From: K6X (Cluke) Subject: Program Documentation WITZ The program to which I referred in my General Message should be on this disc under the filename WITZ, if Chris has managed to find room for it. It was a very large program which was written originally for use on NASA's equally large computers, where space was not a problem!! It took Mona nearly as long to prune and convert it for use on my 128 as it did to write it in the first place. Most of the facilities have had to be removed, like the 18,000-word technical-term dictionary, the pseudo- thesaurus, the multi-language text translation function, and more. Even so, the main facilities of word- and spell-checking constitute a very large program which only just fits into my 128, and even then only after a bit of OS tweaking prior to loading. Simply, it works by reading several pages at a time from the source file, using these as the 'template' for the next few pages loaded, and loads the corrected text into a destination file. The next few pages are loaded and then checked against this 'template' to catch any words which might be correctly spelt, but which do not make correct sense in the sentence or in the general context of the pages being checked. As each large block of pages is being checked and then downloaded to the destination file, the 'template' is constantly being updated, even to the extent that earlier corrections could be reloaded and amended in the light of later up- dates of the 'template'. You will see from this that twin-drives really are preferable when dealing with large or multiple files, as I do when checking the issue discs, although it does work OK ( with a lot of disc-swapping! ) on a single drive. Text is not displayed during the process, as it scrolls both backwards and forwards far too quickly to be read. All that is displayed is; a HEX number at the top of the screen relating to the page-block currently being processed, and some messages as the program works it's way through the text under scrutiny. It runs directly from the Utilities Menu, after loading a short header which does the necessary OS tweaks for you prior to loading in the main program. I have also written a short file ( appropriately entitled TestFil ) which is liberally sprinkled with (INTENTIONAL!) errors. If you read it before running the program, you will more fully appreciate just how good it really is. Just follow the prompts, and I think that you will be impressed. N.B. The program has been modified so it will run on all Beeb machines ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: L1M (Janny Looyenga) Subject: FontSaver There are two versions of Fontsaver on the disc, one for the BBC and one for the Master. BBC users should explode the fonts first by typing *FX20,6 and *BASIC before running this program. The fonts on the Master are already exploded so no need for this. A program will be saved onto disc named FSAVE. When you have loaded a font into memory you can save this by entering *FSAVE where is the name of your font. You can load it back with a * command: * where is the name of the saved font. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Scroll The latest update to Scroll is on the disk. The changes are: The filename is displayed correctly if longer than a certain length. Scroll will now display text files where the lines are terminated by LF instead of CR. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Prime Numbers The text file accompanying my Prime number program in issue 52 lost all the TABs, so the table of times lost all sense. I've resubmitted it here with the TABs replaced by the correct number of spaces to align up the tables. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: D6G (SPROW) Subject: Programs this time Usefuls ======= The file "Usefuls" on this disk contains 3 handy FNs that seem to crop up all over the place when I'm writing programs that require large amounts of text handling. They perform the following functions - 1)Raise a string to upper case Eg.In a word processor 2)Get a string of fixed length using OSWord 0 Eg.When a 7 letter filename is reqd 3)Test for occurences of valid characters Eg.Filenames aren't allowed spaces OSWdetect ========= If your machine isn't a Master,but you do have a clock board added, and don't have the instructions to check whether the driver ROM supports OSWORD and OSBYTE as per the Master,then run this little BASIC program to see if it does. If the resulting screen output says that ANY of the calls are unavailable then the 'Doomsday' ROM (to fix the year 2000 problem AND add some new star commands) will not function as specified. The Doomsday ROM is detailed elsewhere Enjoy! Robert Sprowson ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: 3WU (Fred Price) Subject: Jim Downies Pools After reading Jim's poem 'Mother' in the last issue, I thought I would give you his second of three this time so you can decide for yourselves 'have they or not won the pools?', and as you can see he has brought his parents in this time. Have your printer ready and centred if it can handle it; the program contains a centreing command. If your printer cannot handle centreing, LOAD in the program and put REM at the beginning of line 30 ( or delete it ) before RUNning it. Ok here we go and let's have take a look and dive into Jim Downie's POOLS Fred ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K6N (Brian Raw) Subject: Teletext in all MODEs ********************** The poor Electron owner often gets forgotten nowadays, these machines not having MODE 7 although I believe you can stick another lump of plastic onto the back of these machines to get MODE 7. Anyways, from the Notepad Suite of programs you may have seen or indeed used the Epson printer option, well this works by intercepting the teletext codes and sending a suitable graphic to the printer instead. Well it occurred to me that by using a similar method, teletext graphics may be sent to the screen allowing MODE 7 screens to be viewed in any MODE. On the Master a simple way to do this might be to redefine the character set, however on the BeeB this would need to explode the character set using up valuable ram (Jonathan!) . A better way would be to intercept the teletext codes as they are passed to OSWRCH and redefine CHR$(128) each time. This way you wouldn't notice the program's presence until you try to print characters above 128 The accompanying demo program goes a little way to achieve this but wants a bit more work yet, however notice that in the multi colour MODEs it is possible to change colour. I have included the resistor program from some time ago as this only uses basic teletext codes for changing colours. However once you have got this demo loaded which initially works in MODE1 try escaping out of the program nicely (not hard break). Type MODE 0 and RUN. Try MODEs 0,1,3,4,6,7. While in MODE 0 LOAD"DemoTxt" and LIST and finally hit BREAK and LIST again. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,