In case you haven't noticed, there is now a large selection of scans of The Micro User available at the site 8bs.com.

In the November and December 1990 issues are two articles by Tony Oakden (author of Quest, Star Port and Camelot) with listings explaining how to do the cut-down screen technique on an Electron and increase the speed using a variety of other tricks such as reading the keyboard directly and turning off the A to D converter.

It's amusing to read about the author's tricks to compensate for the scrolling caused by switching screen modes because this side effect was used to great effect in Firetrack to allow smooth vertical scrolling.

Other than disabling the ADC and reading the keyboard directly, I wonder how much of a speed up the screen mode trick actually yields.

I suppose it would make a big difference for initially drawing levels, but I don't know how much difference it would make for games with his "colour-chop" trick - the blurb for the article claims about a 50% increase if you use all the tricks together.