To: 999 (all members)
From: K2F (John Davis)
Subject: Tale of Woe.
or:
How To Feel Like a Right Twit in
One Easy Lesson.
There had to be a better way of
including info with a program, if it
was more than a few sentences, than:
1) Using tedious and annoying print
statements.
2) Putting it in the program info
section, which allows good
presentation quite easily, but is too
remote from the program.
3) Using a TYPE file, which is OK, but
a bit limited.
Clearly, the perfect solution would
be to use this whizzo message system,
with its semi-WP facilities, including
t/text codes, and have the info
directly connected to the program,
running in the two-way scrolling
system. Surely this would be possible,
since that's what happens from the 8BS
Menu for 40 column text.
Obviously, therefore, there must be
a routine lurking in the very
complicated Menu program which runs,
or at least controls, the fancy,
smooth two-way scrolling display, which
could be incorporated into a program.
Hmmm... Couldn't see it, but there
was practically nothing in the Menu
program I understood anyway. Maybe it
could be pinned down on a "suck-it-and
-see" basis - chucking away bits till
what was left did the job.
After a number of hours footling
around, attacking an old Menu program
in the misguided belief it might be a
bit easier, throwing away chunks,
testing to see if a scrolling file
would still run from it, sometimes
retrieving bits temporarily when it
crashed, I was down to a mere 20 lines
left, from the original 289. Must be
nearly there, though I still couldn't
quite see which bit might be useful.
And now there were just 10 lines
left. Things were starting to look a
bit dodgy. 9, 8, 7, 6. Ah; uhhh; hmm??
5, 4, 3. What's happening? There's
almost nothing left here, but the
files still work.
Turns out this whole exercise was
not a smart idea. In the end the whole
monster program whittled down to just
one character, which isn't actually in
the program: *. The !*?*$#!# files
just RUN. Wish I'd asked first...
It then dawned on me that I had a
disc - CJR-11 - which I'd never looked
at closely, which might help. Sure
enough, there it was - a program which
tacked a mc routine onto a file which
made it a self-contained scrolling
display. Nice to learn these things,
the hard way.
There must be a moral somewhere in
all this, but I haven't the strength
left to figure out what it is.
P.S: Could Steven Flintham, or
somebody, please explain to us mere
mortals what's happening with the
first three lines of recent !BOOT/
Menu files. It's very clever to have a
!BOOT file which can be LOADed/Edited/
SAVEd like a basic program (I've now
stolen this - ta.), but it's very
mysterious.
Also: Is there any way to have the
two-way scrolling text files run with
a fixed info bar at the top and/or the
bottom? Is there any way of changing
CJR-11/DISPMO7 to achieve this?