Letters

@~First a comment and a query from +Tom Lorimer, Glenrothes

I've had a quick look at TADS, it looks difficult but once I find
out where to begin, it might become more clear. I'm glad you've
started a Help column on the subject.
@~I sent a copy of last issue to Mike Roberts at High Energy
@~Software and he liked the TADS sections too - in fact he's
@~offered to do an article for a future issue.

I have a query for you. When I format a disk, the computer adds a
serial number to the blank disk. This number is sometimes 12
digits long. Do you know how to stop the computer from adding this
number? The reason that I am asking is that my speech synthesiser
has to read the volume label plus the serial number before it
reads the contents of the disk. I know a few ways round the
problem but I would rather get rid of the number altogether.
@~Not adventure related but I'd be intrigued to know the answer
@~too. Any technically-minded people out there?

@~Now some useful information on ramdisks from
From Ian Taylor, Wallington

@~Just to set the scene, I'd sent Ian Nethack! to review and told
@~him I thought it might need a ramdisk to run properly. See his
@~review for more details.

...I'm afraid the part about a ramdisk is true but I've got so
many it wasn't a problem. Particularly with 2 1/2 Meg, I've always
found them very useful. I load Railroad Tycoon onto a ramdisk and
play it from there, as I haven't got a hard disk for the ST. It's
so much faster than playing from floppies. Railroad Tycoon is my
favourite ST game, I think - anyone who hasn't got it should get
it straightaway.

I tried the same trick (ie loading everything onto a ramdisk) with
Ultima VI because Ultima VI is almost unplayable on the ST - it
loads everything from disk (4 of them, though one's only used to
load the program) and crashes frequently if you use two disk
drives - even with 2 1/2 Meg of RAM - so you can't even have two
disks present at once to reduce the swapping. Every time you look
at an object or move too far or look at a character it seems to
require a different disk.

Mindscape's help people were totally unfriendly and unhelpful when
I rang in to ask for help saying that that's how it's supposed to
work!! You can't even install it on a hard disk. All I can say is
"Don't buy it for the ST, even if you've played all the others in
the series - you'll regret it". As you've probably guessed, trying
to load it into a ramdisk failed. Although the game ran, it still
asked for disks to be inserted at the usual times.

@~I've never done much with ramdisks, only an odd bit of file
@~copying, so it hadn't occurred to me to try them with multi-disk
@~adventures ... it sounds a great idea when it works and it's
@~certainly cheaper than buying a hard disk. If anyone with a
@~smaller memory ST (or an Amiga?) has found other games that run
@~like this, I'd be interested to hear about it.