From: 3WU (Fred Price) Subject: A REDLAMP Well friends, a little change in dialect comes in now from that North- Eastern chap Geordie Broon, or if you want it in English, Mr George Brown. As I said, a little change into the Northumberland dialect for you to sort out. It's sometimes best to leave it in the Geordie way of talking, so get your thinking caps on and see what Geordie got up to during the war, when he did his bit in the Home Guard with his. REDLAMP ******* As usual set your printer up ready Fred ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: E3Y (3.Spaceman) Subject: Those missing ID's... Having only recently subscribed to the 8BS magazine I thought that perhaps Chris hadn't yet gotten around to adding my user ID to the mags that I was receiving. Reading last issue I realised that I wasn't alone in being ID-less or in being perturbed by the lack thereof. With this in mind comes the 8BS user ID stamper. Simply load it up, enter your ID and put any of those annoying "I.D. ***" discs in your drive to be personalised. The program checks to make sure it is an 8BS disc and that it doesn't already have an ID and does it's thing. Full on-screen instruction is provided. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: E3Y (3.Spaceman) Subject: MODE7 screen designer I had a few ideas of programs I wanted to write and those that I wanted to submit to 8BS and one of these was to be a game with illustrations. MODE 7 seemed most practical for this being as how teletext screens use so little memory. Then I realised I needed a teletext screen designer for this. Can't say that I've gotten much further with my game but I ended up with a screen designer that's pretty cool. Here it is. There's a few more bits I'd like to add to it (and maybe will sometime) but for now it works, it's tidy - hopefully it'll be useful to someone! Title page keys: < or > - current screen no. up/down S or L - save/load current screen SHIFT+S or L - save/load a block file containing all 20 screens ESCAPE - go to editing screen Editing screen keys: CURSORS - movement SHIFT+CURSORS - move at double speed RETURN - place selected character DELETE - remove character CTRL+DELETE - wipes current screen < or > - change character SHIFT+ < or > - step through chars ten at a time ESCAPE - go to title page SHIFT+ESCAPE - quits (from title page or editing screen) Included is a simple (single) screen - filename: SKYGRND Final note: this program saves single and block screen files to the S and B directories respectively. Being a DFS man myself it's happy on my machine but I'm sure for ADFS you have to create the directories special-like. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: D6G (Sprow) Subject: REPEATing myself I'm unfortunately forced to use DOS and Windows based machines at University,and their tiresome slowness winds me up consitantly.But ONE good feature I find in DOS is the ability to press F3 to repeat the last command typed. So the wheels of thought started to turn and I've produced 'REPEAT' which is a one page (256 bytes or less) utility for you to use.Pressing F3 will repeat the last OS command issued (ie.star command). Note that it'll even repeat ones issued using OSCLI from BASIC.So the following sequence would occur: >*CAT >OSCLI"INFO *.*" (press F3) >*INFO *.* (not *CAT!) As per usual I've assembled it at &C00 which is the character definition buffer or Econet workspace on BBCs and Masters respectively. If this is a problem,then send 2.50 and a scrap of paper to me (address in adverts section) and I7ll return a disk with a custom version on. Hope this is of use to someone. Sprow. 8BSMail:D6G ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: D6G (Sprow) Subject: ROM images Just last issue Steven Alsopp was wondering how to get ROM images into his machine. Well, firstly you'll need to have some banks of sideways RAM into which you can load them.This usually means you'll need an add-on board of some sort, or the newer BBC B+ and Master series has some in already. For the official Acorn SWR you simply use the built- in software *SRLOAD filename addr id Where addr=8000 usually and id is the ROM socket in which the image will appear.The optional Q means the image will first be loaded into main RAM (corrupting any program there) then put into SWR which makes the operation much much quicker. Other add-ons have their own software, certainly the Watford ROM/RAM board does as it needs to set up some latches first. In general you just *LOAD filename 8000 and the hardware worries about how to page in and out the DFS ! Why not try using my rom LOADER program which has a looksee through the sockets first and tries to make an intelligent guess where to put the image. It's on this disk and written in BASIC so simply CHAIN it. Hope this has shed light on the subject. Sprow 8BSMail:D6G ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: K6N (Brian Raw) Subject: Quick Format & Scandisk If you make backup discs before trying bits of software out, as you should, then often when you no longer require the backup then you find it easier to reformat the disc than deleting all the files, especially with adfs. QFORMAT solves this by rewriting the catalogue info as for a blank disk. Also since this is located on track 0 it is possible to deal with S,M,L formats on an 80T drive by first reading the sector info then using what it finds as its rewrite value! QFORM is the dfs version. Verifying disks is another problem as both dfs and adfs have special codes for performing this which simply check each sector's header info paying scant regard to the data in between. SCANDISK then uses normal disk read codes to read the data off each sector a track at a time, you can see this in action if you do it in MODE 0. SCAN is the dfs version. The source files for these should be on this disk somewhere. You will have to RUN them and save the resulting code on a separate disk! QFadfs QFdfs SDadfs SDdfs Good God its Christmas again! Good God its Christmas again! ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 8BS messaging system file resizer 8BS messaging system file resizer Version 0.10 by Steven Flintham (15A) Introduction This simple program allows you to change the size of a message file, so that if you didn't make room for enough messages when you created it you can extend it, or if you're short of space you can shrink it by removing unused message slots. How to use it It might be a good idea to copy the !Mesg file from your submission disc to somewhere safe before attempting to resize it, just in case the resize program is faulty. (I am just being cautious; I have no reason to believe it contains any serious bugs!) Run the program and insert your submission disc when prompted, exactly as if you were using the messaging system. The message file will be scanned and you will then be asked to enter the new size for the file. (You are prevented from making the file hold fewer messages than it already contains. If you want to do this, you will have to do it from within the main Messaging System program. ) The file will then be resized and you can use it in the messaging system as normal. If things go wrong... The program works by copying messages from the original message file to a new file of the appropriate size, then deleting the original file and renaming the new one. This is safer than working directly on the original file but means that you must have enough free space on the disc for both the original and new message files when converting. If anything goes wrong during resizing, such as there not being enough free space on the disc, the original message file should still be on the disc exactly as it was before. There may be a !MesgX file as well; this is the (almost certainly incomplete or corrupt) resized copy which was being created. You can delete !MesgX (and will have to before you can run the resize program again), but you may want to wait until you have checked that the original message file is intact. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, MANUAL FOR PRNFILE (6502 machine code) This file describes the program PRNFILE which redirects printer output to a chosen disk file.It is inly suitable for use on the 8 bit range of BBC micros. This method is better than *SPOOL as only data intended for the printer is trapped,and not all programs allow command line access. The manual and software is (C)1997 SPROW INSTRUCTIONS- At the command prompt,type *RUN PRNFILE The program will then appear to not have done anything.This is because the printer type has not been setup yet and no filename has been specified. To do so type *LINE then type *FX5,3 This tells the program to use as the destination,and *FX5, 3 tells the OS to use a custom printer driver,not the default one. TO CLOSE THE FILE- Either 1)Select a different printer type (eg.*FX5,1 for parallel printer) or 2)Type *LINE with no parameters (ie.just *LINE) EXIT MESSAGES- "Cannot open file" - for some reason the OS couldn't allocate a file handle KNOWN PROBLEMS/FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS- No known problems HISTORY- V1.00 First release to 8 Bit software disk user group