Apple 2000 Vol 4 No. 3 1989 06 BASUG GB

THE NATIONAL APPLE USERS GROUP ple20004 JUNE 1989 VOLUME 4(3) uggs) L gf = Khe torshiptul Company of Meredant Taylors of the City of f L £ SCSI INTERFACE CARD The Cirtech SCSI Interface is a standard slot card for the Apple lIGS, //e or 64K II, which lets you use an SCSI hard disk with ProDOS, DOS 3.3, Pascal and CP/M based programs. ~ ™@ Extends ProDos 8 to let you use up to two hard disks of 128 Megabytes each! 1 Partitioning of your hard disks for up to four different operating systems is easy with the unique software support NETWORKING — The SCSI Interface can also be used in conjunction with the Cirtech Multi-User Network System software which allows several computers to simultaneously share and partition SCSI hard disks. The leading SCSI Interface at only £54.00 aay Se ee ( PLUSDISK SC PlusDisk SC is a brand new concept in storage media. Use it just like a normal disk drive BUT a drive with the outright speed of a RAMdisk combined with the safe storage of a hard disk — in fact, the very best of both worlds! With no mechanical or moving parts, PlusDisk SC gives electronic performance, in total silence! PlusDisk SC uses special low-power memory which js easily user expandable. It comes complete with its own power source and cable to connect directly ‘onto the back of your Mac Plus, SE or Il; or, via a Cirtech SCSI Interface Card, to your Apple IGS, //e or Il, Sa CHAMPION PLUS INTERFACE CARDS Champion Plus cards are the most versatile Interface cards available for the Apple Il, //e or IIGS, combining serial (RS232) and parallel (Centronics) Interfaces, together with 100% Apple Super Serial Card & Parallel Printer Card compatibility. ®@ Champion Plus Dual (SSC/Champion) Serial and/or parallel output. providing all the features of Super Serial Card mode and Champion Card mode. £78.00 Champion Plus Dual (SSC/PPC) Serial and/or parallel output, providing all the features of Super Serial Card mode & Parallel Printer Interface mode. ie Champion Plus Serial (SSC/Champion) Serial only output, providing Super Serial Card features and Champion card features in serial output. 100% slot-in replacement for Apple Super Serial Card V aS Va The new generation in storage technology from only £348.00 we Ms PlusRAM-16 plusRAM-16 is a standard slot RAMcard for your Apple Il, //e or IGS which instantly gives you one extra Megabyte of memory and can easily be user expanded to FOUR and, ultimately, SIXTEEN Megabytes! @ Supported by more software than any other RAMcard — ProDOS, CP/M, Pascal and DOS 3.3 @ Programs operate at electronic speeds! Desktop expansion and a whole range of enhancements far AppleWorks Supplied with unique RamDesk Manager software to divide the huge memory into separate disks and change instantly between them. The best value standard slot RAMcard ONE MEGABYTE far only £229.00 PlusDISK PlusDisk is the only plug-in card for your Apple Il, //e or IGS which operates with the lightning speed of a RAMcard AND keeps its contents safe for months, even when there's no power to your Apple! Using special, low-power memory, PlusDISK safely stores any standard Apple operating system or program (ProDOS, Pascal, CP/M or DOS3.3) ready for instant start-up whenever you switch on your Apple. The partitioning software supplied also lets you divide your PlusDISK to create separate areas for different operating systems. PlusDisk is easily expandable right up to One Megabyte. The back-up power source is contained on the card — there are no bulky external power supplies or batteries! Ultimate speed from only £128.00 ee PlusRAM-GS8 .. . he special RAMcard for the Apple IGS memory t expansion slot and the only single card to expand from ONE up to EIGHT Megabytes. Use the superfast extra memory as a RAMdisk or directly {or both}! plusRAM-GSB is fully compatible with all IGS software like AppleWorks, and ProDOS, DOS3.3, CP/M and Pascal 1.3 programs. Add a PROMDisk or ROMDisk Adaptor to your plusRAM.GSS8 to give up to 256K battery backed- up static RAM or 512K ROM. This lets you boot your favourite program instantly from the Adaptor as soon as your GS is switched on! plusRAM-GS8 — 1 Megabyte for only £249.00 Selkirkshire, TD1 2BP, Scotland Telex: 9312130256 (CI G) CIRTECH (UK) trd 1989. Apple t+ CIRTECH (UK) LTD, Currie Road Industrial Estate, GALASHIELS Telephone: (0896) 57790 Mailboxes: 84:CPDOO1 (Telecom Gold) AAHS555 (Source) 1@. IGS. AppleWorks, DOS3.3, ProDOS, are registered trademarks of Apole Commuter Inc. CP/M is a registered trademark of Digital Research Inc Apple2000 The All Apple User Group Committed to All Apple Users including Macintosh June 1989 Apple2000. CONTENTS 4k STOP PRESS - Apple/Mac 89 - See Page 33 ek Chairman's Corner Ewen Wannop 2 Letter Box 3 C - the language Dave Miller 8 Controlling the Real World Bill Hill 12 Hardcore Pips John Sharp 16 DB Master - a review T.O, balisty 18 The Graphic Exchange - a review Peter Stark 20 Print Magic - a review Peter Stark 21 A tale of Eve and that Watchmaker Mike Tickle 22 Deepspace - a review Rober t Hornby 22 Rocket Chip - a review Dave Ward 24 Marble Madness - a review Richard Bradley 27 TransWarp GS - a review Ewen Wannop 28 Cool It! - a review Dave Ward 30 Amnesia - a review Dave Ward 32 Hot Line News Dave Ward 32 Apple/Mac 89 33 Applied Apple Spreadsheeting P F McMullin 34 SoftCat Corner Jon Gurr 37 The Nibbler 38 MacChat Norah Arnold 42 AnonWare MacLibrary 43 Nisus - a review Geoff Wood 44 PostScript Fonts from the UK Irene Flaxman 49 Apple and the Desktop Publishing Market _Irene Flaxman 49 Koala Source Book of Macintosh Software 49 The Care and Feeding of your Laser Printer Walter Vose Jeffries 50 N-Font MacLibrary 54 Learn Persuasion Irene Flaxman 55 Heraldry Ill John Armold 57 Network News 60 CheapColor MacLibi 64 TN # 227 Toolbox Karma ape 66 TN # 230 Macintosh SE/30 67 Club Business - AGM Minutes 70 Programmer's Online Companion - Mac John Arnold 73 MacLibrary 76 Local groups 78 Members’ Small Ads. 80 Advertisers’ Index 80 There are a number of ways to contact Apple2000. Force users who have a query about the service can contact the adminis- trator, John Lee, directly for help and advice. Call him on the number opposite or send a message to his box on the Force. Ifyou wish to order goods or services from Apple2000, call Irene on (fll Sia 4s or (during office hours) call Alison on 0732-740415. Both have Ansafones, in case they're not around. Alternatively you can Fax, to (limi) elie) iiiF write to the PO Box or (if you use comms) you can leave orders on TABBS addressed to the SYSOP, If you are experiencing problems with Apple hardware or software Dave Ward and Tony Dart run the Hotlines and will try and help you. We are very interested in the activities of local user groups, and if you have any information which you would like publicised John Lee would like to hear from you. Moans and Groans - We don't get many of these, but the Editors have broad shoulders, so send these to them via the PO Box. A little praise for a few of our authors wouldn't go amiss. Send all comments, and contributions, via the PO box, especially suggestions about what you would like to see in your magazine. Apple2000 P.O.Box 3, Liverpool, 121 8PY Fax. @81 S29 Ga? Fe rea supports users all the Apple computers. The ITT 2020, I, II, I+, //e, //e. //c+. Tgs. ///, Lisa, XL, Mac 128, 512 MacPlus, SE, SE/30, Mac Il, IIcx and Ikx Contributions and articles for the pe te are always welcome. We can handle any disk size or format. Please send to the PO Box, L21 8PY. NOTE: In general the front half of the magazine is for the Apple ll, Apple ligs and Apple /// The back half for the Macin- tosh and Lisa. Look out for the descriptive page icons. Key: Apple Il, //e and //c a Apple /// zat Apple llgs B Macintosh, Lisa =) Mi NC lacintosh II a) Contact Points The Force and Local Groups John Lee Voice GiiRi meaizili Administration Irene Flaxman (hl Sm wi ee eek CD Soe Oy NIT Adverts / Admin. Alison Davies Apple Il Hotline lave Ward (QED FRE Se Mon-Fri 1900-2100 Macintosh Hotline Tony Dart (GHbSee SteeRiD Mon-Fri 0900-17.00 1900-2100 June 1989 Apple2000 Chairman's Corner May I start by making some com- ments on behalf of the production team at Apple2000, and espe- cially the hard worked editors. We produce the magazine in our spare time. We need help from you the members to make all this possible. Please help by contrib- uting articles and reviews on any relevant subject. We receive many letters for the magazine, very few of these are submitted on disk however. We try to answer them all in due course and often we would like to answer the problems before the next magazine arrives. The sheer vol- ume of these letters, and the need for considered replies, means there may well be some time be- fore you see your reply. We apolo- gise to those who have waited some time. We are not able with the present level of expert help on the editorial team to improve on this time delay. Please send letters if at all pos- sible on disk, this saves many hours of typing. Our team of typ- ists are not able practically to help with typing these letters and their replies. Another apology is need as well. Many of you have contributed material for the magazine. There is simply not enough room to publish it all. It may be some time till you see your article published. Please support the advertisers in the magazine, and let them know that you saw their adver- tisement. We balance on a thin edge of making the magazine as we want. and getting sufficient advertising to make it work. Ad- vertisers will not come back to us ifthey get no response. The maga- zine will only suffer in the end if this happens. We shall be continuing our pol- icy over the next year of trying to improve the standard and content ofthe magazine. I have mentioned this already in Apple Slices, but it does not come amiss to repeat this now. We hold a unique position in the market place, we must build on that strength. You can help us do that. Submit articles for the magazine. and tell us what you would like to see. I hope that we shall see a com- mitment from Apple UK over the coming months to support the end user. We all too often feel that allthey are doing is 'shift boxes’. It would be nice to see them plough back some of those profits and help the User who has bought their machines, and who might even buy another one in time! Finally welcome to you all as your new Chairman. I hope we canmake 1989 agreat year for the Apple Computer user. Ewen Wannop é Ring TABBS on (( \ Ring John Lee on (fii (- Apple2000 brings you two exclusive systems that will give you all you ever should need in modern communications and messaging. National and International messages, Telex, Software Downloading, Contacts, Problem Solving, Special Interest Groups, Teleshopping, Databases, Telecom Gold and a host of features tailored for Apple2000 members S)/7AIPI at any speed through V21 to V22bis 8N1. TABBS is available 24 hours a day ) MiAe|| for details of The FORCE. >) (7- The contents of this journal are copyright of BASUG Ltd and/or the respective authors. Permission is granted for non- commercial reproduction providing the author and source are properly credited and a copy of the relevant journal is sent. The opinions and views expressed are those of the vari- ous contributors, and are not necessarily supported by BASUG Ltd. This journal is published bi-monthly by BASUG Ltd as a benefit of membership in February, April, June, August, October and December. The copy date is the 5th day of the month preceding publication. Advertising rates are available on request. Apple™ and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Computer Inc. Macintosh™ is a trademark of Macintosh Laboratory Inc and used with the express permission of the owner. Telecom Gold™ is a trademark of British Telecom ple, The FORCE™ and Apple2000™ are trademarks of BASUG tare : \) Annual subscription rates are £25.00 for UK residents, The Editorial team is: £30.00 for E.E.C. idents and £35.00 for other overseas iembers as a Apple II Macintosh Apple2000™ is a trading name of BASUG Ltd, a non- Ewen Wannop Norah Armold profit making independent company limited by guarantee. Irene Flaxman Many thanks to all those who work behind the scenes and who receive no personal credit. These people are the stalwarts of Apple2000. Additional thanks to Walter Lewis of Old Roan Press (051-227-4818) for our printing service, and to Ian Sharp of Sharp Studios (051-227-2788) for our cover design. (Graphics for the cover design supplied by Apple Computer UK Ltd, Adobe Systems Inc., Cricket Software.) Apple2000 are Founder Members and Whole- hearted Supporters of the Apple User Group Council ) 2 Apple2000 June 1989 GENERAL LETTERBOX Norbury London Dear Editor, I would like to say how much I agree with the sentiments expressed by John Stanier, in the Feb issue of Apple2000, regarding Apple's atti- tude to the British user. Recent re- ports of their heavy-handed attempts to stop dealers purchasing directly from the US also serve to re-inforce the image of Apple as not caring for the UK market. Any retailer should be able toobtain his stocks from any legal source in any country of the world and sell them anywhere else, provided they meet the necessary safety standards forthe country in which they are sold. Nei- ther manufacturers nor wholesalers should be allowed to refuse to supply, nor to refuse to trade terms and dis- counts, just because the dealer is ‘for- eign’ or doesn't hold some sort of ‘ap- oval’ from the manufacturer. Simi- larly a seller should be allowed to set his own prices and should not be penalised if he chooses to trim his is and lower prices. It is, of course, quite legitimate for manufacturers to ‘approve’ suppliers for the purposes of carrying out war- ranty repairs or to raise their profile with the public, but such suppliers should not be given more favourable purchasing terms solely on account of such ‘approval’; nor should the ‘approval’ be condittonal upon sup- plies only from designated sources. Purchasers should be entitled to the full support of the manufacturer's warranty in any country of the world without regard to the source of the oe Naturally, goods sourced from foreign countries might not be fully compatible with local custom and practice, but that is a separate prob- Jem between purchaser and retailer. As evreyone knows, even products from ‘approved’ suppliers far too often ignore UK requirements for & signs instead of $ and for dates in the dd/ mm/yy format. The attitude of Apple Computer and others towards ‘unapproved’ retailers is an unwarranted interference in. and restraint of, trade and it is about time that our Government and the European Commision took a firm stance to outlaw this sort of discrimi- natory behaviour. CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT 1987 lam sure that many readers will be pleased to know that the Consumer Protection Act, which recently came into force, makes it a criminal offence to give consumers a misleading price indication about goods, ete other than for business use. A consequence of the Act, and a code of practice made under it, is that advertising to consumers must now quote VAT inclusive prices and must not hide non-optional extras, like P&P, away in illegible type some- where, nor so word things that the consumer cannot easily and simply work out exactly what total sum of money he will have to pay to acquire the goods he wants. Since Apple2000 is clearly a ‘con- sumer’ mazagine. I hope that Apple2000 will refuse any advertise- ment which doesn’t comply with the DTI's “Code of Practice for Traders on Price Indications” and also ensure that any prices quoted in editorial matter (eg in Reviews and news of New Products) include VAT. Vernon Quaintance Q The problem of restricted practice from Apple Computer is an old one. AppleCentres seem to be able to quote prices that often are less than normal dealers pay to purchase from Apple direct. There are even rumours that Apple UK will cease to supply anyone other than AppleCentres in the near future. We will endeavour to see that we keep to the Consumer Protection guidelines, We shall ask all advertis- ers to conform as well. However most of their business is supplying bust- ness customers who are unaccus- tomed to thinking of VAT in the prices they pay. Editor oe MACINTOSH LETTERBOX Harpenden Herts Dear Editor, In connection with my letter toyou, I saw an article which appeared today in The Independant. Its author refers at one point to writing from right to left mare claims that it presents no major problem. He must be right of course, I have now found that on your Public Domain disk No 015 the He- brew fonts have a DA device which reverses the order of printing but it does not work with other fonts. I hope that either you or one of your readers will be able to advise me how to change the direction of printing for Arabic fonts. Bogumil W Andrzejewski @e@ APPLE II LETTERBOX iDipaevatipasi Read) Ut) (Lr eBtBn010) Weipessibpeeticre: West Germany Dear Irene, Thank you very much for your friendly reply to my letter, and the sample magazine you sent me. I would like to become a member of Apple 2000 and am enclosing my completed application form. Some comments about the letter from Margaret Audin in Paris (Octo- ber 1988): I bought Multiscribe just before I heard that the Claris Corporation had taken over StyleWare Inc. I sent offmy registration cardandat thesame time ordered a backup disc. This arrived safely some time later. In January. | read an article in Nibble magazine about AppleWorks GS, which stated an upgrade to AppleWorks from Multiscribe was possible for the GS, so I wrote to Claris to ask if this parade ‘was also possible for the //e. So far have had no reply whatsoever, although as I only sent the letter two months ago this may just mean that they are taking their time, and not necessarily that they don't care about Apple //e users either. I had some old AppleWriter files which I converted to ProDOS using Copy II Plus. It was then possible to open the files from within Multiscribe and convert them to Multiscribe files. I didn't lose any data, but a certain amount of reworking was necessary. However, if Multiscribe files can be recognized by AppleWorks (I assume this Pa ih then iene tis upgrade possibilty), then may is en Be MORRIE for Margaret Please submit all letters and articles to the magazine on disk wher- ever possible. The disks will be returned to you when the magazine is published. If you have a modem, send us letters, articles and Public Domain programs either to BSG005 or to TABBS (RBH FARTS, June 1989 Apple2000 @BBeemM 3 Audin's work. 1 also have The Print Shop, which I thought was very good, and I used ita lot until the end of last summer when I bought a copy of Print Magic, from Epyx, which is even better! However, neither of them can cope with foreign languages, and I don’t know how to make them either. If! want to write to my German friends I have two choices: I can write the special Ger- man characters out in full, i.e. instead of a, 6, Q oHr §, I write ae, oe, ue or ss. Although this is acceptable in Ger- many, it makes the text difficult to read and it looks messy. Or I can use a modified font for Multiscribe that I have made myself based on Wordsworth font number 3. If | am sending a birthday card or a short note I usually write it in English as most of my German friends can understand English anyway, but this is hardly a solution to the problem! like Multiscribe a lot, but I find it rather slow sometimes and I have to be careful that I don't get words with letters missing because I have typed too fast. Two things I miss about Multiscribe are a hyphenation func- tion and a hard spate (to hold things together that shouldn't really separated, ¢.g. 120 kg or Mr Smith). If anyone has any advice or hints about using Multiscribe I'd be very pleased to hear them. Tam looking forward to the arrival of the next Apple 2000 magazine. June Baker Sevenoaks Kent Dear Editor, Doyou know if there is a driver todo graphics dumps to my Centronics 739 from the //e. ¢ Tickle Q There are various problems related to making graphic dumps on the Apple Il. First of all the printer must be capable of Delo acarented with 8- bit data that will be sent straight to the print head, this rules out all but dot matrix printers. Secondly, the printer card must be able to pass 8-bit data when requested. Thirdly you need a routine that can dump the screen data in the format the printer wants. No two printers are the same in my experience, and most programe ex- pect the ImageWriter to be at the receiving end. Apart from writing a custom driver, probably the best thing you will be able to do is to first dump the screen to disk. Then output this picture us- ing a suitable program. Try Timeout Triple Dump or Printo- grapher, both these will dump Apple Il graphics to printers. Perhaps someone else has a better solution? The Boffin a Multilingual Services 22 Charing Cross Road London Dear Michael Corgan, As a recent subscriber to Apple2000 I was intrigued to come across your letter in the October is- suc. We have four //e Apples here, with varying amounts of AE RamWorks memory. and we use AppleWorks, v. 1,3, together with AutoWorks. At some stage we shall need to get a couple of more machines so your experience with the GS and Au- toWorks is a timely warning. I'ma bit late off the mark and I don't know whether I can be of any help to you, or any other business users who may have contacted you. After all, it would seem that you are the nized ploneer with your GS venture while I have stuck prosaically to what we have found to work extremely well, namely //e + RamWorks + Apple- Works + AutoWorks. This is not tosay that I have no problems at all: firstly, I find the AppleWorks printing instal- lation woe! ily inadequate as it won't allow me to get all the (to us) essential accents and continental characters on the diasy wheel of my Olivetti inter- faced typewriters; secondly I find ita damned nuisance having to reboot every time | have to send a telex via Telecom Gold (despite noble assis- tance from Steve Morrisby of Bidmuthin I am still unable to load both AppleWorks 1.3 and the Access Il comms. program into RAM). If you think I can be of any help in any respect don't hesitate to get in touch. George Knapp Q We reprint George’s letter to Michael Corgan with his permission. Barbican London Dear Sirs, I have had a Brother HR- 15 Printer for some years and it has given rell- able service and required only one repair. lam reluctant to replace it, for the present anyway. It Serves as a printer for an Apple / /e computer and is serially connected thus, the cable being provided by the dealer who has since gone out of business: Printer Computer Pin 1 Pin 1 2 2 3 3 4 20 5 5 6 6 7 kA 8 8 20 4 This configuration successfully from AppleWriter Il (DOS 3.3), Quick- file II (Pascal 1.1) and Microsoft Multi- plan (Version 106, DOS 3.3) -via an Interface Model 7710 of California Computer Systems set at 9600 Baud. I have recently purchased Apple- Works marketed by Claris which is ProDOS based, and am unable to successfully print using the above configuration. I do not get a garbage output, but there is no line rationali- sation and the format has random line lengths. Also each printout is preceded two lines earlier by all of part of the Control Code AppleWorks asks for configuring for a “Custom Printer” ie one which is not already listed in the programme. Can you help? It has been sug- gested ta new interface card may be required and/or (b) the connection should be changed to parallel. In that case can you p indicate the pin connections in a listing similar to that above. Further, will I still be able to print the original three programmes after the change? Any help or advice would be much appreciated. WP Goss Q First of all apologies for taking so long to print your letter. Your CCS7710 card is a serial card. You have been using it this way with a serial connection to your printer, a parallel interface which is something quite different, would not in fact work with your printer at all. The problem lies elsewhere. The CCS card normally issues a <CR> after 255 characters. | suspect that AppleWorks may be thinking that the printer is operating quite differently, and is sending line lengths that are triggering off the ragged line ends. A further clue may be in that you see part of the printer initialising string on each printout. I suggest re- configuration of the printer in Apple- Works. There should be no control characters sent except for any men- tioned in the Brother manual. Make sure the platen width matches that of the printer. From the <OA>0 configu- ration menu, make sure the charac- ters per inch again matches that of the printer as AppleWorks normally expects an ImageWriter which can print many different widths, If none of this works, please give Dave Ward a ring on the Hotline. He may be able to help further. The Boffin South Croydon London Dear Ewen, Congratulations on the “Hardcode Pips”. | bought my //e when others were buying Lisa and I missed a lot of the early ‘Pips' which the veterans may know about. I didn’t know about BASUG those days and relied on ‘Apple User’ magazine. Some more would be welcome. Michael Bass 4 @8 Apple2000 June 1989 Q We intend “Hardcore Pips” to be a regular feature. Many of our newer members are new themselves to the Apple II. Ed. e Cheltenham Gloucestershire Dear Dave, In response to your plea for Apple }[ repairers in Hotline News, the o1 possibility I know of besides those who advertise in Apple2000 is ESCO Compuer Systems of 115 Burring- ham Road, Scunthorpe, South Hum- berside DN17 2DF, phone 0724- 855795. I have found the proprietor, Eric Sausse, most helpful, knowledgeable and sensible. His prices are reason- able too. He readily admits he is not an electronics expert and if he thinks a solution is beyond his capabilities he says so. If he thinks it is better to throw something away and replace it he recommends this. With prices where they are it is often cheaper todo this. On several occasions he has made suggestions which have en- abled me to solve the problem myself. He seems to have a pretty good supply of manuals at reasonable prices too, and generally his prices for cards and accessories are as low as any. Incidentally, Eric had a plug from another satisfied customer in the March issue of Apple Slices. Peter B Dyson Amersham Bucks Dear Boffin, I wonder ifyou can help me with any of the fol : 1, With my recently acquired Apple //e came the Apple Business Graph- ies program (2 disks, PLOT: and DATA:) and manual together with a disk (CONFIG:) that claimed to enable output from the program tobe printed on an Epson printer. There were no instructions with this disk and I have not been able to work out how to access it from the main program, nor do I know which driver to use; conse- quently although I can mun the pro- gram Iam unable to print from it (my printer is a Panasonic KX-P1081 that seems to be fully Epson compatible). I would like to be able to use this program as in many ways It is more powerful than Appleplt. * 2. Is there a patch for the bug in AppleWorks 2.0 (and earlier versions) that causes it to crash to the monitor if you attempt to use OPEN-APPLE-S to save a file to a disk on which there is insufficient room? 3. Lalso acquired with the Apple an Owl modem and card, and Owl Ap- pletel colour card and a Decca TV- style colour monitor (?type PN 781 RGB). There are manuals for the modem and Viewdata editor but not for theAgniete colour card, sol donot know le settings for the dip- switches. Is it possible for me to use some combination of this gear to get a colour display from Apple Business Graphics, or games, on the monitor? At the moment all I can get are green and white. David M.L. Morgan Q1. The program is written in Pascal. This requires that any printer should be placed in slot 1, and that the rinter interface card conforms to ‘al protocols. You do not mention which printer card you are using, but you should find that most normal parallel cards will work with Pascal. From the listing you enclose, I cannot see any mention of a printer which is similar to the Epson. Perhaps some- one else could help on this one? 2. I have searched the Open Apple magazines, the ‘bible’ of AppleWorks and other Apple II poganmes: and cannot find a patch for this problem. 3. If | remember, the Owltel colour card is a Teletext chip driven card. If this is correct, it can only display Viewdata displays, and cannot therefore display graphics as such. Perhaps someone can help with the dip-switch settings? The Boffin e Totland Isle of Wight Dear Editor, A comms. link which I wished to make, required DEC VTS2 terminal eumlation. To this end I purchased a Linnet/Gazelle combination, having received a verbal assurance from the vendor that it would suffice. Although able to access Prestel and Microlink easily, I have yet to see into the system requiring the VT52 emulation. Is there an obvious solution to the prob- lem? Finally, on boot-up from Mousedesk, the Selector screen is almost illegible, since the text com- prises s: block of colour. Is there a remed) Malcolm Tait QAs the author of Gazelle, I am sorry to hear you were misled by the vendor. The manual explains how to set the oven a for VT100. VT52 was an earlier and more limited version of this protocol, and {s not entirely compatible with VT100. It was incor- rect of the vendor to say it was. You will find VT100 more usually used on most systems these days. Gazelle cannot emulate fully VT52. The solution to the second pro, is easy. Go to the Control Panel, select DISPLAY and change to Mono- chrome. This default eettibg is to make the normal hi-res graphic dis- plays show as black and white rather than colour. It will not affect the super hi-res colour screen. Ifyou then runa rogram that should be in colour, but displays as black and white, simply change this back to colour. Ewen Wannop aA Cameo Entertainments Sherwood Nottingham Dear Sirs, I'd like to ask if anyone can tell me just how to discover what the es available on the back of the Apple2000 introductory disk actually contain. It may be that they have lots of things useful to me and my Arp / /e, or maybe none of them woul of interest to me at all. Do you have any further details? Also, I've just started using the very good pro; e Print Magic to pro- duce posters for the clubs & pubs for which we supply acts. I also use Print Shop and Print Shop companion. I find that I can use P.S. Graphic disks with Print Magic, but I couldn't use the graphics from the Print Shop itself until I transferred them to anew disk, since when they work OK. I cannot find any way bey of getting Print Magic to accept fonts and borders from Print Shop and Companion, which fs annoying as I've customised most of them to get a £ sign on the fonts. | find the borders on the Print Magic a bit dull and boring in com- parison to Print Shop & Companion too. I tried moving these on to a new disk as I did with the graphics from Print Shop, but Print Magic tetally ignores them. Can anyone help wit any suggestions? Mavis Shardlow OThe programs on the back of the In- troductory disk are in fact Apple- Works word processing files. These were written under a large desktop, and so will need AppleWorks runnin; with at least a 256k memory card you wish to read or print them. They are normally read by the driving pro- cant On the front or boot side of the isk, there are various programs. They are run when you boot the disk. There is however a Merlin text file of the actual program that will be of interest to assembly language pro- ers. grammers. I throw open the Print Magic discus- sion to others who might help. Ewen Wannop APPLE IIGS LETTERBOX Letchworth Herts Dear Sir, I have many points to mention, but first I feel some thanks is in order for eve! who assists in the produc- tion of the magazine: the layout is good, the articles interesting and the June 1989 ‘Apple2000 @e@is tips useful. l have a 768K Apple IIgs, with one disk drive and Revision 01 ROM. I recently constructed the Ensoniq input interface, for the Apple IIgs, by John Kishimoto in volume 3(5) of Apple2000, but have ienced some problems with it and the associ- ated software. The actual circuit works and I can record and playback sound using the Tapedeck ” however, the quality of the recording is very poor; although I used a coax lead from the circuit to my input connector, the noise on the recording sometimes drowns out the music or speech. Also, I cannot save the samples with the Tapedeck program. IfI select ‘Save As’ from the file menu, the usual dialog box comes up. I select the pathname (making sure the disk has enough room to spare) and click on save. The disk whirrs for half a second, the dialog box disappears and no data has been saved. I have tried using the program from both ProDOS and GS/OS, but neither works. What do you suggest? I am in the fifth year of a local comprehensive, the Highfield School, and you may be interested in the events that have taken place there in the last month or so. The education standard computer in Hertfordshire seems to be the RM Nimbus, and our schoolis no different, having about 70 plus computers on two networks (we have 777 pupils). Personally, I don’t think very highly ofthem, so es, fe my surprise when I went into the library one day at the beginning of March, and discovered 3 Mac SE's and 2 Mac II's there! A few enquiries revealed that they were there for a satellite link up with Ja- pan. Here is a copy of the school press release: Highfield's Historic computer link with Japan First year students at Highfield School are taking part in a unique and historic computer link up with children on the other side of the world. Their faces and voices will be sent via specially installed personal com- puters, to aclass of children in Toyma, on the northern coastline of Japan, particularly in school, and telling the Japanese children about life at Highfield School. The children of both countries will be taking part in a Japanese television programme, sponsored by Apple com- puters, which aims to answer the question: ‘When the children of two nations meet through the computer what do they talk about?" The 38 minute program ts scheduled togo out live onJapanese televisionon March 21, a national holiday. This week teachers and children at the school have been busy preparing Jor the broadcast, mastering thenewly installed computers (on loan from a British company) and compiling ques- tions to be put to the Japanese chil- dren, The s director, who with his crew have been filming in the school and around Letchworth, bie a this ts the first time youngsters in dif- Jerent countries have been able to ‘speak to one another via a computer. The ‘personal computers’ installed are, of course, the Macs, with some aapociated: hardware, namely an Apple scanner, ImageWriter Il printer and modem. Hypercards are being used to transfer the data. I believe the ‘British company’ to be Apple UK, who are likely to be getting a lot of publicity out of the venture. which was ar- ranged by a local hi-tech industry- education body, with large resources, called Education 2000. Rumour has it that some of the computers will remain at the school and I hope they do. I also have some more praise for you, regarding the TML Pascal. After following your advice in February's issue, I phoned TML in Florida and managed to obtain version 1.50, even if it isn’t posted straight away. Finally, I think a few book reviews in the magazine would be quite useful. as it is nice to know what's behind a title. I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions. Stuart Aitken Dear Apple2000 Looking back through the last years issues of Apple2000, I am convinced that the magazine is fctting better and better. Being a little wary of at- tending the AGM at Luton, I was plea: to see the workshop work well and feel that it was well worth attend- ing. After talking to several people at the AGM, Ihave decided to try and get into comms. I read somewhere that you sell the Linnet 1200 modem reviewed in issue 3(3), which has hopefully not expired. You said you would send anyone who enclosed a large SAE a free guide to comms and TABBS. I have enclosed one, as I want to know what V21 and V22bis etc. mean. With regard to my earlier letter, trying the DOC recording circuit from issue 3(5) with Tapedeck, sometime later, the problem of Tapedeck not saving the sound data has miracu- lously disappeared. In its place is a further problem: The article suggests using Sound Studio for editing sound. The program runs OK, but the sound from Tapedeck comes out to- tally garbled, what ever the playback cS |. Have you any ideas? The pro- ram does work, as the sound file from the init fle Startsound (the one that goes “Startsound, by Guy T. Rice”) comes out perfectly. Foal, I too have to report that many PD programs from the IIGS library crash on quitting under GS/ OS. Is the only solution to wait for updates that are GS/OS friendly? Stuart Aitken QThe praise ts overwhelming, thanks a million ... lam not sure what is going on with your problems over using Tapedeck. lowever, I might suggest that itis due to you only having 768k of RAM. I would assume that Tapedeck would expect a full lmeg. It was one of the very earliest programs written for the llgs. The poor Bound ua ay using the DOC circuit may be due to mismatch of volume. The circuit that John de- scribed is quite fussy about the input levels, try putting a potentiometer into the circuit and adjusting that. As to the problem with Sound Stu- dio, | do not know the answer to your problem. You have tried using differ- ent speeds. soit can't be that. Perhaps it is also linked to the lack of memory as well. Many of the PD programs were writ- ten in the early days. Most Program mers were breaking new ground, and they may well have not cleaned up correctly on the ProDOS 16 exit rou- tine. We shall all have to walt for better versions, Asanardent comms man, lam glad you are considering getting into comms. The Linnet 1200 is still avail- able from Apple2000, and represents one of the best buys in modems today. The free guide we publish is a very basic one. It may not answer all your questions. V21 {s actually another way of describing 300/300 baud European style. V22 is 1200/1200 baud, and V22bis is 2400/2400 baud, both these are compatible with US versions of the same speeds. We have no book reviews in the pipeline, but if anyone out there has read a book recently that they would like to comment on. we would wel- come a review of it. Reviews need not be long, but they should be submitted on disk (or modem) if possible. Ewen Wannop Thirlmere Drive Liverpool Dear Ewen, Belated thanks foryour letter. I took the plunge and bought an Apple 20 mb hard disk and topped up the memory card to its full complement of 1 mb. Having no prior rience of using a hard disk, I thought it advis- able to stick to the Apple version fora first purchase, Cirtech are now marginally cheaper for the memory chips. As you advised me, everything now runs a great deal better than before. 1 have put the SCSI card in slot 7 on the GS, and moved the PlusDisk (which contains AppleWorks) into slot 2. Bi leaving the startup slotas 7 {although scan would probably be just as good) I can start up from the hard disk by simply switching it on before I boot the system, from AppleWorks on the PlusDisk card by leaving the hard disk off, or froma disk placed in either 6 &@ Apple2000 June 1989 the 3.5" drive or the first 5.25" drive. The only problem now Is where to put the Mastercard if I decide to use the modem again! By the way, even with my enhanced setup, I cannot get a peep out of the sound demo program I mentioned in my last letter and the “moving land- scape” demo still hangs up in the middle of part of the Finder screen, even after pressing Control-Reset as recommended. Perhaps some of the earlier programs just don't work with the new ROMs. I have been very impressed with Jumpstart and am seriously consid- ering sending off the fee and installing it as my startup program. As you say, it does read text files much better. One odd that appears to happen when I use any of the library programs to print anything Is that the ImageWriter does odd things if! try to print multiple copies from Apple- Works. What us' happens is that it prints part of it and starts printing the second copy without formfeedi etc. It took me a while before I foun that the printer setting in the control panel had been changed to enable a pen buffer. Changing back to “No juffer” instantly solves the Apple- Works problem. I can only assume thatJumpstart and at least one or two of the other library programs with printing facilities must change the setting to allow for a print buffer, as I have now had to change the setting back to unbuffered several times. Publishing this warning might save someone else the wasted time and concern that their ImageWriter has gone faulty! The FontDoctor font editor only works with GS fonts and will only display fonts that have been installed in the System/Fonts folder. The au- thor does say that he plans to en- hance it to include. iter alia, the facil- ity to edit Publish-It! fonts, so I will probably send off the fee and ask him if he has done this yet. I have taken the opportunity to examine some fonts with the charac- ter swapping program, and was dis- appointed to ‘dnd that the Publish-Itt fonts donot appear to containa £s\; at all. Interestingly enough, I cola not find a hash sign in the library fonts that I examined in this way, although there is a £ sign. My next ste] be to swap the £ sign in one of the library fonts you sent me to the data occupied by the hash sign in ¢ Publish-It! fonts, change the file type and then see if it works. Ifit does, T will let you know as the information will doubtless be useful to others. Did you see John Molloy’s enthusi- astic review of AppleWorks GS? He mentions that it will not printa£sign, but seems to consider this to be a minor point. Frankly, lam at a loss to understand that view as this failure renders the program useless to me. He hints that the problem concerning the £ sign has its origin in the GS/OS itself. He did have partial success in persuading the program to display a£ sign on the screen, but could'nt print it. Anyway, I can save £200 and stick to AppleWorks 2.0 for the time being in the paler hope uae one oy, Claris might luce an icised version. it John. Maloy centioned the problem, the two reviews of Publish- It! I read before purchasing the pro- did not see fit to comment on the ck of the £ sign. I must admit that I still feel conned into buying a pro- gram that. as it stands. is really onl suitable for the American market. uf I wonder what slot I could use a PC Transporter card? At least there is a wealth of UK-written software which will run on that! Alan Willey QI am glad that you are finding the Hard Disk useful, it has almost got to the point with the IIgs that a Hard Disk ts essential to make the system work properly. The Macintosh is impossible to use without one, and in fact some programs for that machine are now too large to fiton a 3.5 floppy! If you are not going to use the Mastercard and the Printer together, then put the Mastercard into slot 1 and simply switch the from the Con- trol Panel as needed between ‘Your Card’ and ‘Printer Port’. Sound on the IIgs seems to be a variable event. I have heard of a few people having problems with it, whereas I have had none so far! There are indeed some of the early pro iS that will not work under GS/OS, I think we just have to accept that. However, JumpStart is not the on! program to alter the Control Panel. This is going to be a continuing prob- lem. Soualy Pepe 8 programs like AppleWorks cannot know they are running on a IIgs, and so will not know things might have changed. oa programs that change the Con- trol Panel should first save the para- meters they find, and restore these on exit. Programmers please note! The font problem will not go away easily. There is a legacy we have to live with in that the Fonts owe their struc- ture to that of a Macintosh Font. The Macintosh uses 256 character posi- tions, and puts all the ‘funnies’ into the top 128 with the ‘hi-bit’ of the word set. This means that any word Hehe must be able to handle 8- it data. In transferring these fonts to the Ilgs, the £ sign and other useful characters will be in these top 128 positions, It is usual in ProDOS word processors to only handle 7-bit data, thus hiding these characters from view. The Font editors simply redraw or swap these characters to make them visible. However, unless the printing is done by means of a bit map image, the characters will si elusive. The ImageWriter will print them for instance where the LaserWriter will not. Some of the Font Editors and char- acter swapping programs are decid- edly flaky, and should be used with caution. We have not given a review of Apple- Works GS yet for various reasons. It is very slow, it cannot see the full font set as you mention, and it needs 3.5 mb to be able to load large files you may already be using in stan AppleWorks. For the meantime, I do not think it is a viable alternative. Ewen Wannop Arlesey Beds Dear Sir, My Ilgs currently does not have the Version 01 ROM. Can you supply this ordo you know of somebody who can? Colin Staple QI have had quite a bit of correspon- dence on this matter and the SCSI ROM upgrade. Malcolm Tait was quoted £90 to exchange his system ROM and R. H. Devitt was actually charged around £57 for upgrading his SCSI ROM by his local dealer. The upgrades are necessary if you are to use the current GS/OS operat- ing system for the IIgs. The ition is this. Apple will re- place the VGC and system ROM ofa IIgs free of charge to the current revi- sion level if necessary. You should also have a free upgrade to revision 2.0 (C ROM) ofa SCSI card. It is up to you to pay any charges involved in getting the machine to your dealer. He is entitled to make a charge for la- bour, but this is unusual. Apple sell the ROM upgrade kits to the dealers, but credit the dealer on return of the old ROM's. For this reason, it must be an Gee a oe cannot get the ROM'’s in a ce. However, Apple UK have failed to tell many of the dealers how the ex- change operates. Consequently, they are charging for this service. There should be no charge whatsoever ifyou fo back to the dealer you bought the machine from. Persevere, and make sure you are not charged for the upgrades. After bh to Apple themselves, R.H. Devitt got his money back from his local dealer. Apple UK are not being very helpful over the Ilgs. Apart from the total lack of advertising, they are not for in- stance providing the GS/OS system disks for existing users. It has been left to the User Groups to distribute these disks to their members. OM- cially we have not received these disks from the UK, we have had to obtain them from the States. Ifyou are not a member of Apple2000, you will have to rely on adealer who may or may not have these disks. and may or may not give you a copy! Come on Apple, wake up to the Ilgs. it does exist you know! Ewen Wannop e June 1989 Apple2000 @e Dave Miller continues with his definitive series on languages In this instalment I shall cover C, an See ecinctipaa thant eeryenss mu in the few years but dates from the mid-70s. Reference is made to ALGOL and Pascal and the relevant articles in Apple2000 Maga- zine should be consulted where neces- aebcsng the ten years following the publication of the “Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL-60' by P Naur, in 1963, several new lan- guages were devised, among them were ALGOL-68, Pascal (both cov- ered in ean 2000 Magazine) and CPL (Combined Programming Language - so called because it was intended to be applicable to all types of problem: numeric, textual, logical, etc). CPL was a joint venture between the University London Institute of Computer Sci- enceand Cambridge University Mathe- matical Laboratory. It was never fully implemented buta reduced form, called CPL1, was implemented on the Atlas computer. CPL led to the development of several systems programming lan- , the most notable of which are CPL (Basic CPL), B and C, All the languages developed from CPL share ALGOL's main concepts and the resemblence can be easily recognised. Another common feature is that these languages generally produce highly optimised machine code. Features are provided for the programmer to specify statements in the most efficient man- ner. Thus these languages are id suited to systems programming wor! where efficient code and the benefits of a high level langauge are required. C was designed by Dennis Ritchie as the language for the UNIX operating system. In fact much of the operating system is actually written in C. Although many implementations of C now exist outside of the UNIX envi- ronment (e.g. versions for the Apple // ) most implementations are still under UNIX. The nearest thing to an official definition of C is The C Lan e’ by Kernighan and Ritchie, Fung . SOURCE FORMAT Like Pascal, C adopts free-format source files and spaces are used to delimit rds and variable names. C differs from Pascal in two major 8 BBs respects: C is case sensitive - so“Fred", “FRED” and “fred” are all regarded as different. Also the semicolon is a state- ment terminator in C, and not a state- ment seperator, as in ALGOL and Pascal. Thusall statements should end inasemicolon inC. This last difference has caused many an upset program- mer to tear his/her/ (its?) hair out because it is easily forgotten when using. say. C and Pascal! Comments in C are delimited by /* and */. BLOCKS Blocks, as defined in ALGOL. are fully supported in C. The braces, ‘(and y, are used to delimit blocks in the same way as the keywords ‘begin’ and ‘end’. nei brarss) were adopted is be- yond me use they are most inap- propriate: they can easily be overlooked when inspecting source code. A block counts asa whole statement, including a terminator, and so does not have to end with a semicolon. VARIABLES C is a typed language. Two main types are supported: Integer numbers and real numbers. Integers are split into ‘char’, ‘short int’ and ‘long int’ which are usually 8, 16 and 32 bits long. Since all these are integers, they can be freely mixed in expressions (yes, even ‘char). Integers can also be la- belied as being ‘unsigned’ which allows all the bits in the variable to be used to store a value (i.e. the most significant bitis notasign bit). Soa ‘char’ canstore numbers in the range -128 to 127 (7 data bits plus one sign bit) whereas an ‘unsigned char’ can store numbers in the range 0 to 255 (8 data bits). Reals are split into ‘float’ and ‘double’ which ae nee 32 and 64 bits long respec- e.g. some simple variable definitions: long int 11, 12; /* two variables 11 and 12 defined */ char es float f; double = d; int i, 3. ke /* short int */ STORAGE CLASSES Allvariables have an associated stor- class. This indicates the way in which the variable is stored in memory. Unless otherwise specified, variables are automatic. This means that they are local to the block in which are defined and only exist while that block is being executed. Otherstorage classes are: static Static variables are constantly main- tained. Thusa static variable will main- tain its value after the block in which it was defined has been exited. Static variables are initialised to zero by de- fault. external Externalvariables are defined in other blocks or modules (by definition they are also static). Thus variables from one block/module can be access by another. register This is a optisation feature. A vari- able can be explicitly bound to one of the CPU's registers if allowable. Obvi- ously this is a machine-dependent feature. With prudent application this can speed up the execution time of a pro- gram considerably. By definition regis- ter variables are automatic. typedef This ts, effectively, a type definition. ©.8 typedef unsigned char byte; byte c; The above two statements define the variable “c" as a “byte” which is an “unsigned char” (i.e. an 8-bit number without a sign bit). VARIABLE INITIALISATION Static variables may be initialised when defined: static float x = 3.5; static int i= j= 23 static char c= ‘a’; eg float vector [20]; int matrix[10) (10); Here “vector” is defined as a floating array dimensioned from 0 to 19 (.¢. 20 elements long) and “maxtrix” is defined from [0]{0] to [9}[9). Note that the array always starts at index 0. ce Apple2000 June 1989 Bi hin’ L TransWarp-GS More than double the speed of your GS AppleWorks-GS Full Colour DTP and More TOGETHER - £499.00 + VAT eidnennin n Technologies s Ltd. BrentHouse == Harrow : Middlesex -HA3 3 aBT Telephone 01-907 8516 The array identifiers are actually pointers which address the first ele- mentofthe array. The index specified is an offset to be applied to this pointer (hence arrays start at index 0). Arrays be initialised (they are zeroed by default): aA int n[3) = (1, 2, 3) int matrix[2] [3] ={ {1, 2, 3} {4, 5, 6) } In the second example matrix(0][0] is 1, matrix [0][1] is 2, etc. character arrays ee char str[10], text[] = "this is a text string"; Note that ‘text’ is defined without a length - this is taken to be the length ofthe text si . Text strings are delim- ited by DOUB QUOTES. No length information is stored - the end of the string is marked by a nul (zero value) thus there is no theoretical maximum string length (although different imple- mentations may impose some practi- cal maximum size). Non-printable control codes may be included in the string using the following editing char acters: \n new line (carriage return and line feed) \b backspace \f form feed \r carriage return (without line feed) \t tabulation \xn n = hexadecimal character code \n n = octal character code (e.g.\7 = CHRS(7) in BASIC) \e escape also \' includes a singe quote in string \" includes a double quote in string \\ includes a back-slash in string cg char example[] = "test\n\'test\'\ntest\rr"; ifthis were printed then the following would be output: test ‘test’ rest STRUCTURES Structures are C’s equivalent to Pascal's records. A structure has members. For instance, a payroll rec- ord may have the following members: the employee's name, his/her payroll number and the date of his/her joining the company. This could be defined in C as: typedef unsigned char byte; struct payroll { char name (20); long int paynumber; byte —_ joiningyear; byte joiningmonth; byte joiningday; } struct payrollperson_id(20]; /* array of 20 structures */ struct payroll id = {"Fred", 112039, 88, 3, 30}; Here two variables have been de- fined: ‘person_id’, a 20-element array of structures and ‘id’, a single record which is initialised. Accessing the members ofa record is achieved by ap- the member's name to the structure's name with a full-stop be- tween: in the above example accessing ‘id.fred’ returns “fred”. ASSIGNMENTS These are pretty straight-forward (note the use of ‘='): xy? Some special assignments are pos- sible: at=b; /*->asatb */ even: xtmyt=3; /*>yenyt3rx= x+y+3*/ Note the different meanings of‘="and ‘==’: the former ass! values and the latter only tests for equality. SUBPROGRAMS C, like ALGOL-68, only has functions which return a value. Certain func- tions are of type ‘void’ which indicates that no value may be returned (the nearest equivalent to a procedure). Parameters are specified in parenthe- ses which must be specified even if there be no parameters required. e.g. the following integer function sums ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ and returns the result: int sum (a, b, c) /* calculate the sum of the three para meters */ int a, b, ¢; { return a+b +c; } This ts called thus: int result, a, b; result = sum (a, b, 4); If a function is not invoked in an expression returned result is discarded, Cg sum (a, b, 4); This call to ‘sum’ would call the func- ea and then ignore any returned re- sult. STATEMENTS C has the usual set of statements: goto statement This is an unconditional jump: label : goto label; Note that alphanumeric labels are supported. conditional statement This allows conditional branching: if (expression) statement; or: if (expression) statement; else statement; Note that there is no ‘then’ keyword. Alsonote the semicolon before the ‘else’. Looping is performed via three t pl perform ree types of loop: while (expression) statement; Here the expression is tested before the statement is executed, so there isa chance of not executing the statement at all. Looping ends when the expres- sion returns zero (false). do statement while (expression) ; Here the expression is tested after the expression so the statement is always executed once. Looping ends when the expression returns zero (false). for (expl; exp2; exp3) statement; exp] is executed only once when the loop is started, exp3 is executed repeat- edly after the controlled statement while o ge Apple2000 June 1989 exp2 remains true (i.e. non-zero) This is equivalent to the following while loop: expl; while (exp2) { statement; exp3; } eg for (j= 1; j<11; j++) /* j++ increments j */ dosomething (3)7 The Pascal equivalent is: for j :=1 to 10 do dosomething 1a)) The'break’and continue’ statements can be used with loops: ‘break’ exits the loop and executes the first statement past the end of the loop whereas ‘con- tinue’ jumps to the position just before the evaluation of exp3. Each of the expressions may be omitted: for (; j< limit;)...; /* loop while j < limit */ for (53) «++. be: /* loop forever £/, switches Switches provide C’s equivalence of Pascal and ALGOL's case statement: switch (exp) { case 1 : exp_is_l: case 2 : exp is 2; till 2; default : If the default prefix is omitted then the switch is exited on no match. Note the use of ‘break’. This causes the switch to be exited after the statements )_is_2'and‘exp_is still 2'havebeen executed. The previous match (with 1) lacks a ‘break’, this a ei on continues unim| remainder of the switch after state- ment ‘exp_is_1" has been executed. STATEMENT EVALUATION Like ALGOL-68 all statements can ‘yield’ a value. Hence ‘x = 2' act yields the value 2 (this is why x=y = is valid: ‘y=2' cesighed eve the value 2 which is assigned to ‘x’. This ts why all subprograms are func- tions. The *' is an indirection operator and forces C to interpret the contents of the associated integer as a memory ad- dress and not as a value. The ++ increments the associated variable, if placed before the variable, it is incre- mented before its value is examined, if placed after the variable, it is incre- mented after it is examined: a=2; betta; /*a=3 andb=3*/ an-2; batt; /*a=3andb=2 since a incremented after assignment to b */ The while loop is equivalent to: {register int val; /* val is register variable */ loop: val = *t; /* get value of location addressed tty if (val != 0) [* Sime means not equal to */ { ’s = val; /* save in destination loca tion */ s=st+l; si select next locations #/, tett+1; goto loop; /* loop again */ Not only is the first example far more succinct, but the code produced is more efficient since ‘val’ will always be a register variable but it may be allo- cated store in the second example if ithe co storage mode is not allowed or panne thinks that no registers MACROPROCESSOR One of C’s most powerful features is the compilation-time macroprocessor which it shares with languages like CORAL-66. This allows macrodefint- tions (like abbreviations) to be defined on undefined during compilation. jus: #define pi 3.14159265358979 fundef pi In between the define and undefine compiler directives any reference to ‘pi’ is substituted by the string *3.14159265358979". Note that semi- colons are not used since these are compiler directives and not C program statements, for (j = 1; 3 != 20; 4++) begin do_something () > end This looks far neater than: for (j = 1; j != 20; j++) { do_something () ; } (eae te It lacks Cisarather ie. some of Pascal's (for some reason virtually all C listings appear messy to me no matter how much attention the programmer has paid to source code layout! - I blame the adop- tion of braces as the compound state- ment delimiters). C is, though, a real language, designed from the outset for programming work in real en- vironments, not for teaching, and it is supremely suited for this task. Cis and has many advanced features such as bit manipu- lation, expression yielding and special function evaluation facili these features come from CPL an iz low C to produce optimised machine code for applications solving many dif- ferent types of problem. ‘The powerofC isindicated by the fact that many of the latest C compilers, if given suitably written code, will pro- duce machine code almost as good as a competant programmer using as- sembler. Bs C also has an almost uniform set of library routines which provide such facilities as file handling and trigono- metric functions. ers are be; touse C for more general applications and, with the spread of UNIX systems, the popu- larity of C willincrease. It looks that C will displace Pascal but itshould some a major rival. In the next installment I shall be Bon igbackoarcs in time and covering favourite, BASIC. DAVE MILLER « Die dic net pave rooemin tile sastie:to pul us programming ex- ample provided by Dave Miller. OThe full set of articles by Dave Miller published in Apple2000 so far covers: Full use if this feature can produce One useful application is toredefine _ Introduction August 1987 very efficient (but sometimes rather _ those pesky braces to ‘begin'and ‘end’: Fortran October 1987 obscure) code. The pibwing while loop Cobol December 1987 copies data fromone partofmemoryto — ¢define begin { Algol June 1988 another until a zero item is met: #define end } Algol-60 August 1988 Algol-68 Oc! 1988 while (*st+ = *tt+); Thus the following would be valid: Pascal February 1989 June 1989 Apple2000 BeMun Controlling the Real World Bill Hill tells us how to automate the central heating system and keep the baby warm INTRODUCTION Before you dismiss the Apple II+ or //e as obsolete, think for a moment about what the Apple 2 series is: a simple, highly expandable computer. Where am I leading? Well, since the software and hardware of my //e are much less sophisticated than those of the fancy 16 and 32 bit machines on the market today. I thought I would not have too much trouble convertin; itintoa smart central heating control- ler for my house. This article de- scribes how I did it, and I hope that you will be convinced that it is not all that complicated. An added benefit is that the hardware and software that I describe here can very quickly be modified for use in controlling many other things, e.g. motors, lights etc. Before I launch into describing the hardware and software that I pro- duced, I will explain a bit about my central heating system and the rea- sons why I wanted to improve the existing control scheme. My house has an old gas-fired cen- tral heating system. It is the sort where you cannot have just hot water: the radiators upstairs warm up whether you like it or not (unless you turn them off at the valve, of course!). An electric pump, controlled by a wall- mounted thermostat, is used to circulate water round the radiators. The wall thermostat is in the living room, so all 1 could do was control the ambient temperature in that room to any degree of accuracy. The boiler was controlled from the typical wall-mounted time clock; the usual old fashioned sort, with knob to select the mode (e.g. water + radiators two times a day) and two sets of on/off tabs, The only means of controlling the water temperature in the hot water tank was by adjusting the boiler thermostat. The only means of con- trolling the ambient temperature was by the wall thermostat (which switches 240V mains). Parents among you will know that some thought has to be given to get- ting the room temperature just right for a new baby. I therefore want see if! could come up with a good way of controlling the temperature of the baby’s room. I also wanted to control the temperature of the hot water tank - the boiler seemed to fire far too often for my liking. | wanted to achieve both these aims but still be able to switch back to the old control system when- ever I desired. Tocontrol the ambient temperature in the baby’s room, one could fit a thermostat in that room and/or fit thermostatic valves to individual radiators. To control the hot water tank temperature better, one could fit a thermostat directly to the hot water tank. (In fact, one could fit an electri- cally controlled valve to isolate the hot water circuit from the radiator circuit in order to get hot water without heating the house, and vice-versa. A suitable control box would of course be needed.) I did not want to go to the trouble of fitting an electrically controlled valve to isolate the space and water healing circuits, so that ruled out independ- ent control of baby room temperature and hot water. Still, there was nothing to stop me fitting thermostats to both and selecting which one to control at any given time. However, I was not sure how fine a level of controll would et using the standard bimetal ermostats available from plumbers merchants; mains wires all over the place was not an attractive proposi- tion, and I didn't fancy the palava of having to use transformers. Also, I wanted a controller that would allow me to have all sorts of time settings, and perhaps a few other features as well: a max-min thermometer would be nice since my main concern would be to control the temperature accu- rately in the baby’s room. So there you have it. To sum up, I wanted to control the ambient tem- perature in the baby’s room. control the hot water tank temperature, and have a controller with max-min read- ings, lots of programmable on-off scree and plenty of flexibility. Oh, and I didn't want to add any new elec- tric valves to my pipes or do any rewiring of the existing system. The latter was very important since I wanted to be able to take the new controller with me if I moved house, and still leave a working central heat- ing system. Now perhaps you can see why I thought about using the old Apple! I therefore decided to use the Apple as a ‘supervisory controller’, te. it would switch the power on oroff tothe existing control system, rather than replace it. The Apple is thuseffectively acting as my proxy - it keeps an eye on either the baby room temperature or the hot water temperature and takes the appropriate action. I still have use of the wall-mounted thermostat in the living room, which cah be adjusted (‘tuned’, to use the jargon) to produce the desired overall performance with the new control system, or used as it was originally intended, i.e. to regu- late the temperature in the living room. REQUIREMENTS I needed three things in order to use the Apple as a central heating con- troller. Firstly, ameans of measuring the temperatures, secondly a means of calculating whether to turn the heating on or off, and thirdly a means of actually switching the mains to the boiler and pump. The first task can be done with transducers (also known as sensors), the second by software. and the third using a relay. Most of the hardware can be mounted on proto- cards that can be plugged into ie Apple's slots, as you will see. Since the system works in real time (Le. I want to be able to tell it to come on at, say, 6 am), then a clock card is also needed since the Apple 2 does not have a built-in real time clock. MEASURING TEMPERATURES Now. as it happens, there are cheap solid state temperature transducers widely available. Not only that, but they are linear, unlike thermo couples. That is to say, the Hea they produce Is linearly related to the temperature (crudely put, if the tem- perature doubles, the voltage doubles). The particular variety that I decided to use was the LM35DZ, which produces 10 millivolts per degree Centigrade rise, over the range © to 100 degrees. In my case the working range would be, say, 0 to 25 degrees for the baby’s room and 0 to 70 degrees for the hot water tank. Thus, the temperature transducers would produce up to 25 mV and 70 mV respectively. The voltage from the transducers needs to be converted to a binary number that the computer under- stands. This process is termed ‘ana- logue to digital conversion’, A-D for short. These days you can buy cheap A-D converters on a single chip. They usually only need a small amount of ancilliary electronics to give you a working system. What's more, they often have more than one channel eight is usual - 1.e. you can convert eight separate analogue inputs to eight separate digital values. T opted for the ADC0808, a cheap 8 channel. 8 bit A-D converter chip. By ‘8 bit' I mean that the chip will convert an analogue voltage into an 8 bit 2 24s Apple2000 June 1989 integer number. Since the range of integer numbers that can be repre- sented by eight bits is 0 to 255, and the ADC0808 expects inputs in the range 0 to 5 volts, zero volts into the converter will produce binary 00000000 on its output data lines while 5 volts will give binary 11111111 (Le, 255). Figure 1 shows the complete A-D converter circuit. The ICs are as follows: NUMBER TYPE +5V GND +12V Icl ADCO808 see figure 1 Ic2 74LS00 pe Meanie Ic3 LM301 4 7 Ica 74Ls02 14 7 IcS 74LS30 14 nil Icé 74LS04 14 r Since the output from the transducers is in millivolts, I needed something to boost their voltage to the 0 to 5 volt range needed by the A-D converter. This is done using opera- tional amplifiers (op amps’ for short). An op amp, in conjunction with a couple of resistors, can be configured to give a gain of your choosing. The idea was thus to make two amplifiers with different gains in order to boost the the two transducer voltages to fit into the range 0 to 5 volts. I decided on the LM324 chip which actually contains four op amps, so two were unused. The only problem was that the LM324’s output voltage saturates at about 3.8 volts. This limited my range into the A-D con- verter to 0 to 3.8 volts. Ideally it would have been better to get an op amp that would allow me to boost the transducer voltages such that their maximum likely outputs would be amplified to 5 volts, but the hardware limitation of 3.8 volts was not too bad. At 50 pence for the LM324 I was not going to grumble too much! 1 mounted the A-D circuitry on a Vero prototype Apple card, which can be plugged into any slot (you can buy these aie protot cards from Verospeed, MGA Softcat. etc.). The op amps and the digital switching cir- cultry are on anot! oe ara card which can be plugged into another Apple slot. The two transducers are connected to the amps by. long leads laid under the carpet so that they are unobtrusive. The leads have three wires: one for ground, the second for the 5 volts to supply the transducer, and the third for the transducer out- put voltage. Since the A-D converter has eight channels, I connected the amplified baby room output to four of the A-D inputs, and the amplified hot water tank output to the other four. I could then average the four readings in software. “A program can use PEEKs to read the converted voltages. SWITCHING THE MAINS So I had sorted out how to get the temperatures converted into num- bers in the correct range for the Apple to understand. The next stage was to work out what hardware would be needed to switch the 240 volt mains needed by the boiler and the pump. Since the Apple's circuits use 5 volts to represent logic 1, and zero volts to represent logic 0, you will appreciate that you don't want 240 volts any- where near the inside of the machine! I therefore decided to switch a low DC voltage inside the Apple, which would then switch a mains relay in a sepa- rate box well away from the computer. Since the Apple is upstairs and the boiler is downstairs, this also allowed metosleep: at night knowing that my two year old daughter would not electrocute herself if she decided to cut the flex with her “snissors” (al- though I have gone to the trouble of hiding the flex anyway, both for safety and for aesthetic reasons). The switching circuitry in the Apple is mounted on the second Vero proto- card, You may have heard of ‘solid state relays’. These act just like old fash- ioned relays, but instead of energising a coil to open/close the switch, the solid state relay does the job elec- tronically, using light would you be- lieve. They also have additional inter- nal circuitry designed to reduce noise on the mains when you switch some- thing on (I won't bore you with the details!). These ‘opto-isolated solid state relays’ are very safe, can switch high currents at mains voltages mil- lions of times without failure, and are cheap. I opted for the FR Electronics ZRA 6010A which will switch 240V at ten amps (way above the 2 amps that I needed, but I like a nice beefy piece of equipment with plenty of s; capacity!). This little {cost about eleven pounds. A DC voltage of any- thing between 3 and 24 volts will cause the relay to switch the mains on. I used a different relay to switch 6 volts DC to energise the external power relay. This relay was mounted on the same card as the two op amps. I could have gone for another, smaller, solid state relay. However, there is a cheap reed relay available that is directly TTL compatible, that is to say, it can be driven by the Apple's binary Bek ieee of 5 or 0 volts. This relay (FX88V from Maplins) only costs a couple of pounds and also has a long life. The 6 volts DC that I use it to switch is produced by one of these dirt cheap (about two pounds) power supplies that can be bought for use with cassette recorders etc. This power supply !s housed in the same boxas the power relay. The box is alu- minium so that it can double asa heat sink, although in fact the heat gener- ated by the relay and the DC supply {s very small. They are bolted to the inside of the box to increase heat transfer, and I have drilled ven- tillation holes in the box. I hasten to add that the box is of course very well earthed, fused, and the wiring inside 1s carefully laid out and soldered onto isolated terminal blocks so that there is no risk of a wire baring denne The safety aspect of these things has to be well thought out when dealing with mains voltages. The final pieces in the electronic digsaw are a 74LS04 logic invertor chip and a 74LS74 flip-flop. These are mounted on the same card as the op amps and the reed relay. I use these to latch a binary signal from the Apple's bus in order to switch the reed relay on and off. | won't bore you with the details, but basically I use the DE- VICE SELECT line and address line AO on the bus. By pene or POKEing to an odd num ad- dress in the I/O range for the slot that Tuse, I close the relay. By PEEK- ing or POKEing to an even numbered address I open the reed relay. This method is by no means the only way of doing it, but it is simple. I could even have used the games port to drive the reed relay, but decided that things would be neater all laid out on a card in a slot. Figure 2 shows the circuit diagram for the second Vero prototype card with the op-amps, reed relay and the address decoding logic. Figure 3 is a schematic diagram of the overall switching circuit. CHOOSING A CLOCK CARD The only other hardware that I needed was a real time clock card. Not having one, I decided to purchase the U-CCT card that U- Micros were sell- ing cheaply to get rid of their stock (they no longer make this card). However, when I tried to write a gen- eral purpose ‘suspend for time’ rou- tine, I discovered that this card has a bug in the firmware which affects the decade digit of the seconds field. It is the sort of thing that would not cause any problems for 99.9% of users, but for the particular job I had in mind it was annoying. I could have ‘coded around’ the problem. but after point- ing out the problem to U-MICROS they offered me my money back and I bought a secondhand TimeMaster HO. This isa super card and has given me no problems at all. THE SOFTWARE The final hurdle was to write the control software. Since the program was going to be relatively long, I de- cided to use Apple Pascal rather than BASIC. This was partly to force me to learn Pascal, and p: cause Pascal is by far the better language and would increase the likelihood of me being able to understand the pro- gram in six months time! Because of the size of the Posen T have had to make some of the procedures into ‘include’ files. The main program is CONTROL.TEXT and the separate ‘include’ files are SETUP. . READCLOCK.TEXT, DISPLAY.TEXT and TIMEDELAY.TEXT. Rather than use interrupts. I opted to write a simple ‘suspend for time’ June 1989 Apple2000 ae 13 t of procedure, i.e. a procedure that I could call with a parameter speci a time delay and which wo! only return after the time had elapsed. Basically, the program reads the temperatures, calculates whether they are above or below the set-points and switches the mains on or off ac- cordingly. It then waits for five min- utes and repeats the process. | have built some hysteresis into the pro- so that it is not constantly switching the mains on and off. For fun, I have added a few bells and whistles to the program. Since there is some noise in the measurements, the pro; filters the noise digitally using the Kalman filter algorithm (why use a Metro when a Ferrari will do?). Ihave also added 0.1 microfarad capacitors across the op amp inputs to filter the measurement noise, which is quite large for long lengths of lead. Since I am using four channels to read one voltage, the program aver- ages the four values. To make thin, more interesting, the program chec! the four values to see how close to each other they are. If one is signifi- cantly different from the other three then the program excludes it from the erage. The program uses a slick method called the ‘degree of inconsis- tency’ to do this. If the degree of inconsistency is ater than a threshold value for the four measure- ments then the program sounds an alarm to indicate that there has been an input failure of some sort. The program stores all the current set-points and time settings (up to twelve on/off settings per day are allowed) on disk. If the power fails and comes back on later. the program will run automatically and, if no key is pressed within a given time, will read the data off disk and carry on as be- lore. Since the Pascal software supplied with the clock card didn’t do quite what I wanted, I have written my own driver. You may find this useful in other applications. Likewise, the PEEK function and POKE procedure in the program are generally useful if you don’t already know how to do this in Pascal. I have not bothered with any error trapping of user inputas yet, andl am toying with the idea of adding various other functions to the program, time permitting. RESULTS Well, does it work? The answer ts: yes! The pyetem has been running for six months now without any prob- Jems. Afler some initial scepticism, my wife now uses the system quite happily, changing the set-points and selecting either control of the tem- perature in the baby’s room or the hot water temperature. The performance so far indicates that the new system will cut down the gas bills during late Autumn and early Spring when out- side temperatures are not ultra low. During Winter months when the temperature is particularly ‘brassy’, the new system does no better than the old system since the boiler needs to work full tilt to keep the house warm and provide hot water. I will be monitoring my gas bills over the next year to see how much | have saved. Since the overall cost of the project has been about one hundred pounds (including clock card), I'm sure that it will take a couple of years to pay for itself. However, it was great fun to make, and a good learhing exercise. You may have realised that, as the hardware stands, it is simply a com- puter-controlled electric switch. With the appropriate software it could therefore be used to switch anything on and off. The design also allows for expansion; an extra reed relay could be added on the same prototype card, and this could be used to control another remote power relay box. Finally, 1 would just to say thanks to the following people: Sim- eon Manners for his advice on the solid state relay and aluminium box idea, to Craig Powers for advice on op amps, and to Roddy MacKenzie for his comments on my misuse of Pascal! Bill Hill Q The Pascal text file listings were too large too include in the magazine. They can be found however on TABBS for downloading. Anyone who wantsa copy of the original disk should send a blank 5.25 disk with return postage marked "PROGRAM HEATING CON- TROL" to Apple2000, PO Box 3, Liver- pool, L21 8PY. Figure 1 ala Co DS ich o> ee € ico bed SS! ] Awatogue Be one h 7) INPUTS o—Te pb fey 7 a}-————_3 hbo 3% 3 Pa SF 5 ee +a Ss | st . s}+———-a” a Ei ‘ + 1c4 17 a shre py ao A M3298 eo 14 Apple2000 June 1989 +Sv 747 FROGV as Cee? ee To Box ia Ll DOWNSTAIRS. . + Messen sy —_W einem +5Sv +5v 2yOv AC MAINS IN al le > > ° E b> = yi ene u N Swirtted Ps L MAINS ouT fon. io sse UPSTAIAS © DIECAST ALUMINIUM Box Te A-D +Sv T4LSog +Sv 45v Iso me | roo oa a z by }-— fH 16s fa) [7}+—}—{a] 74.574 [aH E) Fxssv fy f=) p+] oe g o pl ld oh I ua 3] q gre? June 1989 Apple2000 15 Hardcore Pips We continue our dip into the BASUG archives with more cuttings from 1981 There are, according to Microsense, three kinds of Apples. First, there is the ITT 2020, manu- factured under license by ITT and although based on and to a large extent compatible with the Apple II, utilizing different video display cir- cultry, Race apres (in the sense at least of higher density) resolution. Second, there are American ma- chines imported directly, either by individuals or by companies, and converted to U.K. standards. Thirdly there are the genuine Euro- plus Apples, manufactured to U.K.standards by Apple Inc., and sold via Microsense and their approved dealer network. Microsense are a commercial or- ganisation and, not unreasonably, want to promote the sales of the third kind of Apple at the expense of the other two kinds. It follows, unfortu- nately, that Microsense do not sup- rt or help owners of either the ITT 020 or of directly-imported ma- chines. Owners, and on their behalf the Apple Systems User Group, must look for support from ITT in respect of the first kind of machine and from the importing dealer or direct from Apple in Cupertino for the second kind. But what if the persistent rumours that ITT will pull out of Micro-com- uters should eventually turn out to true? One could perhaps hope that in this situation, Microsense’s (and Apple Inc's) war having been won, they would rally round and help the innocent victims of their commercial power-struggle. And for users of directly-imported machines who haven't got a dealer or who cant get support from one? Well, ifenough pressure were put on Apple Inc, then perhaps they would ask their U.K. distributor (Microsense, would you believe?) to sort out the mess for them. In the last resort it looks to be down to Microsense who, after all, are eflec- tively Apple-U.K. - and from our side of the fence that looks to bea pleasant and profitable position to be in. If in return they have to take on a little extra responsibility than the legal situation demands, so be it. ANON Beginners Page By John Sharp There have been a number of begin- ners writing in requesting help with binary files. so this month let us begin with a look at what porn files you might have on a disk. If you catalog a disk you will get something like this:- A 002 HELLO I 020 DRAGON MAZE A * 004 PROGRAM 1 B* 002 FILE 1 T 003 TEXT FILE R * OOS ANOTHER FILE You may not get all these on one disk, and indeed you may not even have seen a T or R or even B on your disks. Leaving aside the first column of AI,R,T,B for the moment, what does the rest mean. Well the * tells you if a file is locked. If it is locked, you cannot write to the disk with the same program name. That is you cannot wipe out your program on the disk by overwriting it. i¢ number is the number of sectors the program takes upon the disk. As a rough guide each sector is 0.25K. The name to the right is just that, the name of the file. I say file because it is that rather than a program. It is only when entered cor. rectly into the Apple that it becomes a program, if it indeed is. A file with a T in the first column, is not a program. It might be a TEXT file to EXEC or it might be as the prefix suggests a TEXT file. A TEXT FILE is a bunch of data ready to be read into a program, ¢.g. a set of records, such as a set of names and addresses. If you want to see what is in a TEXT file then type:- MON I,0,C <RETURN> EXEC XXXXXXX <RETURN> where XXXxxxx is the name of the TEXT FILE you want to look at. As each bit of data is printed, since you are doing the equivalent of typing in directly from the keyboard and press- ing return, you will get SYNTAX ERROR, just as you would if you typed a command the APPLE does not understand. You can slow down the screen printing by using CTRL-S. It tends to be a little noisy because of all the beeps and syntax errors, but can be a very useful tool. You could use the READ TEXT program on the master disk. The Aand I program file names are fairly straightforward. They corre- spond to APPLESOFT and INTEGER program files respectively. Unless you are only running disks that boot and take over the machine, you will be familiar with both of them. The problem arises, however, with B (and R) files. B stands for BINARY FILES. R stands for RELOCATABLE FILES which are a special type of Binary file. You will see some on the DOS 3.3 TOOLKIT disk. They are produced from the APPLE ASSEM- BLER on this same disk. So apart from a slight difference, they are basically the same type of file, a sav- ing of a batch of machine code to disk. This can have various functions once it is in memory and this causes the problems for beginners. The first type of file it can be is a pro; . wrilten in machine code to make it run faster. A program ex- ample is a FID, MUFFIN or MASTER CREATE (on DOS 3.3 MASTER), and UPDATE 3.2.1 (on the DOS 3.2 MAS- TER). In order to get these to run as programs, simply BRUN FID or what- ever the program name Is. Before going further, the number 034 or whatever is the number of sectors the file takes up on the disk. It only helps you (and the DOS) to keep track of how much of the disk you are using. This is dealt with in the DOS manual so! will not go into it here. For those mebers with tape only it wil help to explain waht these numbers mean in the software library lists. As a rough guide, four sectors equals 1K of program. The next of file is a Hi-Res Picture that has been saved. The length of memory taken by a Hi-Res Picture ts 34 sectors; so if you see :- B * 034 BASUG LOGO on a disk catalog, you can be fairly confident that it is a picture. There may be other binary files coinciden- tally 34 sectors long which are not pictures, but the name usually tells you they are not . Alternatively, there are now ways of compressing pic- tures, soa picture can be less than 34 sectors. You then need a special pro- gram to put Shen back on the Hi-Res pages correctly. If you to BRUN a BitRes sissies arything could hap- pen. Normally you will just halt in Monitor. Try a few and see. You will not do the Apple any harm, just con- fuse it. The third type of binary file is a set of data used in a program. It Is a little bit like a text file except that it is totally machine code and wouldn't mean anything except to the program 16 OB Appie2000 June 1989 that uses it. The best example is a shape table which is a set of points and directions. If looked at other than a shape table by the program you are using, it is totally meaningless. A good programmer will put some indi- cation such as MARTIANS.OBJ or MARTIAN.SHAPE to let you know it is used in another program. The DOS 3,3 TOOLKIT fonts for example are labelled BYTE.SET, ROMAN.SET etc, to make this clear. It is as important as putting REM statements in if you wish to let others know what is going on. On some of the software libra: snd disks there are binary programs wil just a single letter or a pair of letters; these are fairly obviously used by another program, and the author has made them too short to make think to run them: the name doesn’t mean ai ben Another type of set o! ‘machine code might be data as for example in the copy program on the 3.3 Master disk. The copy programs look like this:- just * I 009 COPY * B 003 COPY.OBJO * A 009 COPYA There are versions for you to use for copying disks if the BASIC you are using is INTEGER (the first one) or APPLESOFT (the last one, which has an A tagged on the end since two programs cannot have the same name on the same disk otherwise there would be confusion when it came to running them.) In between Is a machine code set of data for the other programs (both of them) to use. Ifyou list these programs you will see a line that has a print"BLOAD COPY.OBJO"at line .. Why no D$=CHR$(4), well there is an invisible CTRL-D. You could see this if you used something like The APPPLE- SOFT PROGRAMMERS ASSISTANT on the DOS 3.3 TOOLKIT, or the PROGRAM LINE EDITOR. The most confusing programs on the 3.3 Master it would seem are cataloged as:- B * 050 FPBASIC B * 050 INTBASIC They are in fact APPLESOFT (or Floating Point BASIC) and INTeger BASIC, respectively. If you have a language or RAM card, then these files be loaded onto the language card and the card locked so that it appears to be an INTEGER CARD or APPLESOFT ROM CARD. If you have an APPLE II PLUS, look at the HELLO program, by just loading it. LINE 210 has “BLOAD INTBASIC,A$D000". Again there is an invisible CTRL-D. The A$D000 means load it at position DOO in memory, which is on the language card. en a bin: file is saved, It is necessary to tell DOS the start and ending locations of the program. This information is saved onto the disk. When you load the program back, it will be loaded into the same position, unless you tell it otherwise. The A$DOO00 in this BLOAD statement tells itnot to load it where itwas saved from. This is in fact.in the middle of memory and it will load there if you {ia BLOAD INTBASIC. If you try to RUN INTBASIC, then since it is not written to run in this location, but on the language card, it will cause you to think your machine has developed a fault. If there are any more problems, lease write in and we will see what lp we can give. John Sharp é Q It {s interesting to see the piece about Microsense fine forerunner of Apple UK) in the light of the present lack of interest in the Apple II series from Apple worldwide. Many people in fact are still using DOS 3.3. <« Apple Il GS Macintosh You can add a Ile/liclike second G4K bank of memory to an Apple Ii-Pius by lugging in an accelerator card. Neither the memory is there, But programs that check for the memory, From our fan mail: Despite its small size, Open-Apple is the best Apple information source ve ‘ever found. Creating a forum for the glab- al Apple It user community is a noble pur- Jerry Kindall, Grove City, Ohio Let me add ation to the cho- mus of Apple Il users who have come to i i i I I H can access For more information, se ScPurate:reahstic, ed dountoeasth | ! ! I H I I I “RAM found in accelerators’ in the information available | H H H iE I H H ! | footed into thinking the machine is a lle, H H H H | i i i i December 1986 Open-Apple, page 2.88, Nevin Diener, Neezietown, Va. & Try two months free! $ Otter good one time only Try Opem-Apple at our expense. Cut out or photo- Q rm csomattmintraie nore i WAR GAMES, ADVENTURE GAMES . SIMULATORS & SPORTS - } > Strategic Plus Software 3 PO Boxe Hampton, Middx TW12 3XA , x 8, Hampton, mi: Telephone 01 $79 2967 SOFTWARE IO BE Le. SCs Send £2.50 for Exiensive Catalogue. &S June 1989 Apple2000 pes 17 DB Master Terry Cymbalisty reviews this sophisticated database Hardware Requirements Enhanced //e with extended 80 column card or //c or //GS or Laser 128. 2 off 5 1/4" disk drives or 1 off 3 1/ 2" disk drive or 1 any floppy disk drive plus ProDOS compatible hard disk . ARAM disk is highly desirable, as is Backup and Restore from Glen Bre- don’s Prosel. Review System 128k enhanced //e 1Mb Cirtech PlusRam RAM card in slot 5 3 1/2” 800k Unidisk in slot 7 Grappler + printer interface card in slot 1 Epson FX80 clone printer. Glanmire Time- Kit clock board in 16 pin games socket DB Master Version 5 Pre-Re- lease #5 Introduction I would like to assume that most readers are familiar with Appleworks and as such I would like to use the database module within Appleworks as the program to compare DB Master (hence forward referred to as DBM) against. DBM goes a lot further than Appleworks being a far more sophis- ticated product. This is not to be seen as detracting from Appleworks as I feel that the two programmes are aimed at different audiences. The Package DBM consists of the following: 1 off 3 1/2" floppy 4 off 5 1/4" floppies 1 off reference/tutorial manual The man- ual supplied is a 9" x 8" 3 ring binder 500 page affair. Note also that one either uses the 3 1/2" disk or the 5 1/ 4" disks depending on what s of drives the owner possesses. The first part of the manual ts a Sey, good tutorial. This leads the owner through the various stages involved in creat- ing an estate agent's database and also using an existing database pro- vided on the floppy disks. Also reports are dealt with quite extensively within the tutorial as reports are one of the scone points of DBM. DBM Is Prodos and the supplied disks are unprotected. Bad Points The package is very sophisticated and as such is not as immediate as Appleworks. Appleworks is easy enough to learn without referring to the manual (I lost mine a long time ago!). DBM on the other hand really benefits froma good understanding of its features. In fact the tutorial only glosses over some of its features and its more advanced features must be learnt from the good reference section ofthe manual. DBM constantly refers back to the program disk. Usinga3 1/ 2" disk eliminated constant disk swapping if | were to have used DBM on 5 1/4" disks. Also 3 1/2" disks are a lot quicker than 5 1/4" disks. But DBM gets over this problem because when the program is first booted, if it finds a ram-disk it prompts the user if he wants to have DBM loaded into It. It quite happily recognised my PlusRam card and then proceeded to copy itself into it. This process, al- though only a one-time operation, was quite slow because it copied itself file by file. I then used the ProSel Restore program which did the task far quicker. Ofcourse ifone was using the ram-disk to store data then the Prosel Backup program would be used. DBM always seems to write back to the database on disk when ever a modification is made. This slowed things down a lot. This is why I stored my data on the ram-disk (as mentored: in the last point). Having done this, DBM flew along with no problems what so ever (and when my Zipchip finally arrives...). 1 found, at least what I thought, was as serious bug or at least a drawback. From the main menu it ts possible to perform some ProDOS commands, one of which is rename. I was not happy with a name I had given one of the data- bases I had created. I tried to use the aforementioned rename command and DBM told me that it was not possible to rename a database. Not to be put off, I then tried Copy ][+, which worked quite nicely. When I next tried to access the renamed database file using DBM, I got the reply that the data was no longer recognised! My database was now corrupt. It was quite lucky that the database did not contain too much data. The method of going back a level in the menu system was not consistent and meant that one constantly had to refer to the on- screen menu. In some places the escape key was required, in other cases control Q was required. There were other key combinations in other situations as well. There is on-line help available. On expecting to see some useful sentences on screen when this function was called up, in fact all I got was a page number referring to the relevant section of the manual! DBM comes with one of those silly license agreements which state: “Stone Edge makes no warran- tles.....-. Stone Edge licenses this software on an “AS IS” basts..... The entire risk as to the quality and per- formance and its appropriateness for your needs is with you.....” In otherwords, what in the hell are you getting and does the manufac- turer have any faith in the product? DBM Is not as disk space efficient as Appleworks. An Appleworks data- base occupied 53 kbytes on disk but when It had been converted into DBM format, it occupied 106 kbytes. In otherwords twice as much space. Perhaps not a drawback for those with hard-disks or 3 1/2" drives, but end cause some problems for those with only dual 5 1/4" drives. Good Points DBM is ve strong on field types.Note also that the date format is ae flexible too. There are nineteen ifferent formats! DBM’s handling of formulas for computed fields is quite impressive too. For instance such functions as: +-.%/ =, <>, >, <, =>, <=, parentheses constants AND and OR NOTI) INT() ABS() SGN() exponents Note also that the above are usable in the database and not only in re- ports as in Appleworks. Multi-line comments are allowed in DBM data- 3s DB Apple2000 June 1989 bases. This is a great drawback in Appleworks as far as I am concerned. DBM can read into its own database Appleworks databases. What one does is to create a DBM database making quite sure that the field names are EXACTLY the same as those used in the Appleworks data- base (note that it is case insensitive). This is obviously a good feature if one is upgrading from Appleworks. The manual is very good (far better than the Applewo! manual). The glos- contains all the functions sorted aiphabetieally. The function is de- scribed in a clear non-technical manner making the program easy to learn, considering the complexity. Primary/Secondary fields are used to index the fecurusiohabning them to be quickly found during sort opera- ben al ao a Her tae Pri- mary fields then Secon ‘ids may be specified. It is important that all records have unique Primary or Pri- mary/Secondary fields. In actual fact, this point was brought home when I tried to convert my Apple- works database for my music LP col- lection I had problems at first. Ini- tially I used the “Artist Name” field as the ary field without using a Sec- ondary field. On conversion problems were encountered. When I specified the “LP Title” field as a secondary fleld, the database converted quite nicely. Summary All in all, probably the best data- base product available for the Apple // range of computers. TO Cymbalisty ¢ info Product: DB Master 5 Publisher : Stone Edge Available from : MGA Softcat P