Richardson's Ramblings. Richardson's Ramblings. This section is the dump area of the mag, the 3 in the morning better not keep this in the text area area. The scrolly text message buffer of endless tosh that makes your eyes spin but you just can't stop reading it because you might miss something important at the end, you can't *LIST it because the person that wrote it EORed it into knots type area. Was it you that wrote that article a while back and didn't think it was worth sending in to 8BS? Now it's stuck on a disc somewhere in the bowels of your disc box gathering dust? Or were you the one that wrote that brilliant routine and promptly forgot about it. Surely, it is hidden away on that utility disc that you haven't looked at for months. What? You don't remember? Well just have a look through your collection again it must be there. Yes! Go on, stick it on a disc and send it to 8BS. Can't you find it? Oh well, it shouldn't take a minute to knock up something else should it? After all if someone like 2J3 can do it you must be able to do something far better! Or was that you, Steve Flintham that lay down a challenge to get a BASIC program to make an exact copy of itself? See Basread. A spin off from this was spending several hours working out how GOTO and GOSUB targets were stored in memory. They are stored in three bytes after &8D is found. Why are they stored like this? Is it something to do with RENUMBER ing? Or BCD? This is a procedure that calculates the GOTO or GOSUB "TARGET". Assuming that the file pointer is hovering over the first of the three bytes: 400DEFPROCcalc:A%=BGET_F% 410G%=(BGET_F% EOR &40)+(BGET_F% EOR &40)*&100 420IF A% MOD &10=0 G%=G%+&4000 430A%=A%-A% MOD &10 440IF A%=&40 G%=G%+&40 450IF A%=&70 G%=G%+&80 460IF A%=&60 G%=G%+&C0 470PRINTSTR$G%;:ENDPROC How about this idea: A challenge to see who can create the most useful one liner? Maybe a dump routine or sound sampler, or 3D scrolling "shoot 'em up" game? Something will have to replace the Repton competition when it is finally laid to rest. CHEATS. CHEATS. Here are some of the latest cheats from my repertoire of fiddlings. Beware! Beware! If you have the slightest doubt about how to use this information, don't do it or you will mess up your prize games. PANTHEON 30 FOR L%=0TO2 STEP2 40 P%=&C00 50 [ 60 OPT L% 70 JSR &FFF4 80 LDA _&60:STA &1A1D:STA &1A2A 90 STA &2845 \ SOME IMMORTALITY 100 LDA _&EA:STA &24F5:STA &24F6 110 STA &2887:STA&2888 \ INF LIVES 120 RTS 130 ]:NEXT 140 *LOAD OMCL 150 ?&BAA=0:?&BAB=&C:CALL&B00 Lines 80 90 and 100 give immortality except for falls. Remove line 90 as the game probably plays better without it. Line 110 gives infinite lives. This on it's own is probably sufficient. RUBBLE TROUBLE changes to RUBBLE2 70B$="" 80PRINT"IMMORTAL? Y/N":A$=GET$:IFA$="Y" B$="?&34D0=0:?&295E=0:?&339F=0:?&353C=0 :":REM ?&3023=0 TIME NOT KILL 90PRINT"INFINITE LIVES? Y/N":A$=GET$:IF A$="Y"B$=B$+"?&2F15=&EA:?&2F16=&EA" 100REM ?&2035=NUMBER OF LIVES 110OSCLI"K.0*LOAD RUBBLE3|M"+B$+"|MCALL &4078|M" 120*FX138 0 128 130END TIME MACHINE *KEY 10 INPUT ?&B33:?&39D6=?&B33:CALL & F86|M Pressing break allows you to input the location you wish to go to: 1 Swamp 2 Sphinx 3 Brig 4 Cellar 5 Grassy plain 6 Time warp 10 Machine 11 Swamp 13 Lake 14 Causeway 15 Island 16 Desert 17 Wall 18 Passage 19 Weapons 20 Statue 21 Temple 22 Tunnel 23 Foremast 24 Rigging 25 Pantry 26 Deckhouse 27 Cabin 29 Nest 30 Cabin 31 House 32 Quagmire 33 Fog 34 Door 35 Fog 36 Window 37 Hall 39 Study 40 Powerhouse 41 Corridor 42 Guardroom 44 Dead POWER RAIDER Immortal *LOAD POWCODE ?&2E78=&EA ?&2E79=&EA ?&2E7A=&EA *SAVE POWCODE 1800+3FFF YIE AR KUNG FU 2 Main game: ?&2015=&EA:?&2016=&EA: infinite lives ?&2CF6=&EA:?&2CF7=&EA: no minor nasties ?&2DE3=&EA:?&2DE4=&EA: infinite power THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Infinite shields: Main game ?&568A=&EA ?&568B=&EA ?&568C=&EA Thought for the day: Tippex on disc labels flakes off inside disc drives. This cannot be good. Well it happened finally. All this time with just the odd finger slip here and there, just delete and the error is corrected. Everything was going fine when all of a sudden in an unguarded moment, the worst happened. Instead of loading a file into an empty memory, I saved empty memory over a file. Out came the sector editor, fifteen minutes of sticky palmed jiggling about finally rescued the file. I backed up the disc I was using onto a spare disc. I then used the spare disc and my sector editor to find the area that the text file was sitting. Then I changed the file attributes of one of the existing files to the same length and address on disc as that of the data I wanted to rescue. I then loaded that newly changed file into EDIT and trimmed the excess off. I then saved the rescued file back onto the original disc. PHEW! What? No female members? What? Of Mix-ed and Mix-ed2. Of Mix-ed and Mix-ed2. I think that there is a minor point in need of clearing up regarding the two versions of this program of mine. There have been questions put to me by various people now about the difference between Mix-ed and Mix-ed2 the sound sample editors. In a nutshell: Mix-ed is obsolete. There is no need to attempt to use it if you have Mix-ed2. Mix-ed and Mix-ed2 will work well on all samples on CJR discs. There now follows a more involved explanation which you probably don't need to read if you have better things to do. After all, this is just the ramblings section. This is the question from YJ2 that prompted these paragraphs: "Incidently what is the difference between Mix-Ed 1 and Mix-Ed 2? (apart from the fact that the latter is uncompatible with the former). Is there a conversion program for transferring files between the two systems?" Ok. Well to cut a long story long. Aeons ago, before I had my own sound sampler I had a load of TYB samples. Wishing to play around with these samples I wrote my first version of Mix-ed. Mix-ed is not compatible with the BBC B because of an assembler instruction. At the time I wrote the program I was unaware of compatability problems. I then acquired my own sampler and started gathering my own collection. The software that takes and runs these samples is slightly different to TYB software. Therefore Mix-ed2 was born. As is usually the case, as time passed by, Mix-ed2 evolved. Comparing the 2 versions will bear this out. Mix-ed2 is shorter than the original Mix-ed for instance. The original Mix-ed is on the first two sample discs (CJR-4 and 5) that I sent to Duncan and now Daniel. The first two sample discs contain The Yorkshire Boys samples only. Mix-ed2 is for use with all susequent discs. All subsequent discs contain samples taken by myself only. Has anyone heard the laugh on CJR-8? This is a friend of my wife's, a nice lass, but what a noise. I do not see any point in attempting to alter Mix-ed as I regard this program and in fact the whole area, finished with. The collection of sampling and editing programs that I have written suits my needs to now produce sample discs when the mood takes me. I am working on my next disc (CJR-9, samples disc 6) at this moment, although it only has 1 meagre sample on it at present. As you are all bearing witness to, teletext editing was the next poor innocent subject for me to slaughter. That is now out of the window. To be replaced with text game writing programs maybe, or even graphics games. All of this is generally interspersed with my favourite subject but the problem is that none of that can be published. humm humm...... HAH! HAH! an extra bit!!! Okay. Stage one finished. That was simple. For stage two, you need a sector editor and a bit of patience! Unless of course you are really good at locating hidden stuff! Oh! That's too many clues! And don't forget And don't forget to before anything else. before anything else.