TECH NICHE

This issue sees the start of a new corner in CRASH, the Tech Niche, which will appear every month, crammed full of news and reviews of gizmos you can bolt on to your trusty Spectrum. We’ll also be taking a look at some of the things you can get up to with your Spectrum ...other than play games, that is!

We’ll be doing profiles on Utility programmers, reviewing utility packages and digesting the contents of a few technical-type books, which we’ll tell you about. Hardware, including printers, disk drives, and all the peripherals that can turn your Speccy into something Specc-ial will be put under the Tech Niche microscope in due course, and there are plans for roundups on specific products like add-on keyboards, joystick interfaces and compilers (which go part of the way towards saving you the bother of writing in machine code).

In the next two issues the Tech Niche Team, aided and abetted by a professional musician and keyboard teacher, will be examining the ways you can compose, play and even learn music with your computer.

We hope to take a look at Modems and Micronet 800, and may even include a regular sub-Niche for communications freaks who can’t resist making telephone calls with their computers.

Who knows, robots and the kind of things they can get up to may prompt us to push our pens over paper in a while. The artistically minded among you will be pleased to hear that a review of graphics packages and input devices is already on the drawing board!

Maybe all the marketing men out there in the wide world, who’ve been wondering why we haven’t written about their products as much as they’d like will be able to sleep more soundly in their beds at night once they’ve sent us their utilities and add-ons for scrutiny and evaluation. Don’t say CRASH isn’t a caring magazine, even if WE have to stay up nights to do it, Tech Niche will provide a forum for all that’s happening away from the games front line.

And don’t forget, dear readers, that we’re here to serve your every whim. Well, a whim a week, at any rate. If you think there’s some aspect of Spectrum ownership to do with hardware or non-games software that the Tech Niche Team should take a look at, drop us a line — we might even print the odd letter, you never know...