From: D9X (RON KILROY) Subject: FOR SALE. 2off MASTER 128's plus H/Book. 2off BBC's, Model B plus H/Book. 3off 40/80 D/sided Disc Drives, powered by the BBC micro. Local delivery or collect, hence price on application. Watford Herts WD2 6PZ ( 01923 678748 ) ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: 15A (Steven Flintham) Subject: Large dictionaries There were one or two mentions of the availability of large dictionaries in issue 59. Although it depends exactly what you want to do with it, having lots of obscure words in isn't always a good thing. If you're tryng to find anagrams or something then it's obviously great, but if you're spellchecking some text the advantage of the extra words has to be weighed against the risk of them hiding a typo. For example, you might mistype: He was as drunk as a lord. as: He was aa drunk ad a lord. (A and D being next to S on the keyboard) and as both 'aa' and 'ad' are words, a more comprehensive dictionary will miss the errors while a 'common words only' dictionary will catch both of them. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: E3B (J R Halliwell) Subject: DISC Drives. Help please I have two sets of d/s d/d's 40/80's Cumana and Pace when connected a Beeb with 8271 or 1770 fdc's they don't work at all if i *info *.* i get "not found"format or verify i get drive fault at 00/00/00. tried new cables and my mates Beeb no joy. on my Master they work perfecly.any help much appreciated. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Econet Station Number In issue 55, Jon mentioned 8 switches on the keyboard setting the Econet station number. The station number switches are actually near the back of the main PCB, about one inch from the Econet socket. (The Master/etc station number is set from CMOS ram, so doesn't need switches.) Also, you shouldn't try to read the station number by reading location &FE18 - what if you're on the Tube, or on a Master? You should - as with all calls - use the provided operating system calls. The station number is returned with: X%=ctrl%:Y%=X%DIV256 !X%=8:A%=&13:CALL &FFF1 =X%?1 ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: ??? (Steve Fenwick) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Anglian Water Steve (in iss 55) said: Anglian Water produced a simulation of a coastal town's water and sewage handling system, has anyone come across this? No, but the Hong Kong Polytechnic Hydrological Studies Department used to model the water and sewage flows through Victoria Harbour with a giant model of the harbour with lots of sensors connected to a network of BBC Masters. When they were persuaded to replace the with PCs (spit!) it took months for people to write software up to the calibre of the BBC stuff they were replacing! ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: HADFS on Master & Compact Yes, PAGE is raised (but only to &1500 if you configure only two i/o channels with *OPT5,2) as the version of HADFS you have is designed to work on ANY machine. I've been tinkering with a Hazel-specific version (Hazel is the high workspace memory) and I'll send it to you as soon as it's stable enough. It's not just as simple as getting the universal version to find what machine it's running on and then set some pointers to point to the other memory, as a lot of operations need to work with at least some absolute memory. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: K6N (Brian Raw) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Beeb/Master incompatabilities Re: 8271/1770 incompatabilites. Well, if you go and play with the hardware, then of course things are going to be different, but you're not supposed to do that. There is a proper OS call (OSword &7F) that you use to read and write directly to disks. It makes no difference what the hardware is - it could be a gramaphone record for all the calling program cares. You ask Osword &7F to read a number of sectors and it worries about what te hardware is. Basic III is basically Basic II, but with the COLOUR token also acceptable as COLOR, and listed as such; it was mainly for the US market. OPENUP is definately there in Basic II - I use it all the time. Maybe what you're thinking about is Basic I. In Basic I there were the following two tokens: OPENOUT &AE - Does OsFind &80 (ie OpenOut) OPENIN &AD - Does OsFind &C0 (ie OpenUp!) In Basic II, token &AD was changed to list as OPENUP, as that's what it does, and a new token was introduced: OPENIN &8E - Does OsFind &40 (ie OpenIn) ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: EMail Address Section: Regular Contacts I now have a functioning email address as: jgh@digibank.demon.co.uk And, may I repeat, my phone number is 0114 281 8708, and not the one with '3's in it. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Diary 1997 disk checking (Again...) Diary doesn't really need to check what format disk is inserted right at the start of the program, just what filing system is in operation: DEFFNfs:LOCAL A%,X%,Y%,E% =(USR&FFDA)AND&FF Returns filing system number, eg 4=dfs, 5=net, 8=adfs, 16=hadfs True, when the program lets you change a disk, that's when it would be useful to check what format it is The following function is also useful: DEFFNfsname(A%)=MID$("HADFS",3-A%DIV8) Giving it a parameter of 4, 8 or 16 will give that filing system's name, so PRINTFNfsname(FNfs) will print the filing system name if it is DFS, ADFS or HADFS. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D6A (Godon Wileman) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Acorn CP/M System Disks I have a full set of Acorn CP/M system disks, I can provide copies to anybody who needs tham, plus some additional extras including a program to allow BBCBASIC(Z80) to run outside CP/M and use normal BBC file i/o. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: 4WL (Martin Wilson) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Modems and BBSs I'm putting together some articles about modems and BBSs to go into the magazine, including some information and programs to make sending internet email just as simple as using the 8bs messaging system. Watch this space! ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: 4WL (Martin Wilson) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Laser Printer not FF-ing From the BBC keyboard, try doing CTRL-B, CTRL-L, CTRL-C. This will send a FormFeed code to the printer and should eject the paper Not an ideal solution, I know, but it works. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: K6N (Brian Raw) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: 3.5" disk drives The drives I have sucessfully used are: Newtronics/MITSUMI D359T5 no DS link, always drive 1 SONY MP-F17W-00 and -01 and -02 selectable 0/1/2/3. I have four of these, one of which died in the humidity of Hong Kong All my computers have a little switch in the lead to swap drive 0 and 1 around. I have a single 5.25" and 3.5" on each machine, so I can select which is drive 0 or 1. On one machine I have a bigger setup with four drives (!) and switches so I can have: Drive A 3.5" Drive B 3.5" Drive B 3.5" Drive B 5.25" Drive A 5.25" Drive B 5.25" Drive A 3.5" Drive B 3" and A and B can be selected to be either drive 0 and 1. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D7Y (Andrew Medworth) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Write protecting Ram Most Roms that will not run in sideways Ram do so because they check whether they are in Ram or not and diable themselves if they are as a form of copy-protection. Some versions of View do this, but my copy of ENIGMA that you mentioned does not. With the Waford Rom/Ram board, there is a bank select latch at &FF30+rom which selects the bank that write operation go to. So, for example, doing: ?&FF3E=0 *LOAD image 8000 would load image to bank 14. So, conversly, to write protect bank 14, just set the write latch to something other than 14, the recommended being: ?&FF38=0 which would set it to bank 8 which is a rom socket. The actual value written is irrelavant. From hardware, link S2 on the left hand side of the board may be removed and replaced with a switch. Then write protecting is just a matter os switching the switch. Hope this is of some help. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D7Y (Andrew Medworth) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Loading to &00000000 Why doesn't Basic complain with Bad program when loading to &00000000? Probably because the machine has crashed before Basic is returned to and gets a chance to look at what's been loaded. Also, the program integrity is only checked whenever a error occurs, a program ends, TOP is asked for (which is done by SAVE), END is done or a LOAD/CHAIN command. Try doing: !PAGE=0 No Bad Program message, but now press Escape. Bad program message appears. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D7Y (Andrew Medworth) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Acorn User Magazine Acorn User is published by IDG media and is available in all good newsagents NOW! price #3.95. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D2G (Niel Parry) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Mag Search Program It's a very good program! Yes, keep on developing it. I used it to track down an article I wrote ages ago and couldn't remember what issue it was in. Wonderful. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: K6N (Brian Raw) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: 3.5" disk drives Brian has successfully added 3.5" drives to his BBC Master and tried them out on his Beeb, and declared: 3.5" drives do not work on a Beeb with an 8271, only with the 1770 interface. Not quite true. I have been using 3.5" drives on my Beeb since about 1989. What is more correct to say is that DFS up to 1.20 (ie, the firmware, not the hardware) does not wait long enough for the drives to come up to speed, and so keeps dropping out with Disk Error 10 (Drive Not Ready). It's actuallyt fairly simple to dig around in the DFS and modify the disk access loops to get it to ignore Error 10. This is exactly what HADFS does. If people contact me I can send them a program that will create a rom image of a modified DFS 1.20 ready for blowing into an EPROM. As for using HD disks as DD disks - don't! You'll ruin them in the long term (long meaning after a couple of uses). Back in issue 40 (I think) I wrote an article about different disk recording formats. I've repeated it here for further perusal. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Basic 3 and USA Beeb Jon said: ...Basic 3 had to cope with US screen modes being only 25 lines deep... No, that's nothing to do with Basic, that the OS. The Basic doesn't care whether the screen is 1 line deep or a million, it just sends commands to the OS and lets it sort it out. Let me quote the BBCBasic version changes application note: "BBC Basic 3 (C)1983 Acorn This version of BASIC was produced for the US version of the BBC Micro. A few minor changes were introduced over Basic 2. The HiBasic distributed with the 6502 second processor is a relocated version of Basic 3. The changes from Basic 2 are: 1: The interpreter accepts COLOR for COLOUR. The detokeniser spells the word as COLOUR. An American version of the Basic is available that lists the word as COLOR. This is the only difference between the versions. 2: SAVE n$+m$ now works. 3: The use of ? and ! as formal parameters works correctly. 4: Random number generator re-coded for speed. Point 3 means that something like DEFPROCname(!&F2,?&F4) works properly ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ReplyTo: K1D (Ken Davison) From: K8G (Jonathan Harston) Subject: Star Printer Codes I've enclosed on here a complete listing of all EPSON-type printer codes. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,