At first, I'd like to apologize for my article in SE#3 where I strongly wanted to respect rules concerning making TAP files instead of TR-DOS ones by former Soviet Union freaks. After reading an article by MacBuster/XTM, it's clear. TR-DOS is the one and only system here, monoloaders are a need because of low speed of TR-DOS. Well, TR-DOS is probably the most used Speccy system in the world as well. So, let's wish them their best and reconcile with the fact, we will have to CRACK their stuff!
I could describe a bit the situation in the Czech Republic now.
Almost all the Speccy people think and say, when talking about ex-soviet stuff: "Russians are fuckers!" This is not political.
It's caused because people from the middle and western Europe use different disk systems than TR-DOS. Yes, of course, TR-DOS originally came from the UK, but there were better systems since 1986, the year when the first version of Beta was released. It was mainly DiSCiPLE and OPUS in the UK, D40/D80 in former Czechoslovakia, FDD3000 in Poland and maybe other minor systems like DATAPUTER in CZ and SK and so on. Then came MB02 and later its variant MB02+, a disk system with all its good parameters, being widely spread to all the world. All these systems are based on tape loading - there is no need to get a program to one file and load it sector by sector and on some of them this is definitely not possible.
In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the most known system for Spectrum was Didaktik 40/80 (known as D40 and D80). D40 for 5,25" DD disks and D80 for 3,5" DD disks. Next was maybe Beta, then Dataputer. Since 1995/96 when 8BC shocked with MB02+ some people bought it. The actual situation is that the most spread system is still D40/D80, then MB02+. The other systems like TR-DOS are rare.
In the last time, 8BC said they stopped producing MB02+, mainly because it's conception is outdated and started to think about an MB03, a compatible system with 02 series, with modern electronics conception like optimized concept of MB03 mainboard for easier assembling, more SRAM (about 1 to 2 MB), FLASH ROM 32kB, integrated HDD controller, Z80 CTC, possibility to connect PS/2 keyboard and mouse, MP3 decoder and so on, but they asked at Czech Speccy mailing list (at www.pandora.cz) if it does any sense to make new disk interface. Whether it would be better getting a russian machine instead of making this. Well, response of people at speccy@pandora wasn't big. Some of them want it, some would like 8BC make whole new computer including all the best features of Spectrum, MB02+ and MB03. Only time will show what will be the best solution.
Finally, people here will not start buying russian Spectrum clones because of compatibility. No way. It seems there is an imaginary wall between TR-DOS users and the rest of world. The only thing we can do with it is to CRACK and MODIFY russian code to run on our firm Speccies. There are a lot of cracks of eastern stuff by X-Agon/PhT, but it's not modified - fucking snow fx and slowdowns are making invasion to our screens. Let's wish good luck to SUNBEAM, a new western cracking group, removing slowdowns and things like sector loading will be the most tricky things to do when adapting to our systems.
Aki (as Factor 6)
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