Extensions to CBM 64 Basic are not fairly common but, up to now, rather costly. The appalling Simon's Basic and the slightly better BC Basic are good examples. It was therefore with delight that I examined this package. The result confirmed the well-known adage "you get what you pay for". This package seems good value but has silly omissions.

As with its predecessors, this package adds commands for the easy use of sound and graphics and gives other commands.

The graphics routines are quite standard apart from an unbelievably slow circle command. All commands appy only to hi-res mode. What happened to multi-colour mode? The sound commands work well enough but the handbook didn't give any hints on how to use them.

Other amazing omissions included: Renumber didn't deal with GOTOs or GOSUBs; I found a DOKE but no DEEK; a FILL command is included which had no real obvious use (nothing worthwhile anyway!), the point test used a RAM location rather than return a Boolean result.

The package has a small instruction booklet which described all the commands but didn't instruct.

In all, this package offers a cheap alternative and is better than nothing.

A.W.