ajs@ihuxf.UUCP (Al Sawyer) (01/04/84)
I have had two ADAMs so far, and neither worked. The serial numbers were approximately 500 and 15000, so the trend does not seem to be improving. The tape drive on the first one had overheating problems. The second one came with two bad tapes. More interesting than the tape drive is an apparent bug in the word processing code. Unfortunately this code is in ROM and appears to have been in both ADAMs I had. The problem appears when in the word processor on the second half of a line, ie the second line in the black typing area, a single letter correction is made using the backspace key. Occasionally it will erase a sentence. Further, if this happens when in the insert mode text in a different area of the file may be mutilated, causing various blob characters to appear on the screen. It was so bad with the second ADAM that I was unable to write a letter of complaint to Coleco. I would be interested in whether anyone else has had experience with this problem. Note that besides these problems there are numerous inconveniences associated with the ADAM. It is not easy to use the built in editor to edit a BASIC program. You would have to change tapes three times and load BASIC twice. While in BASIC the only editing available is retyping the entire line. The manual is inadequate. The sprites can be controlled from BASIC, but no information about how to load them is provided. Accessing files from BASIC is supposed to be provided but in not documented sufficiently to be used. The MID and LEFT string commands do not work consistently.