Before I became engrossed in the Electron, I used to take a few electronics magazines every month and I subsequently kept my eye open for computer-related projects. There were rarely any published for the Elk, but plenty for the Speccy and C64 of the (Give your mother-in-law a belt when she switches on the microwave) type. However, two that did cross my path and could be of interest to readers were as follows:
- From Elektor Electronics, February 1987. ROM/RAM cartridge for the Plus 1 slots, which turned out to be quite a versatile and useful addition. It could be used as a 4 x 8K 6264 RAM module giving two banks of 16K or a double 27128 EPROM carrier, or as a combination of RAM and ROM.
- From Everyday Electronics, April 1989. An Electron User Port project which makes use of the expansion socket on the back of the Elk. Plus 1 users could easily adapt this to plug into a slot.
I built two of the RAM/ROM modules and slightly adapted them to give write-protect switches and used them extensively with ROMs and ROM images. Slogger's Plus 1 operating chip was a boom with its *RLOAD and *RSAVE commands and I kept one cartridge permanently in the front slot of the Plus 1. Having a commercial User Port that plugged into the Plus 1 meant that I never got around to building the one from the mag, but it appears to do its job and would be ideal for all those running their train layouts from their Elk, etc, etc.
As both the mags are a bit dated and Everyday Electronics is no longer published it might be a bit of a struggle to get hold of back issues. Elektor though may still be contacted at:
ELEKTOR ELECTRONICS (Publishing)
P.O. Box 1414
DORCHESTER DT2 8YH
Their back issues may be obtained from:
WIMBORNE PUBLISHING
6 Church Street
Wimborne
DORSET BH21 1JH
On to a new topic. I've seen some correspondence in recent issues about Viewstore on the Elk. I used it a great deal when I had the Elk and experienced no difficulties, apart from running out of memory with large databases. Below are the Elk-equivalent keys that allow pretty much 100% compatibility:
| f1 = RECORD FORMAT | f2 = CHANGE DISPLAY | f3 = DEL END OF LINE |
| f4 = BEGIN of FIELD | f5 = END of FIELD | f6 = INDEX FIELD |
| f7 = LOCAT | f8 = INSERT CHAR | f9 = DEL CHAR |
| f0 = DATA | ||
| fa = CARD LAYOUT | fb = D'BASE HEADER | fc = CURSOR LOCK |
| fj = DEL RECORD | fm = BEGIN of RECORD | fn = END of RECORD |
| fo = DOWN 1 SCREEN | fp = UP 1 SCREEN | f" = END of FILE |
| f/ = BEGIN of FILE | f- = FWD 1 CHAR | f, = BACK 1 CHAR |
f = CAPS LK/FUNC key
I believe these were listed way back in one of the Electron Users, or possibly The Micro User (or indeed Acorn User).Del Williams
Cardiff, S. Glam
EUG #12