RAMUTIL ROM
The other day I was looking through my collection of ROMs and found one labelled RAMUTIL and wondered what it was. I copied the contents onto my PC only to find it was one I wrote many years ago.. 1994 to be precise!
This of course didn't tell be what it did so I set up my Electron with the RAMUTIL ROM in slot 0, some sideways RAM in slots 2 & 3 and MMFS in slots 6 & 7.
After doing a *H.RAMUTIL I remembered what it was!. Back in the day I wrote a couple of programs to LOAD and SAVE ROM images and then tried to reduce the code to a single line of BASIC. I then went on to do the same for the BBC and the Master although I couldn't fit it into one line of code but had to use two.
The commands for the Electron are: ERLOAD & ERSAVE and for the BBC/Master: BRLOAD & BRSAVE just to keep the names unique.
I remembered that I wrote up the whole writing process for EUG and it appeared in issue 14.
Now to see if it works.. Issuing a *ERLOAD command the screen clears and a header appears 'LOAD ROM' and a prompt to ask you to type the ROM image filename.
Typing the filename and pressing Return it asks for the RAM bank number, in this case I typed Starmon and the bank number 2. A couple of second later the says Done.
Typing *ROMS confirms the image has loaded successfully. Then a CTRL BREAK to initialise it and typing *Starmon and the program starts up. Success!
I'm pleased that it still works. I don't know if I would ever use it as there are perfectly good loading and saving commands in the PRES Plus 1 ROM, ARM and the Slogger AP2 ROM. It was just an excerise to see how compact I could make the program.
I noticed that the ROM has found it's way into the BBC Micro ROM Library. It can also be download from this site here