by Simon HillHi! I am, I believe, AMPLINEX's first Electron member. I bought my Music 5000 last December, a few months after they had been released. They are being marketed by P.R.E.S. Ltd which is a company that produces lots of add-ons for the Electron.
I think the synthesiser is wonderful, although I have to say that I have a Slogger Master Ram Board fitted to my machine. This gives me 32K Shadow RAM and fast RAM banks - the Electron has a reputation for being a slow micro. Music plays at the correct speed on the unexpanded Electron, but takes up so much processing time that trying to do anything else (like using the Mixing Desk) becomes a very slow business. Having said that, it is still perfectly usable. Another problem is that the Electron has no Mode 7, so there is a natural lack of memory. This is no problem for me, as I always work in Shadow RAM - but unexpanded owners only have about 9000 bytes free when no editors have been installed (4000 with Mixing Desk). This has the side-effect that all of AMPLINEX's Mode 7 displays look like a dog's dinner and that the AMPLINEX control program does fit in the memory available. Otherwise, the system is identical to that of the BBC and everything I have tried playing on it works perfectly. I don't think that the speed and memory restrictions will be too much of a problem as a vast number of Electron owners have the Master RAM Board. Electrons are being sold with the MRB fitted. Acorn no longer markets them. |
Source: AMPLINEX 010 disk, file $.MARCH |
Published in AMPLINEX 010, March 1989
