In Vol. 5 No.3 Martin Winbow wrote an article about his visit to and the Sharp computer scene in Japan. He mentioned all sorts of wonderful Sharp computers with amazing specifications, oodles of peripherals and full support by the major software houses. When I read the article, I wondered if he was talking about the same Sharp corporation as we know it. It seems he was.

In the March issue I mentioned the Knights donation and that there were some Japanese ASCII magazines, but I didn‘t mention ( because I didn‘t notice them ) four OH! MZ issues. Oh! MZ was, or still is a 200 page, glossy magazine dedicated to Sharp MZ computers. As in this country, only popular, ‘mainstream‘ computers get this sort of treatment from publishers, this certainly supports Martin‘s statement that after NEC, Sharp are second in line as far as computers are concerned.

Although OH! MZ is mainly written in Japanese, a lot of the BASIC listings and all of the assembly listings are as we normally see them. Because of this, I suspect that lots of information can be gleaned from these issues.

Armed with the proper MZ-700 version of HUDSON BASIC which is the language most of the BASIC listings are for and I suspect a more popular BASIC in Japan than S-BASIC, I have typed in a super logic game called BLOCK LAND. About 6K of the program is written in HU BASIC, whilst all the data and the screen layouts for the 98 ( yes 98 ) levels is written in machine code. As you would expect, it took me quite a while to key it all in and debug, but if the standard of this program is anything to go by, I will be doing the same on other programs. Watch this space!