USE CURSOR KEYS TO SCROLL TEXT. USE CURSOR KEYS TO SCROLL TEXT. 8 Bit HELP! MESSAGES HELP! MESSAGES From: John Battersby To: All Subject: Wanted Exmon II Version 2.06 On Rom or a Rom image would do. Please contact: J.Battersby. 107 Richmond Terrace, Darwen, Lancashire, BB3 0HE Tel. 01254 775101 From: Chris Richardson To: All and D.Ambrose Subject: Data Pointer Douglas was working on a program and he wanted to know where the DATA pointer was held in memory. He wanted to be able to find at exactly what point in a program the DATA pointer was so that he could return to it at a later date. The problem was easily solved with a different approach. However, the question was niggling at me. Where is the DATA pointer stored? I asked this of Stephan Richardson who looked it up in "The Basic Rom User Guide". So, ?&1C+?&1D*256 will give you the address in memory of the next location to be read in by the instruction READ. Can anyone find a use for this? ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: 0E7 (Fred Nevin) Subject: Message System V.2.0 I have a problem with the latest version of the Messaging System. With V.1.8 I had a simple !Boot File to CHAIN 'SendMes'to Boot up the disc This does not work with V.2.0 The Boot File CHAINS 'SendMes' which commences the Menu but when it attempts to CHAIN 'SendMCC' I get a faulty channel message.Why is this. I assume it is obviously something I should know but it'ESCAPE's me. To overcome the problem I have had to make a !BOOT File to LOAD 'SendMes' and to press a function key to 'RUN' the program. This appears to work OK. Can anyone say WHY? please. Thank you in anticipation. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To : All From : D2P Bob Chown Subject : Help CAN ANYONE HELP ME OUT WITH EITHER MANUALS OR PHOTO COPIES OR ANY OTHER INFORMATION ON THE FOLLOWING: VIGLEN WINCHESTER HARD DISK, MODEL VPD 0300, 28M MS. ACORN CO-PROCESSOR 6502 ISSUE 2. ( FITTED IN A MASTER 128 ) SEIKOSHA MP-1300AI COLOUR PRINTER. ANY HELP WITH ANY OF THESE WILL BE MUCH APPRECIATED. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: D2C (Andy Burgess) Subject: Wanted - ViewSheet Manual Can anyone help with the loan or sale of a Viewsheet manual. I have acquired a ROM, but no documentation. All expenses paid as usual. Please ring:0117 9575168 after 6pm. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K4V (Trevor Crapper) Subject: View Professional Part 4 Hopefully you will have used the printer driver program in Part 3 and have got yourself a printer driver ready for use. In this part I want to prepare you for writing a simple no frills letter. In the first place you will now have to run the main View Professional program before we can make a start. Read back through the early parts if you have forgotten how do this. Having got VP up and running, take a look at the screen. At the top is a line of letters and dots, the total count comes to 72. So your letter will have a width of 72 characters. Normal paper allows a width of 80 characters. So there is going to be a space of 8 characters. Just bear with me for a moment please, because I want to make a point here. Without altering anything and simply writing and printing a letter results in the first letter of each line starting on the extreme left hand side of the page without a gap. If this style of writing suits you, then leave things as they are. Now for those of you who want a margin on the left hand side of the page please follow my instructions. With View Professional on the screen press the ESCAPE key, this will take you out of the writing screen to the Options Page. Take a good look at the page. However, there is no need to try and remember anything. Using the arrow keys move the flashing cursor to where it says Margins: Top 8 and move the cursor onto the number 8. Now press the 0 key, and notice this changes the number 8 to 0. Go down using the arrow key and change each number to 0. Except where it says Left. Now you can either change the number to 4 or 5, the choice is yours. Now press the ESCAPE key again and you will be taken out of the Options Page and back to the writing screen. Nothing will have altered on the screen, it is just as you left it. Before typing in your simple no frills letter there is one more thing to learn. This part is important and it affects everyone. In order to carry out the functions of loading, saving and printing, plus almost everything else you may need to do, you will have to press one key. This key is the back slash key which is to the left of the left arrow key just below the BREAK key. This key is used together with single letters or a combination of letters to carry out most of the functions used by VP. These including printing, loading and saving files. Plus a lot more besides. Did you program yourself a printer driver? Doesn't matter if you didn't provided your printer can use Epson print codes. The back slash key is used in conjunction with the letter H and a number between 1 to 8. This will enable you to input changes so that fonts and styles can be altered. Providing you can remember what code is represented by the numbers! However, for the time being we will only use the back slash key to save, load and print your letter. Keeping things simple for the moment. Finally remember Chris Richardson sells VP and it is a very handy package. Bye for now. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: D4H (Paul Smith) Subject: New member Hi all, Just thought I would introduce myself. I have just started to get back into BBC computing after a few years on PCs and I am enjoying it all once more. I have 2 working computers and 1 not working at present. I only have 1 monitor so I have to make do with the TV for the other computer. My interests in the Beeb are: a) Some programming. Fairly basic (pun intended) stuff but its fun. b) Wordprocessing with Wordwise Plus writing letters, notices, etc. c) I am interested in getting some useful educational stuff for the 7-11 age group. If anyone can help reply via Messaging System please. d) I require a simple ASCII file editor. Perhaps there is one in the 8BS catalogue but I have not looked all the way through that yet. e) One of my computers came fitted with the Replay system. Unfortunately it didn't come with any information. Can anyone help please ? f) I do use my computers for games (surprise, surprise) and I am looking for a REPTON 3 disc. Can any one help please ? Thanks in advance to anyone offering help. Regards. Paul. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K3H (ALBERT SCHOFIELD) Subject: TAPE TO DISC ON THE BBC B Last month I dealt with a game which would not work unless a character was poked into the locked program byte. This month I will deal with the game EAGLE'S WING which needs to have four characters poked into the four spare bytes immediately following the locked program byte. The four characters are DDH. (including the full stop). To PEEK at these locations, first catalogue a few blocks of any part of the game, press escape and type PRINT$&3CB. The characters DDH. will be shown. Typing PRINT ~!&3CB will show the hex equivalent in reverse order which is as they should appear in the necessary poke. So to transfer the game to disc a short loader program will be needed as follows:- 10 !&3CB=&2E484444 20 CHAIN"EAGLE" Save this to disc as LOADER. Load in the first part of the game, which is Eagle-Wing, using *LOAD""1900. This section is part basic so list it and copy line 10 and then list it again. The hidden line 15 can now be seen. Copy line 15 to eliminate the REM but leave the colon. Delete line 20. Copy line 40 and alter the last statement to:- *L. 1.EAGLE Add line 50PRINT'"PRESS"'"SPACE"GET$ Add line 60CALL&753E It is essential to do these alterations exactly as shown to maintain the same length of the basic which is &AB. Otherwise the screen may be corrupted. Save it to disc using:- *SAVE EAGLE 1900+600 8023. The second part, which is 1.EAGLE, is locked so it will have to be loaded at &1900 using a locked file utility. Save it to disc using:- *SAVE 1.EAGLE 1900+600 753E 7000 The last part, which is 2.EAGLE? is a bit tricky. It is locked and also, as the ? shows, the filename contains a control code. This control code is different in every block so it is in effect a changing filename. So type *TAPE and then enter *OPT2,0 to force it to load and load it in at &1900 using a locked file utility. Ignore the File? messages. Then save it to disc using:- *SAVE 2.EAGLE 1900+2C00 3200 1200 By chaining LOADER the game should now run. More next month. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K6L (Richard Chamberlain) Subject: View Professional Can anyone help me with the above package? I obtained the TBI-74 disk from 8BS many moons ago, looked at it briefly, but never did much with it till recently. My PC's monitor packing up prompted me to have a look through my Master 128 software for a PC type wordprocessing package. (Only till the monitors repaired) I came across View Professional and decided to give it a more thorough going over. I was a little amazed at its supposed capabilities, PIPEDREAM compatibility and all! Anyway, I managed to load in and use the 4 main rom images, but I fell foul of one or two of the other files/utilities. In particular PDE, a printer driver text file editor. It seems to be another rom image (I could be wrong) but when I load it in, initialise it, and then subsequently try to use it my machine locks up. I now know I was wrong! Having read Trevor Crappers mini tutorial on VP, I realised it dealt with the topic of this message! Isn't life wonderful! Anyway I discovered that I needed to change modes to MODE 128. As you need to to run VP, and low and behold, up pops the Printer driver text editor! I will now go through the other disks I have just received and look for more from the redoubtable TC! Also, having decided to persevere, I had another look at the other software, ViewVP etc and found them to be nothing more than basic programs! I would though like to hear of any manuals for this software! Whilst preparing this message though I discovered a problem that effects the messaging system while VP is loaded into sideways ram. The ESCAPE key doesn't work at all! So it's impossible to SAVE a message. I had to switch off the computer, then reload the messaging software, and then retype the info again. Another problem I found was VP interacts adversly with *executable files that contain Control Codes making them inoperable. To see this in action, if you have VP loaded, try !booting an 8BS disk. No double height coloured text! I discovered this as I was working out how to create coloured text and double height characters in a !boot file. I still had VP loaded and wondered why suddenly the text generated no longer appeared coloured and double height! It took me ages to realise it was VP acting in a subversive manner!! Now heres the crunch. Can anyone explain to me why VP does the dirty in these two ways?? ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Comms, etc Reply to:K4E (Richard Walker) Internet, WWW,etc... These can all be accessed by the trusty Beeb, the only problem is software. 'Traditional' BBSs were either Viewdata or Scrolling that is, looking like MODE 7 or MODE 3 text. All you needed was a modem connected to you serial port and a few lines of code that send your keyboard input down the phone line and displayed whatever came back. Electronic mail was one of the most useful things most BBSs gave you access to. The Internet can be thought of most easily as a network connecting host computers together, so that if you called into one, you could EMail to a user on another computer host. What has happened recently is that somebody realised that the Mac Hypertext display program could be set to read from a device file for the displayed pages, and that this device file could be the modem COM: port. Once this was realised,then large graphcally-orientated screens could easly be sent around, as the protocols were already loosely defined. This is also the reason most Web sites start with http: (HyperText Transmission Protocol) and end with .html (HyperTextMarkup Language). For Beebs to access Web sites, someone needs to write an HTML displayer for the Beeb. This is possible, but I am finding it difficult to get hold of the neccessary information without forking out 40 or 50 quid apiece for several books that I don't yet know if they will be the right ones. Most book on the subject are for users, not software writers. Anyway... I'm currently writing a clearer article on this slightly foggy subject which I hope Chris will put in later issue. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: DIRing ADFS disks Acorn DOS disks and Acorn ADFS 640 disks are both identically formatted: 16 sectors per track, 256 bytes per sector. So, if DOS reads sectors 2/3/4/5 to look for the DOS catalogue and an ADFS disk is in the drive, it will read whatever is on it. DOS doesn't do much checking to validate disks and directories, so you get DOS trying to display the data it has found as filename entries. If you tried to do an ADFS CAT on a DOS disk, you will get a catalogue containing a single file which contains the DOS partition that fills the whole of the rest of the disk. Acorn DOS 800k disks are formatted like ADFS/D 800k disks that the Arch. can use. (And theoretically, so can the Master if someone writes an ADFS/D filing system). ADFS/D is 512 bps, 10 spt. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: CLOSE_0 bug This is fairly easy to work around. Write your program something like this: Initialisation: in%=0:out%=0 Error handling: DEFPROCerr : : IFin%:A%=in%:in%=0:CLOSE_A% IFout%:A%=out%:out%=0:CLOSE_A% : : ENDPROC File handling: in%=OPENIN(file$) : process : CLOSE_in%:in%=0 : : out%=OPENOUT(file$) : process : CLOSE_out%:out%=0 Basically, define all the variables you will use as file handles before you use them and set them to zero. In your error handling routine, check if they are non-zero, and close them, using a temporary variable, so that if the CLOSE causes an error, it won't be tried again. Every time you close a channel, set the variable back to zero. This will work a treat and solve most problems. The only hard bit is remembering to do CLOSE_var:var=0 instead of just CLOSE_var. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: D4U (Dave Gray) Subject: Help/Info wanted Can anyone help with a Welcome Disc for the Master 128 ,instructions or help with a Viglen 29mb hard drive , and Acorn hard drive. Ive been given both and I'm not sure how to connect and run them. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, To: 999 (all members) From: D4A (Paul Richmond) Subject: Clogger & Sidwayes RAM I have just formatted my sons favourite game,it was a free Xmas gift from Micro User in 1988,the game is called Clogger. I wonder if anyone would have a copy? I would be more than happy to pay all expenses! I want to talk to my son again!! My other problem is with sideways RAM. I have a B.B.C."B" with a Watford Electronics Rom board,with two 6264 chips.Included with the computer was some discs with Roms recorded on them, I have a switch on the back that connects to E to A. I have tried *LOAD""8000, BREAK, the drive turns for a few seconds and then stops. When I *H. the Rom is not listed. I have tried the switch in both positions with the same result.I also have a Master 128 on which the discs work O.K. What am I doing wrong? My address is, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, PRESS SPACE PRESS SPACE