Try your skill at DUEL, a superb two player game by Neil Davidson

DUEL is set in the far future when space gladiators battle between the stars in their specially made space ships. In this two player game your spaceship is located on the left of the screen while your opponent's is on the right. Between you is empty space and a few harmless asteroids.

You can move your ship up and down using the A and Z keys and CTRL is used to fire laser bolts at the enemy on the other side of the screen. He uses the *, ? and RETURN keys. Force shields which surround both ships protect them from laser bolts, but their power is limited, as shown at the sides of the screen.

You can hide between the asteroids for protection, but not for too long as it is possible to shoot holes in them. However, this is a dangerous ploy too, as your laser bolts may bounce back at you first. Also watch out for passing flying saucers that fire indiscriminately. If you try to blast them with laser bolts they'll bounce them back at you.

Game Controls:
Player 1: A - Up, Z - Down, CTRL - Fire
Player 2: * - Up, ? - Down, RETURN - Fire

Teach yourself Morse Code with Paul Keddie's useful utility program

The second program that many people write when they first start Basic programming on their Electron is a Morse Code tutor - the first being a character definer. Over the past five years we have seen dozens of code tutors, but Paul Keddie's is a clear winner.

When you run it you'll be presented with the menu screen. Press 1 to read the instructions, and 2 to display the alphabet alongside its Morse equivalent. Pressing 3 takes you to the converter which allows you to convert text into dots and dashes.

You are prompted to input a word which the program then displays letter by letter on the screen. The Morse Code is shown alongside as a series of dots and dashes while it produces the correct sounds via the internal speaker.

Option 4 will print out the codes on the printer and pressing 5 will quit the tutor and return you to Basic.

The program runs in Mode 1 and to enable it to work on ADFS disc systems like the Plus 3 and Pres AP3 which set PAGE to &1D00, a downloader is incorporated into the listing. This means that when the program is run the disc system will be disabled, so remember to save your typing first. Tape users won't experience these problems as there is plenty of memory to run the tutor.

By entering words and carefully listening to each letter you will soon become a quite proficient beeper.

Andrew and Stephen Weir combine lively nursery rhymes and noughts and crosses

TIC TAC RHYMES is a fun two-player educational game for young children. It combines nursery rhymes with the old game of noughts and crosses. After printing an instruction page, the program presents a series of well-known nursery rhymes and prints them on the screen one at a time.

In the rhyme one of the words is missing and you have to type it in. Just type the letters without pressing RETURN or CAPS LK - you don't need them.

Each letter is represented by a short dash so you can tell how long the word is. If the word entered is the correct one you get to play one turn at noughts and crosses. Get it wrong and you miss your turn and the other player has his chance to guess the missing word in a different rhyme.

The winner of TIC TAC RHYMES is the player who wins the game of noughts and crosses. When this happens a tune is played and you go right back to the beginning of the program. As the rhymes are randomly chosen you are unlikely to be asked the same ones again.

Many tunes are built into the program and are played when you correctly enter a word in a nursery rhyme or place a nought or cross. The musical sound effects and tunes can be turned on or off at any time by pressing the COPY key.