Q. I have purchased a Kempston joystick interface for my 48K Spectrum. I have tried using this for playing Psytron but it only changes screens five, six, seven and eight, probably because it simulates pressing the cursor keys. Is there any way I can overcome this?

Pat Breen
Dublin

A. The Kempston interface doesn't actually emulator keys at all - it uses the IN command. Psytron appears to be one of those games that doesn't work very well with a joystick, simply because there are too many keys involved.

There's very little you can do about this with the Kempston, as there's no way to change the keys used. If you felt like investing in a programmable joystick, however, you might be able to use a joystick instead of at least some of the keys.

The Comcon interface, for example, allows you to connect left, right, up, down and two fires to any keys you like, so you get a lot more flexibility. But our Psytron expert tells us it's not difficult to play on the keyboard anyway, so what's the problem?