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 <Q>
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
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 <filename>
then type *FX5,3
This tells the program to use
<filename> 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