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One of the best features of Locomotive BASIC is the ease with which it can be added to. Here, Pride Utilities take 3K of RAM but give in return 31 new commands for your 464/664.

They fall into three categories starting with FIL and CIRCLE - the latter is quite fast and can also draw ellipses. Also GPEN which changes the colour of the graphics ink easily.

Next are easy ways to use the wealth of routines in the operating system that you won't know about unless you have the firmware guide. Cursor on and off, wait for a keypress, read a character from the screen, flush the keyboard buffer, inverse print, overprint, cassette motor on and off, reset the screen to default colours and so on.

Finally, some toolbox and graphic commands, screen visible and invisible, a means of allowing your program to be unprotected if you wish it, super fast save speeds for cassette up to 4000 baud, double peek and poke, ROM peek, memory shift, and screen shift left, right, up and down.

They all work very well, and it's good to see the loader screen using some of the new commands. Very impressive, but sad to find it protected so you can't see how they did it. It can be broken into easily once you know the secret, but it's not in the 8 page manual which accompanies the package. Sad to find spelling errors. Even BASIC requires perfect spelling of commands!

D.M.