anyway. Such commands include rotating 32-bit integers, setting logical operations and copying words to and from specific addresses.

The pros of the package, however, outweigh the cons, and if machine code programmers want to alter machine code from the SuperBasic environment then that is up to them.

For those who want an alternative to Tony Tebby's QL Toolkit, produced by Sinclair Research, Denning's extensions are ideal. The former utility has to be loaded in from microdrive, and that can take up to a minute. All you have to do with the extensions is to slot the supplied EPROM into the ROM socket and all the commands are available when the machine is powered up.

ALTHOUGH MOST companies include a back-up routine for their particular programs, few general purpose utilities are available.

Expresso Coppee not only provides a back-up utility but also copies most files in under one minute. To put it to the test we made it copy itself. It comprised 123 microdrive sectors and took 47 seconds to complete the copy.

We also tried Expresso with Abacus. It was 198 sectors in length and the Psion copy routine took three minutes to do its work. Expresso did the job in 56 seconds.

If an error occurs during operation the utility can cope with it. The file will be read until the fault is located. The program has a retry option, which will try to copy a program a specified number of times.

Software houses need not fear that the utility will be a boon to pirates. Expresso Coppee will not operate on security protected files of any description. It will, however, read 99 per cent of other files.

The routine is overpriced at £9.00 when you consider that a similar utility is included in the Sinclair Research QL Toolkit, which offers much more and costs £25.00.

IF YOU HAVE the QL Assembler from Sinclair Research you will find the QL Monitor, by Tony Tebby, a useful addition to your software library.

QL Monitor and the assembler are not compatible and cannot be run side by side, although they both use the same system of mnemonics.

The package provides disassembly, breakpoint setting and machine code trace facilities together with a simple line assembler. It is invoked with the command QMON at which point it will start running in the window at the bottom of the screen. You can make it run on any channel by adding the usual channel suffix to the basic command. As a result, it is possible to have several versions of the monitor running in different windows.

Disassembly is just a matter of typing the instruction D followed by the start and end addresses of a block of memory. The display format, shown when the command is invoked, is composed of a decimal representation of the instruction address, followed by the code for that instruction.

The Trace facility takes advantage of the trace flag within the 68008 processor. When the flag is set, each time an instruction is performed, QDOS calls QL Monitor and a check is made for errors.

There are two trace modes. The normal mode writes every instruction to the trace window as it is executed. The second mode is called Quick Trace. It monitors the program code in the same way as the first, but no record is made in the trace window of the instruction being executed.

Normally the trace facility is used to look at user application. programs which operate in the QDOS User Mode. It can, however, be used to monitor the execution of privileged code in Supervisor Mode.

If an error occurs within a machine code program it is possible to make a correction to the code using the Modify instruction, which allows you to alter one instruction line at a time. As well as being able to modify the contents of RAM you can also change the values stored in the data and address registers. The Status Register, Program Counter and Stack Pointer can be altered in order to set up programs with test data.

The booklet which accompanies the package is above average for a Sinclair Research publication, even though it provides barely adequate descriptions of the monitor instruction set. However, it does show how to extend SuperBasic using machine code subroutines. As Sinclair Research seems to make a habit of not including examples in its utility manuals, the booklet is certainly a step forward.

If you are shopping around for a monitor to go with your assembler then QL Monitor is worth bearing in mind. Its power and flexibility in dealing with straightforward machine code or QDOS traps and jobs puts it above almost all other monitors and disassemblers on the market. The only product which comes close to it is the Hi-Soft MON QL. Both packages are remarkably similar in performance and display.

TOUCH TYPING is a real bind on any Sinclair computer but Sinclair Research is trying to make the process easier. with the release of Touch 'n' Go.

The package contains two programs. One is a tutorial covering all the basic keystrokes and the other is an analysis routine which calculates the results of the 62 lessons through which you, as a beginner, must progress.

Each lesson has a short introduction which gives the lowdown on the keystrokes you will encounter. You must press the ENTER key at the start and end of each line of the test. As you also need to keep your fingers on the central key positions you need at least six fingers on the right hand.

Each test sequence must be completed with 100 per cent accuracy and at a speed of 30 words per minute. If the boundaries of time or accuracy are exceeded you must repeat the exercise.

The program marks the tests with question and exclamation marks. Question marks mean you have made a keying error while exclamation marks show the parts of a test you have not completed. The more marks displayed on a test screen, the less accurate you have been.

Having completed the simple finger exercises you can move onto the real tests of skill and accuracy, typing in sentences and paragraphs. However, if you have learned your lessons well and are a reasonably fast typist, the speed at which the screen displays your input will soon fall behind the keying in of the tests. As a result, mistakes may not be picked up until it is too late and you will have to re-key the whole exercise.

The results analysis program, which is updated while you do the exercises, is confusing. Each entry shows the Achieved Accuracy, and Achieved Speed against Required Accuracy and Required Speed. Those headings are shown at the top of the screen as initials, such RA and RS. Viewed with the massive block of results data, the initials make the display seem even more confusing.

On other micros Touch 'n' Go may be a boon to budding secretaries, but on the QL it is little more than a toy. Although the package multi-tasks during the tests, the inability of the QL display to keep up with input makes an ordinary typewriter a better proposition for speed tests. Having said that, the package offers a viable alternative - though not a replacement - to typewriter tutorials.