Hardcore Volume 2 No. 4 1982 08 BASUG GB

Kad core THE JOURNAL E JOUR BRITISH APPLE BWSTEIE USER GROUP unis ii PAGE 2 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1° Luv Computer Services Ltd. 108 THE PARADE HIGH STREET WATFORD WO1 2AW Telephone: Watford (0923) 29513 * Business Softw. © * Professional Courses * Pascal * ‘ " Recreational Software * Intertacing * Cromemco Systems * Level 1 Service Centre * Utilities * Colour Monitors * * Supplies * Accessories * Enthusiasm * Open Tues - Sat ° MICROSOURCE SUMMER MICRO! OURCE SALE je have 2 few copies of books uhich are not in pristine condition. They have been dare at sone stage and the pages have ended crinkleys They are not stuck together end are OE OLY quite legible, 1W0 CIPTES OMY of COPPUTER GRAPHICS PROER The “everything” 1/0 board fron ECLECTIC SYSTEMS Parallel 1/0 with handshaking 24 be real tine clock with alarn 2 eprom with graphics 1/0 and screen editor softuare 6 2K Epron sockets vornal price $1045 sale price #5 RSZ32 1/0 (software driven but yery basic and without FIVE COPIES ONLY of BENEATH APPLE DOS Os fornal price $11.95 sale price # 756 byte PRON supervisory software, Generate full ASCIL character set fron keyboard, Character rotation etcs Extensive documentation and denonstrationn diskr including SOFT CHARACTER EDITOR, 4 b _* fhuch much nore and developable to sour own ends. +f inet var Bs omy a5 advertised in the insert with this issue,is available (ALL PROCES CLUDE AI UNLESS SPECIRIC MENTION 18 MADR. ALL phaces for 429 incl VAT PéP mi MICRO: OURCE bein Tol: Park Street (0727) 72917 1 BRANCH RD, PARK ST ST ALBANS, HERTS August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 3 hardcore THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH APPLE SYSTEMS USER GROUP P.O. BOX 174 WATFORD WD2 6NF EDITED Er DAVID GOL.TON TONY WILLTANS Editorial assistants! Tony Game, John Sharp; Bob Raikes and many others. BRITISH APPLE SYSTEM GROUP COMMITTEE NORAH ARNOLD Chairman JOHN SHARP Secretary FRAN TEO Treasurer JIM PANKS Membership Secretary BOB RAIKES Events Organiser JOHN ROGERS Software Librarian JOHN RODGER Librarian Information Officer JOHN WELLSMAN, JOHN MARTIN, TONY WILLIAMS, DAVID BOLTON, MIKE PRESTON BANKERS National Westminster Bank Ltd. Brompton Square, London SW3 1HH. MEMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL APPLE CORE COPYRIGHT (C) ~ The contents of this journal are copyright of the British Apple Systems User Group and / or the respective authors. However permission will normally be granted for non-commercial reproduction by user groups affiliated to the International Apple Core, provided the author and source are properly credited. The opinions and views expressed are those of the various contributors, and are not necessarily, supported by the British Apple Systems User) Group. CONTENTS 4 Editorial Chairman’s Corner 5 Readers’ Letters 10 Courses, Meetings 11 More letters Pascal Notice 12 UCSD Pascal Course 16 Machine Code Course 17 Education Column 18 BASUG Toolkit No 2 Get Hex 20 Annual General Meeting 23 Amateur Radio G8LDR 24 Nicelister Headings M,J.Parrott 25 French Apple Keyboard Tony Williams 26 Herts Group 27 Applewriter II 29 More letters 30 Leicester Laughs Norah Arnold R,T.Raikes Leo Crossfield R,T.Raikes Norah Arnold Cliff Wootton J.Panks, Richard Teed 31 Time Machine Tan Pawson Snafu Time Again Simon Brown 32 Beginners’ Pages Tohn Sharp 33 Eamon Problems Solved John Martin 34 Input Fix Simon Brown 97 Letters 39 Add Auto Repeat 41 Expanded HIRES Richard Teed 43 Standard Deviance R.D.Purves 44 Now you see it Neil Lomas 45 Type Right Review Martin Rogers Cover Illustration! The Apple of your Eye! Stolen from A.U.G.E, the German Apple User Group, because we liked it, INTERNATIONAL APPLE CORE ™! MEMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL APPLE CORE PAGE 4 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 ERITORTAL, Two things are immediately striking about this issue of Hardcore, The first is the new format. In an attempt to catch some of the anticipated flak, let me blame it all on member Jim Watson. He it was who ran up a reduced mockup on his photocopier to show that it could be done, producing considerable savings ~—without diminishing the quality, We were convinced, Since a sizeable proportion of your membership dues go toward producing the magazine, the committee could not brush aside his suggestion simply because we might prefer the large format. Economy rules, I’m afraid. Discussion raged into the committee nights, and it was argued that the AS format in any case fits in with the norm for user clubs, that reduction by pruning our costs enables us to be less dependent on advertising and to run a tighter ship. The decision was taken with some regret, since we know that many members like to keep their bookshelves straight and abhor abrupt changes, Our apologies to you all. The other striking feature is the preponderance of your letters we print this time, On this we are quite unrepentant, Hardcore exists in large measure as a forum for your views, and we believe that publishing letters is the best way for that, Your letters tell us most about how you use your computers and the problems you encounter. To clinch matters read the contribution from Mr. Santos on power supply problems, It could save your Apple and sav e you hundreds of pounds. Thanks also to the members throughout the world who have sent in articles: Two things bother us: One, what to do with mammoth listings extending to fifteen columns or more, sometimes consisting largely of esthetically pleasing but wasteful white space. They are too big to publish and yet we don’t want to bury them in the archives, What to do? We are still thinking, Two! Would thoughtful contributors who send in hardcopy printouts in Hardcore format please never, never paste them up. Leave it to us, Just send unsliced galleys: And please, accompany them by the WP file on disk since more often your (and our) spelling is not as good as we would wish, But, keep it coming, Tony Williams CHATRNEN’S CORNER by Norah Arnold Tt comes as something of a shock to me to find myself writing the Chairman’s Corner. It doesn’t seem very long ago that I waited until my husband was safely out of the house before making my first tentative approach to the Apple Il. Two hours laters having become thoroughly addicted in the meantime, I can recall wondering what effect this machine might have on the life of myself and my family. BASUG has certainly come a long way since I attended my first meeting towards the end of 1980. On reflection, I have quite enjoyed putting all those Hard Cores into envelopes, stickino them down with sponges that always seemed too dry or too wet and glue that never appeared to be sticky enough until your fingers got stuck together. This time last year the membership of BASUG was approaching 600, now it is almost double that Figure, The task of looking after membership records has been taken aver by anew Membership Secretary, Jim Panks. At the time of writing, T understand that Jim is in hospital so I would like to take this opportunity to wish him a speedy recovery, BASUG has had a stand at many shows during the last year, and all thase who have given up their time to help at the shows deserve a vote of thanks from the group as a whole, A special thank you should go to Frances Teo for all her hard work (in spite of the heat) at Apple ‘82 at Slough Bob Raikes is in the process of organizing the BASUG stand at the P.C.W. Show, 9th to 12th September at the Barbican, and he has some new ideas for getting BASUG around the country a little more than in the past. I understand that something is being planned for September 25th at Birmingham Polytechnic. T hope Bob will get a great deal of support from BASUG members in the midlands. John Sharp continues ta do battle with a never ending mountain of post, kept going by his good nature and eternal optimism Keep up the good work, John! Finally I would like to welcome the new members of the committee and also thank the retiring chairman, Frank Kay, for all the work he put in during BASUG's formative periods August 1962 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGES readers’ letters’ Sydney,Crewe, Dear David, In the June issue, you asked for readers’ views on the magazine presentation. I bought my 737 because I was impressed with its proportional character set and, on its own, I think it perfectly acceptable. Of course, the individual characters do not stand comparison with those of a good daisywheel, but good presentation involves more than pleasing letter shapes. The Star Trek instructions were printed with a very pleasing typeface, but it was made more difficult to read because it was not proportionately spaced and justification was done by quantum jumps in the gaps between words. The same criticism can be levelled at articles printed with the Epson, although these do not seem quite as bad, possibly because the narrow letters fill the space better, The worst example I find was the Apple /// article in April) This was printed on a dot-matrix printer (which?) using a proportional set but without the appropriate spacing. The result was that the letters were so far apart that one virtually had to read the words letter by letter and assemble them. If you can afford the expense of a daisywheel with proportional spacing and —microspace justification (and the expensive word processor to utilise it) by all means make the change. IF not, then stick to the 737, which anybody can use with a £3 word processor from the librarys A final advantage of the dot-matrix is that you don’t have to resort to Letraset for one-off titles - but for a permanent title, isn’t it time to move the apostrophe in "READER'S LETTERS" to the right side of the "5"? Yours sincerely, Neil Lomas, (Ed. What can we say to that? Let’s try this! we think of you all as individual s, and very singular individuals too, each of whom is likely to contribute more than one letter. No, it doesn’t convince me either, we'll have to change it) Waterford, Ireland Friends, I have the answers to two queries raised in Hardcore June 1982, 1- John Kleenan in ‘Using DOS..",page 18, wonders about the use of location $76, This is the Applesoft Basic current line-number high byte, and under normal circumstances it is $FF when there is no Applesoft program running. Unless you use Poked line numbers greater than 69279 (which cannot be entered directly), when your program is running the, contents of $76 will not be $FF, and DOS tests this for all the commands which can give a NOT DIRECT COMMAND error - but only when the Basic is. Applesoft, The corresponding location for DOS when Integer is active is $D9, which should be less than $80 for any legal line number while the program is running, So di D90 to turn on textfiles.... and D9FF to turn off if Integer is active. On the last line of page 10 the addresses should be 9DSA, 9DSC, 9DSE and not 905A etc. 2- Page 35, Graham Ruben’s request Ci patch to prevent OPEN from creating non-existent filest change the contents of $4923 from $23 to $22, Thus from Applesoft use POKE 43299,34 to do this, but don’t forget to POKE 43299,35 if you want to OPEN a new file for WRITE, Generally, for those working in this area, get ‘Beneath Apple DOS’, There are a few errors in it, but it is an enormously valuable book. Yours Hugh Dobbs. PAGE & HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 Poole, Dorset Dear David I feel that I must write in response to the letter fram Jahn Gribbin that appeared in the June issue of Hardcore. I did not buy my Apple solely to do a bit of wordprocessing, or solely to do a bit of anything else. I bought my Apple because I am a computerphile (sic), and the Apple was the best all round machine that I could afford. I am interested in as many aspects of the Apple as I can possibly squeeze in to my spare time. I welcome the diversity that BASUG currently supports, and welcome any attempts to extend the boundaries of the group's activities, I joined BASUG because I believed that it would enable me to contact people like myself, and knowledge and information would be spread around. That I have failed to have much contact with such people is my fault, not BASUG's, I would have thought that most of the members are hobbyists, and I would suggest that the single minded people such as Mr, Gribbin should form the separate group that he proposes (or stick to reading Windfall), As regards to the courses, there will always be a problem of attendance when the members are spread all over the country: and when the cost of the activities has to come from their own pockets. I wanted to attend the Pascal course, but the dates were inconvenient. Please, please keep trying, it’s worthwhile, There is a facility that a group such as BASUG would clearly benefit from, and that is a ‘Hotline’, such as ‘Call A.P.P.L.E,' has. 1 feel that this would be very beneficial, many is the time that I have had a problem that T was sure someone would know the answer to, but I had no-one to ask. I wonder how other members feel about such a facility ? Having said my bit, I would like to reply to a point raised by Graham Rubens in the same issue, In his letter, Graham asks for a patch to stop non-present files being opened automatically: Rather than patch DOS for something that is not a bug, I would suggest an alternative approach. In the program, monitor all errors (using ONERR) and perform a DOS operation that will return the "File Not Found’ error (eqs UNLOCK) before trying the open. If the File does not exist proceed, if it does, open its Finally, may I take this opportunity to enquire whether anyone has an old (non-Autostart) monitor rom for sale. Yours Bob Phillips P,S, It is not time to turn to daisywheel printers, some of us would still like to be able to purchase our first dat matrix printer. Stevenage Dear Mr. Bolton I would like to take the opportunity of joining BASUG to say that your group appears to be playing its part in furthering the aims of Information Technology Year ‘82. Your bi-monthly magazines have provided some interesting answers to a few problems. I would like to relate a problem that T have been experiencing when using the Apple Pascal Language System (Version 141) EDITOR on my ITT 2020 System. The CTRL-E enable reverse video mode and keyboard upper and lower case toggle, and the CTRL-W enable reverse video and set keyboard to upper case for next character only features DO NOT work as documented in the Operating System Manual Addendum, These features should provide pseudo upper and lower case ~ similar to Applewriter/SuperText II and other text editors ~ text input. These features however, do work correctly on an Apple II. So far, I have found that this is the only software for the Apple to malfunction on an ITT 2020 when using upper to lower case change feature. T hope that this problem does not frighten any more ITT 2020 owners into changing over to the APPLE, but I also hope that solutions can be found more speedily, I have a lower case adapter and a modified version of PASCAL 1,1 which displays commands in Upper and lower case - a marked improvement on just Upper and Inverse Video to represent Upper case, However, this does not affect my inabilty to input lower case on my ITT 2020 - the problem exists on an unmodified machine toor I hope that the above information will prove useful to the User Group’s Memberships Yours Faithfully, Toe Gardner, Dudley, West Midlands: Dear Sir, Having just joined the ranks of BASUG, and duly read the Feb. and Apr: 188Ues of Hardcore, it occurs to me that a number of points were raised which merit attention. ‘August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE7 Ladies first, and Miss Chuah may care to try the harp in getting past the giant (in Wizard & Princess), assuming she has managed to find out how to get it across the bridge (no mean feat in itself, A friend and I managed to ‘crack’ this particular adventure in a few evenings, so if she'd care to pass on her address via yourself, I'd be happy to elaborate on the above, I confess to being addicted to adventure games, and would dearly like to know how to make Dracula appear in Adventure International’s ‘The Count’. I’ve found the crypt - fixed his coffin - and lie in wait with the hammer and stake, but can’t find out how to make him appear...any offers? Can one use ‘Wizardry’ without Pascal? With regard to Mr Lightowler (G&SBGN), my own call sign is G3ZPF, and I have found about 25 amateurs using the Apple. I’d be glad to know if he’s found a cure for the RF interference radiated by the Apple. If he has the American SSTV program, and found (like myself) that it doesn’t work properly in Europe, then I have a ‘fix’, I also have a Hellschreiber program (Hellschreiber is the German WW2 version of our teleprinter), As I've had my Apple for some time now, I’ve come across several routines and bugs which may be unknown to other members. To avoid repeating stale news Ill sumarise them briefly and go into details if asked. 1 ~ There is a bug in the later version of Renumber, even on the DOS 3.3 upgrade version. Again I have a fix 2 - A friend tells me that the Laurence Hall disc copy prog: for his 8" discs works quite happily without mods on 5.25" discs under DOS 3.3 & 3.2. 3 ~ It is possible to alter the tail markers on DOS 3,3 sectors, so that although the disc boots, RWTS cannot be used to scan at the sector level, Following on from this, it is possible to get around the fact that pressing CNTR C during bootup stops turnkey systems in their tracks and hence add password entry to files. This may be of use in a office situation where several users have access to the micro, since although unauthorised users can use bit copiers to copy the disc ‘in toto’ they still can’t use it without knowing the passwords. Anybody interested....7 Or is this all old hat? Incidentally, in spite of the comments on FID under 3.3 (yes I’d got a 3.2 version running) not copying random access files, when I upgraded to DOS 3.3, I didn’t have any problems that I’ve noticed, Perhaps the conditions to cause errors are quite specific, and if so then I’d like more details about them please, Yours faithfully, David J. Reynolds, Campbeltown, Argyll, Dear Sir, The EPSON PRINTER PAGES in the June 1992 edition of Hard Core bring up again the use af the Applesoft TAB instruction. It has been pointed out in several journals recently that there are very few printers (none tht I have ever used) that can handle it other than as a synonym to SPC} so the EPSON range is not exceptional. The acceptable printer instruction is POKE 3éxcolumn number)» which will work on most printers. If this instruction is used it must be remembered that the first column is zero and not one, Line 690 of the CATALABEL program would read PRINT — NAME$(Z)}:POKE(36,80){PRINT NAMESZ+INT(N/2)+P1 if the first character of the second string is actually required in column 80. POKE 34- may also be used for printing to the screen but in this case the column number must not exceed 39 or else there is the probability that the start of the Applesoft program will be corrupted. It seems strange that APPLE do not emphasise this feature since the subject of Apple 11 tabbing is hardly ever out of the magazines. There are two bugs in the original CATALABEL program that have been repeated in the June reprint. Lines 500 and 680 shoud be!- 500 FOR M=0 TO 29 (the program name is only 30 characters long) 690 FOR Z=1 TO N/2+Pi (et’s print all the program names!) Yours sincerely, Hedley G. Wright, Ramsey Isle of Man Dear Sirs, Do you have any information on the Apple Dow Jones Portfolio System Order No AZD 0077 Yours sincerely CW Sinclair BaASUG Member 8203513 PAGE & HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1992 Dear Mr Trackman, T am using your Go-Between with the old Applewriter I coupled to my Centronics 737. This set-up has worked perfectly for me, so when Applewriter 11 came along I borrowed a copy and found many excellent features in the editor but have been frustrated to the Nth degree when trying to print out. How do T get the 737 ta change to proportional or condensed mode from within the prooram? I have done it by presetting prior to booting up Applewriter but this 15 not satisfactory, I have also found that several other features such as fill justification don’t work. I assume that this program wasn’t really written for this printer, How does it work with the Epson? The whole thing is at present a bit of a disappointment, but before I aive up in despair and revert to AW I + G-B by Ian T, I wonder whether you or any other BASUG members can assist, It would be a super piece of software if it had a similar system of print formatting commands to the Go-Between ~ (Hint!), Yours sincerely Peter Trinder. (Ed: On Applewriter II in general please see Jim Panks/Richard Teed’s article elsewhere in this issue. On your specific question, Applewriter II is protected proprietary software and Tan Trackman cannot simply go ahead and and make and market modifications to it simply because they might be a good idea, The whole area of copyright is a minefield, as you can imaoine, and it 1s advisable to stay well clear, In any casey the requirement has now extended well beyond the Centronics 737 and now software is needed to drive a variety of proportional space printers, including the Gume, Such a driver would demand weeks of intricate programming and could never be obtained for 50p. (Apologies for the rather discouraging comment) Leyburn: NYorks Dear David, On re-reading my keyboard and display conversion in the June issue of Hardcore I noticed a minor fault in Figsl (my fault)» The Schmitt trigger nand gates labelled IC2a ~ IC2d should be IC3a ~ 3d, but the wiring diagram is correct. A more important point arose after I had submitted the article, I noticed that after being in use for some time, the changeover switch effect of pressing CTRL and Shift together did not always work. The reason for this is that the temperature rise within my Apple (which has four peripheral boards) causes the switching voltage for the Schmitt trigger inverter ICid to vary. The cure is very simple. Just add a 1K Ohm resistor to the circuit board between pin $ of ICI and the ground line, This acts to pull down the voltage on this pin when a switch-over occurs, making the action more positives T would also like to pass on a little information to those who may not already have seen it. This concerns a modification to the Applewriter which appeared in the June issue of Creative Computing and allows underlining in conjunction with an Epson MX80 printer, and at the same time gives details of free space available within Applewriter (using a redundant, undocumented function), Well worth a read and no doubt available on loan from public libraries: Finally I noticed some comments regarding Emphasised printing on the MX80 in recent issues of Hardcore and for what it may be worth my MX80 F/T prints emphasised characters (as my keyboard article) by sending the codes ESC E to the printer and this is cancelled by ESC F. The printer will double print if ESC G is sent and this is cancelled by ESC H. Both of these codes remain in force until cancelled by a reset or the CTRL code, It should be noted that some interface cards may not send control characters (such as ESC) without modification, and to get round this it will be necessary to POKE the code to the card I/O location (CO n*80 for a CCS Centronics interface, n being the slot number), Yours sincerely Peter Blair LOO REM ARIA REA ARIE * THIS PROGRAM MAKES 0 * MORE SENSE * 130 % WHEN YOU RUN 11 ¥ * * PURVES * ‘ Bony QE = 0 9:3 = 0 TODAY!" August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE? The most versatile diskette filing tynem wetatie . — Tne unguemoauissyten "The ultimate in diskette storage, gies you sate, aus-ree sorage . : for your data wivle, at he same protection and retrieval Din naling W extvoridy en37 1 pany ‘Sturdy, interlocking cases, each holding Yon disketios in a side-out Grawer can be arvengod In tows oF 2:7 5& wwet vat stacks of enol any aco wo moet your pace oqubernects. A your cieketteWorary grows, $0 6008 Jor morege nei yt Any rarer Sita modular cases can be neriockad ilorma tnd and convenient ng oy tem. And, more cases can be aed at mS vv any time — either horizontally or vertically ‘And goes with you papRak When you travel, individual cases make gurER® 00 Eo peat 0 Perfect askote carriers. and are easily 300 POOLE aya removed without disturbing the rest of ve . om the system, Additionally cases can be Set Bien BOF 4 SOL”, sprer removed for storage in a tireproot sate, rane ors nat RF of Of easily rearranged to meet new space ss requirements KU oad Each case comes with two pressure cies? sansitive identification labels, Label sur- por faces can be typed on or marked on with pen or pencil ta show, at a glance, which diskettes the case contains. So, you Teall oes Sa cat you be. | im) rN 4 BRITISH APPLE SYSTEMS 4 a USER GROUP P.O Box 174. Watford WO2 6NF PAGE 10 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1962 COURSES, MEETINGS AND EVENTS by R.T.Raikes Those of you who have read the minutes of the recent A,G.M, will have noticed that I have taken over from Fran Teo as courses, meetings and events organiser. People join BASUG for many reasons, but for me the most important aspect of the group has always been the chance to meet with other addicts and discuss problems) pick brains and see for myself some of the products which are available for my APPLE. I am lucky in living within 30 miles of Park Street village, where there is an active local group, and where many of the national meetinos have been held, My aim aver the next year is to get BASUG out of the London/South East area for a substantial proportion of its meetings, In order to do this I will need a fair degree of help from members around the countrys There are four main changes to the regular monthly meetings that we currently hold. 1, Rather than have just a 2/3 hour talk on a particular topic) it is proposed that we hold Workshops which will last for a whole day evs fram 10 to 6. At each venue we will have at least 2 rooms, one of which will be used for lectures; talks and demos. The other room will be a Systems roam, where we will aim to have the maximum number of systems available for people to program, get help with problems, or just play the latest games. 2s These Workshops will generally take place on a Saturday, apologies to those who have to work thens 3. There will have to be a charge; approximately £3.50 1s estimated, towards the cost of hire of halls eter 4. In order for such Workshops to be a success, members will have to do their bit by bringing a system if at all possible (including a mains multiway socket if possible), and by bringing their problems, new hardware and software, and enthusiasm. I have visited workshops of the above description run by other groups including the TRSBO group, and can vouch for the benefits that can be got from thems Dealers or others who may want to have a presence at a Workshop by renting a table for commercial use, please contact me. If you are able to talk on a particular topic, can demonstrate commercial programs or hardware For home or business use, or are just prepared to help with the logistics then again please contact me. I hope that by organizing these get-togethers, some help will be given to those who want to start local groups, where they are not already in existence. DATES FOR WORKSHOPS September 25. Birmingham Poly. This is just oft the Hagley Rd. See the latest Update for details of speakers/Demas, October 23 London, Beaconsfield Rd School, Southall. Lan Trackman to talk on Structured Programming, Other details to be advised. November i3 Nottingham University.(provisional) COURSES To date, two courses have been run by BASUG, the recent PASCAL course, and the Beginners Machine Code Course held in March, Both of these were highly rated by those who attended them, and both are to be repeated, In addition three more courses are planned for the next year, Beginners and Advanced Basic, and Advanced Assembler.These are envisaged as weekend long courses, Subject to good turnouts ‘on the Workshops, it may be possible to arrange one day courses on other topics, suggestions please. Again, it may be possible to run courses outside London, subject to speakers being available, any volunteers? DATES FOR COURSES October 22-24; PASCAL, This is a repeat of the highly successful July course, Cost £70 + accommodation. December 4/5t Beginning Machine Code. With Ian ‘Trackman, star of the BRC and Blue Chip Softwares Approximate cost 15 pounds, to be held in London, Please send for details of these courses, and on the Pascal course please HURRY. EVENTS As far as other events go, we will be exhibiting at the P.C.W, show on the 9-12th of September, A new feature of our presence is that in conjunction with the TRS80 user group, we have hired the library of the Institute of Chartered Accountants at 44 London Wall; very close to the Barbican centre for the Saturday of the show. The intention of this is to offer a place for members to relax and put their feet up after seeing what they want of the show. Those of you who experienced the Earls Court scrum will especially appreciate this: We are hoping to have bar facilities, and one or two Apple systems to August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 11 play with. The next exhibition that we know of is the Northern Computer Fair at Bellevue Manchester on the 25-27 of November. With the Nottingham meeting and the Machine code course, resources will be very stretched. Free space is available through the A.C.C (Amateur Computer Club), Is anyone prepared to run a stall and carry the BASUG flag ? more letters Dear Sir. T would like to say how much I enjoyed reading Hardcore. I work mainly on my own, and have already found the magazine very useful, County Down, Ireland, I would like to pass on a little modification using a CCS Clock Card. This allows you to address the three programs on the card’s Eprom under software control, and is very simple to implement. It entails removing the bridges at A8 and A9 on the card and running two wires fram the pins to ANO and ANI an the Game Control. The necessary Pokes and Truth Table are as follow: AS AY tRoutine. Poke 49240,0 ( i Poke 49242,0 (0 Poke 49241,0( Poke 49242,0 (0 1)!Time strings Poke 49240,0( Poke 49243,0 (1 creen display. To save plugging and unplugging wires and Game control I have soldered a 16 pin wire wrap socket and two rows of Molex pins onto a small piece of Veraboard with one row of pins on either side of the socket, the tracks in the centre of the socket obviously being broken, Yours sincerely, Clifford Watt, Wembley Dear John T really enjoyed the three-day course on Pascal and I'm sure that everyone else did too. 1’) certainly be interested in other courses organised by BASUG, Now there’s a problem I hope you can answer. My second disk drive recently went wrong and after T had it repaired I tack m Apple in to check the drive, card and micro. The dealer told me he thought there was a fault in the Apple. We checked out the Apple using the Apple diagnostic disk and it appeared to be trouble free, But when the disk drive diagnostic speed controller was put into the same drive it would not runs Instead an error message “Overflow in Line 10" appeared on the screens When line 10 was listed it looked quite normal, But using the same disk, in the same drive, with a different Apple it ran normally. The dealer also has at least one Apple in his shop with this same fault, He has also been in touch with Apple UK who appearently do not know the answer, Wouldn't it be nice if BASUG could solve this problem and it would also be one up against Apple UK. And solve my problem and my dealerss T hope you can help, Yours sincerely, Neville Tan Ash (Bd, Neville, For my part I can’t help muchy but I can extend the problem further, by asking whether there is something wrong with the standard issue diagnostics disk. An Apple of mine was clearly faulty, and SBD’s Master Diagnostics Disk laid the blame fair and square on a particular RAM chip - yet the regular diagnostics disk failed to detect any fault, Any reader’s care to submit their experiences?) PASLAL “I was Fy weakling, unti PASCAL course '* "I thought recursion was 8 criminal offence until I went on a BASUG Pascal course ! ince attending the recent PASCAL course, my wife has got rid of her lovers, I have had 3 pronotions at work, Iam @ areat attraction at parties, and I mo longer lose sleep over personal freshness, " seven-stone BASIC I went on a BASUG Some, all or none of the above has been said by those who attended the last BASUG PASCAL course. BUT it may be said by those who attend the next+ Don’t miss the chance, send for more details now. LUXURIOUS SETTING FREEEE COFFEE FREEEE LUNCH 2.5 days of ACTION! ONLY 70 POUNDS PAGE 12 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group ‘August 1982 THE UCSD PASCAL COURSE by Leo Crossfield When one thinks of attending a course, one usually expects to spend part of the time learning and the majority of the time sitting, talk- ing, and generally wasting time. This was not the case with the UCSD Pascal course. This course was a three day event which started on Satuday 17th July and finished on Monday 19th July, held at the Brunel campus 'Shoreditch', Runningmead. The course structure was a series of workshops which were linked together by a number of well structured lect- ures. The lectures totalled nine hours over the three day course and were given by Drs Les Johnson and Mike Elstob from the department of Cybernetics at Brunel University. They gave an excellent series of lectures which alternated with work- shops. The workshops functioned well with everybody working at their machines, while Les, Mike and myself made sure that no one was left un- sure of the requirements and manner in which they should be attempting to solve the set problems. Constant guidance was available to everybody. The three helpers walked the floor constantly and guidance was given in a manner which allowed piople to help each other to resolve their problems. Each workshop re-inforced the topics which had been covered in the previous lectures. The aims of the course were to give each individual familiarity with structured programming, an under- standing of the UCSD environment and to give confidence in developing their own programs. All these aims were achieved and more. The course was logically structured and had been designed with the experience of university teaching within the sub- ject areas of Computer Science, Cybernetics and Philosophy. This gave each person the opportunity to have professional as well as _ per- sonal tuition in methodology which was systematically linked to prac- tical workshops. Everyone regardless of their ackgrounds and past experience in programming, was catered for and by the end of the course had gained a great deal of confidence in both the design and the actual writing of their own programs. The course was designed around a couple of simple programs which grew into a fairly complex algorithm including the use of nested proced- ures with flow of control loops, data input and validation, sort routines using arrays and disk file manipulation, DAY ONE People started arriving on_ the Friday night, from places as far as Manchester and Margate, in order to get ready for the Saturday morning start. The first day started with people setting up their equipment, some machines were shared. Dr Les Johnson started the course by intro- ducing himself, Dr Mike Elstob and myself, The lecture structure was mainly led by Les Johnson with additional lecturing from Mike Elstob. The lectures started with a highly detailed layman's guide to the nature of programming languages and how they are implemented on diff- erent machines. Compilers and inter- preters were discussed, with regard to high level programming languages and a detailed discussion of the mature of the P-System. The P-System was shown to be a hybrid system in the sense that P-system compilers compile a language to a relevatively low level code (P-Code) which is later interpreted at run time to the individual machines executable code. Les also explained that this concept is a design philosophy to create a universal compatibility between different computer's architecture, the only fundamental difference being the P-code interpreter for each specific machine. We covered the academic origins of Pascal and learnt that Professor Niklaus Wirth, within his lectures, attempted to standardise on a pseudo August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 13 language to demonstrate his ideas of block structured programming and data structures. Wirth later deve- loped this teaching tool, which he had originally designed to allow programming to be taught as a struc- tured and systematic discipline; a compiler was latter written for it. We next covered the concept of the UCSD System, and the later develop- ment of Pascal which gradually put our existing concept of Pascal into an historic context, The lectures then turned to block structured program design with a heavy leaning towards the methods suggested by Michael Jackson. Three main structures "iteration" such as the ‘WHILE DO' loop, "options" as in menu selection and finally "sequence" as in a set sequence of instructions, These three main structures are depicted below in the diagrams. * condition =a instruction] instruction2 Instructions are repeated until condition is met. These structures were explained to be fundamentally tree-structures, We then looked at the nature of Pascal as a free formatted language. Inden- tation was discussed and the reasons for indentation was explained. we studied the concepts of bracketting and Venn diagrams and were shown how these concepts related to nested procedures and loops. We looked at the BEGIN and END statements, which were introduced as 'fat brackets', and the need for their use was understood due to the carlier lectures. The first workshop was a critical, make or break, period. The whole course depended upon the confidence gained in this first workshop. This period was successful mainly due to the fact that Les Johnson had prepared an in depth tutorial which allowed everyone to walk step by step through the use of the UCSD Editor, Filer and the Main Menu. selection [ee | choice choice o choice Selection will give access to one of the three choices. Label C7 instructionl instruction2 Label consists of instructionl in: e: followed by each is only struction? but xecuted once. PAGE 14 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 Everyone got on with their exercises without much need for assistance from the three helpers, or resorting to the many text books which people had brought with them. All this was covered within the first morning, but had set the foun- dation stones for the entire course. Everyone had gained confidence with raw beginners sharing ideas with their more experienced colleagues. Lunch was excellent and everyone returned eagerly to resume their studies. Throughout the course Les had one major problem and that was getting BASUG members away from their machines in order to have lunch and coffee breaks. Being used to university students, I felt that Les wasn't sure how to handle such conscientious students. He stood in the the doorway shouting instruc- tions such as "IF not dead GOTO door ELSE stay where you are and don't move". Needless to say no one moved or even looked up, perhaps it was due to the lack of interest in the ‘Goro’ statement. The afternoon covered the logical development of a program which started off as a simple algorithm which displayed stars (*) on the screen. This program grew through specially designed stages to display a box structure, which was built up of stars and served to demonstrate the use of procedures with embeded and nested loop structures. The day ended at 6-00 p.m. for the main class and I believe 2.00 a.m. for many of the keen ones. Rumour had it that arcade games were the main reason for such late night activity, as well as some discussions on the different prob- lems and concepts which had been covered during the days activities. DAY TWO I arrived at 9.00 a.m., on a bright and sunny Sunday morning, ready to have a coffee and to prepare myself for the day ahead. I found a room full of self motivated people discussing problems with each other and working at their machines. The morning lecture started at 9.30 a.m. and program control was discussed in depth. Repeat Until, While Do, and For loops for repetition as well as the Case statement and the Then Else structure for controlling sequential instructions, We covered the built-in string handling procedures to illustrate string manipulation. Throughout the course the concept of control and structure was amplified rather than the concepts of maths. The course notes gently introduced the fundamental nature of set theory without anyone needing to realise that it is a mathematical concept. Sets were introduced because they are an important data structure in Pascal. We covered data structures and data types within the workshop which were intermittent with lectures; new concepts were introduced and put into practice. We covered data types such as strings, integers, reals, Boolean, char, arrays and sets. The day's finale was designing and implementing a simple exchange sort procedure which illustrated the nature of nested procedures, local and global variables and an in depth use of arrays. This workshop supplemented the final sort by getting input from the keyboard, sorting the array and then outputing the result to the screen. A great deal of confidence had been gained within these first two days. August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 15 DAY THREE The third day started with three very weary helpers attempting to look bright and alive. The atmos- phere was relaxed and enjoyable, with the odd jovial remark from Jim Watson from Margate. The final day's lecture started with a general introduction to the nature of recursion. The ancient game called the Towers of Hanoi was used to explain a standard example of recursive problem solving; each sub- problem essentially being the same problem as the main problem. This concept is comfortably handled by a block structured language. One can define the main problem within a procedure, which calls itself again and again until the total problem is solved. The Towers of Hanoi was not laboured within the lecture for the course notes go into greater depth. Indeed the whole course ran parallel with the course notes thus allowing the student, to go back over the notes to cover certain areas in more depth and at his own pace. This method obviously allows the student to retrace the steps of the course once he has left the studious environment. The aim of the last morning was to analyse the game of ‘Master Mind! which used all the skills learnt throughout the course. We were given a listing of the program, which gave each student a solid guide line for good program structure. We were given a step by step walk through Master Mind which allowed us to examine data validation and many of the other concepts that everyone had so far covered. We saw how one could define a Function and pass values to it with the function returning the product. Finally everyone was asked to critically access the main func- tion in order to see how it could be written differently while still achieving the same goal; the goal being to compare four randomly generated integers to four integers which had been inputs from the key- board. The afternoon's aims were to intro- duce everybody to Records and Files Mike Elstob took the floor and ex- plained how to create mixed data types. Records in Pascal allow one to mix different types. For example, a structure could contain an element of integer, an element of string and a further element of integer. This structure is useful for manipulating a data structure such as a date within the program, i.e., ‘12 Feb 1982', Records therefore allow very flexible manipulation of complex data structures, for one can easily increment the first field of integer without affecting the other two fields. The next section of the lecture was based on a program called ‘Data Capture'. This program served as a demonstration of external disk file structures. We were shown how to put data to disk, seek and then retrieve the data. Once everyone was used to these concepts we put them into practice with everyone essentially writing and manipulating their own simple data-base. CONCLUSION The course was a total succcess. I have gone in depth to explain the structure of the course in order to show the content and benefits which were gained by everyone. Everyone gained knowledge which could, theo- retically, have been gained from one of the numerous books on Pascal, but how many of us ever manage to get further than a couple of chapters in most text books? Many of the people on the course admitted that they had, on numerous occasions, opened their Pascal tutors and closed them again without gaining very much for their endeavours. With UCSD Pascal each new user has a number of problems to contend with. Pirstly the UCSD systems environment which includes a powerful editor, the filer and compiler. Secondly one has to contend with a block struc- tured language, which is funda- mentally different to Apple Basic, PAGE 16 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 but once mastered will enhance the manner in which one uses Basic; making programs easier to design, understand and maintain. The UCSD system is very different in concept to the standard Apple environment. The concepts of listing programs on the screen running prog~ rams, stopping the program to look at the variables, listing the prog- ram on a printer, all these concepts are different. The UCSD system is a device driven environment, this essentially means that the console, disk drive and printer are all different devices with each device having its own specific volume num- ber. For example, from the Filer you can transfer a file to the console, it will then appear on the screen, or you can transfer a file to another disk drive, or it can be transfered to the printer, to get a hard copy listing. The concept of a device driven environment is funda- mental to the P-machine. All these points, plus the fact that you have a totally new syntax makes self tuition an enormous problem. The course was excellent. I person- ally enjoyed the weekend immensely, The friendly atmosphere was created by so many different types of people all gathered together with a common interest. This after all is what club membership is all about. The one thing that a course cannot offer is experience, but nonetheless it can arm people with the correct attitudes and tools to go alone to gain experience with confidence. What more can one ask of a course? I would like to take this oppor- tunity point to thank everyone that was involved in getting this course together. Special thanks to Drs Les Johnson and Mike Elstob for pre~ paring the course. The lectures had obviously taken months to prepare, along with the course notes and demonstration programs. I would also like to thank the BASUG committee with special thanks to Francis Tao, the course events organiser. And final thanks must go to all the members that enrolled for the course. A jollier and more hard working bunch would be hard to find. One last thing that I would like to add is : “Hey Les, when is the next course?" ) REM SOOO eee ea kat 1 REM MYSTERY 22% 2 REM * STOLEN FROM * 2 REM * CALL APPLE * 4 M oo AND MODIFIED + 5 REM * JULY 1982 * 6 REM aesonanEEO OAS Ono 20 TEXT : HOME = DIM O(10);R = 12 167 3O CALL - 1184; FOR M = 1 TO 80 O: NEXT 40 FOR I = 1 TO 10: acy 50 FOR P =R TOR + STEP 126 » POKE P ~ 128,160: FOR M 1 TO SO: NEXT M: POKE PCL) : NEXT P 60 R= R + tx NEXT I 70 VTAB 23: END DATA 66,110,465, 110,83, 110,68 5. 110,71, 110, HACHTNE CODE COURSE by Bob Raikes ‘This two-day course on Beginning Machine Code was a follow up by lan Trackman to his one evening talk on the subject to the Herts & North London BASUG group. One of the first things to be apparent was that the whole subject is much easier to understand when a machine is at hand to try programming on. Over the two days we progressed from the basics of "What is binary 2" to writing programs which would clear the hi-res graphics screen quickly, and restore an Applesoft program accidentally erased by the use of FP or NEW. On the way, the mysteries of using the DOS Toolkit Assembler and the Monitor's inbuilt routines were revealed: While those wha went on the course were not all beoinners, everyone benefited from the course: and the main question at the end of the weekend was “When is the next one?"+ August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 17 EDUCATION COLUMN by Norah Arnold THE EDUCATION GROUP I have learned from Frances Teo that some people who jained BASUG at Slough may be interested in joining the Education SIG. IF you have already written, then your letter is probably still in the pipeline and will be reaching me shortly. IF you would like to join but haven’t done anything about it, write to me via the BASUG Box Number. How about a bit more feedback from those who joined a few months ago? Now is the time to have a think about the last educational year and tell us what you found most useful in your work, what problems you met and what you hope to do in the futures TERRAPIN LOGO, CHAPTER II, AS we have now reached the end of one educational year and are preparing to begin another, it is a good time for me to look back and assess the effect that Terrapin Logo had upon the eight to nine year olds I began using it with in the Spring term, Without exception the children enjoyed their experience with Logo, although some obviously took their interest much further than others. On reflection, certain landmarks can he identified in the children’s approach to programming in Logo, The day when two or three of them came to the conclusion that it would be worthwhile trying to find out why some turtle-graphics programs had more bugs and Seemed vary difficult compared to others, was probably the first of these. Their conclusion, that if they consistently used angles of 120, 90, 40, 45 or 20 degrees life was a great deal easier, led them to work out the following reference table: Noy of No, of turns necessary degrees, to get back to the place you started from. 360 1 180 2 120 3 90 4 72 5 60 6 45 8 40 9 % 10 30 12 24 15 20 18 J.R. Systems presventys.......... User Services *€onsultancy *4oftware development + Insurance Coming Attractions * the Quilding Juite P55 - duilders* package *dlider £35 -®hotograph indexing For Details.... Write to 3.8.4 2 Rye Close Warpenden Werts. Yel. 05827 5100 PAGE 18 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 From this point some of the brightest children progressed by leaps and bounds, Although they did not take the table further, it made them recognise what an interesting number 360 was, after all ‘nearly everything divided into it!’s The other magic number was of course 90 dearees, Some children got so stuck with it that they became proficient in writing bug-free graphics programs using only 90 degrees and a few other angles. Another landmark was conquering the circle, After a wet dinner-hour one boy was able to pronounce, "I haven’t spoken to anyone for half an hour but I’ve done it. It’s just got to be REPEAT 360 (FORWARD 1 RIGHT 1)." He didn’t look back after that, Neither was the Logo confined to Maths lessons. The extensive list-handling _capabilities available led to it creeping quite naturally into English and Science lessons and forming a large part of a highly successful Art project By the way; Apple Logo and Terrapin Logo are both based on Mil:T. Logo and are almost identical. COURSEWARE WRITER, 2 review. A problem that I experienced when using Aristotle’s Apple to create ‘one-off’ revision quizzes for older students has been solved for me by the use of the Teacher’s Toolkit (Courseware Writer) available from Wida Software, The version I found most useful is upper-case only, which confines its use to text-based subjects for older students such as History, Sociology, Economics etc. although lower-case versions for various foreign languages are available. The CREATION program which is used to construct the question sequence, and the TESTER which enables the question sequence to be run by the student, are the warkhorses of the suites As with all test construction programs, thorough preparation definitely pays dividends and the use of these programs then becomes easy and straightforward. The fact that you are allowed up to eight lines for each question makes the Toolkit program handy for ‘wordy’ subjects where it is difficult to make questions short without them also becoming ambiguous. The flexibility of the answer area is nother good point. Answers can take up to eight lines, and these can be arranged in various ways. One could have eight alternative correct answers but I found it a good idea to give one or two alternative correct answers followed by a positive reinforcement comment (to follow a correct response by the user) and a negative reinforcement comment (to encourage after an incorrect response), A little ingenuity in thinking up varied and interesting responses is repaid by the fact that the user of the test does not get annoyed by the same response to his answers coming up over and over again, The tests I created with this program have worked consistently, but one or two minor irritations cropped up when using the other programs which make up the suite, I sorted these problems out fairly rapidly but someone less familiar with the Apple might have greater difficulty, However, the gentlemen of Wida Software would no doubt help to exterminate any bugs which may have crept into their programs: ES#SUG TOOL_ICIT NUMBER 2 GET_HEX by Cliff Wootton This tool kit routine will allow you to read the keyboard and test the value entered, converting it into hex. The entry values of the 6502 registers are irrelevant (ie they will be scrubbed anyway) The first example is a single hex digit input routine. This is illustrated in Listing A, GETHEX JSR RDKEY CMP #KZERO BCC GETHEX CMP #KTEN BCC OKDONE CMP #KA BCC GETHEX CMP #KG BCS GETHEX cLo ADC #309 OKDONE AND #$0F RTS Listing A Single Hex Digit Routine Of course, you will more often want ta get a two digit hex value, This will fill an entire byte which should be very simple (isn’t it all?) The next routine that is listed will accomplish this by calling the previous GETHEX routine twice and combining the two results, This is illustrated in Listing B. August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 19 GETBYTE JSR GETHEX GPBYTE JSR GETHEX ASL A PHA ASL A ISR PRHEX ASL A PLA ASL A ASLA STA TEMP ASLA JSR GETHEX ASL A ORA TEMP ASL A RTS STA TEMP JSR GETHEX Listing B Get Two Hex Digits PHA JSR PRHEX When getting data from the keyboard in this way PLA you often need to display the characters ORA TEMP accepted, as they are entered, It is by far the RTS simplest solution to output them after they have been tested for validity, If they are printed as soon as the character is entered, invalid characters must be back~spaced over and deleted, This is an easy enough task in itself but for a subroutine to work in the most logical (and structured) manner it must have only one entrance and one exit, To instruct a subroutine not to back-space on entry but to back-space each time it error loops is not so simple without leaving and reentering the subroutine at some point other than the start. This breaks the rules of structured programming which may not be everything but often "they’re all we've got", The easiest solution is to print the contents of the accumulator on return from the GETHEX routine. Listing C shows how to get hex digits and print the results. GPRHEX JSR GETHEX PHA JSR PRHEX PLA RTS Listing C Get And Print Hex Digit Depending on the routine you use to print the contents of the accumulator you may or may not need the PHA and PLA instructions, To implement this modification to the double-digit-get-hex routine, this PHA-PRHEX-PLA sequence is required after both calls to the GETHEY routine, Listing D shows how the print function can be integrated in this ways Listing D Get And Print A Hex Byte A more compact version might be as shown in Listing Ey GPBYT2 JSR GPRHEX ASLA ASLA ASLA ASL A STA TEMP JSR GPRHEX ORA TEMP RTS Listing E Get And Print A Hex Byte 2 A short explanation of the variables and syntax of these listings may be in order. Ido all of my machine code assembly with the APPLE TED assembler. ‘This was a forerunner of the APPLE TOOL KIT, Where I have called a routine that has not specifically been described then it is from the Apple monitor, You may wish to use your own routines if these are not suitable fur your application. Load immediate is signified by the # character which should be read as a hash sign,The immediate constants such as KZERO and KTEN are the numeric key range values. KZERO equates to $B0 while ICTEN equates to $BA, The constants KA and KG are the range checks for the alphabetic keys, The KA value equates to $C1 while KG equates to $C7, The variable called TEMP can be any location zero page or otherwise as you wish, Give these routines a try in your spare time. If you find a shorter way ta get the Same result please write it up for the journal. There are no prizes however, That is unless any one wants to donate an APPLE ///. If so I would be more than pleased to ‘look after’ it until I can decide on a winners PAGE 20 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 ANMMIAL, GENERAL MEETING Minutes of The AGM of BASUG, held at the Old School, Park St, St Albans at 2.45 pm on Sunday 18 July 1982. The meeting was opened by John Sharp, BASUG secretary. Apologies were presented for the absence of the Chairman, Frank Kay. It was proposed that Mike Preston be elected Chairman for the purposes of the meeting. This having been carried, the Chairman pointed out that there was nut a quorum and proposed that the meeting carry on as a normal meeting until such time as a quorum was present, 1, It was proposed by John Martin, and seconded Jim Panks that the minutes of the last AGM be taken as read, There being no objections, this was carried, 2. John Sharp then gave the report of the committee. The membership stood at approximately 1100, over three times the number 4 year ago. During the year BASUG had attended the PCW Show in September, the Holland Computer Club show in Utrecht in November, the ALCC Fair at the North London Polytechnic, and the Computer Fair at Earl’s Court also in April, with the APPLE 82 show at Slough to round off the year. The name of the group is becoming known throughout the world, Contact has been made with the IAC via the European Director Wolfaang Dederichs, meetings with him at Utrecht, and in June before and after his visit to the [AC AGM in Boston: The workload has been very high, and some jobs have not been done as well as they might have been due to lack of time. One neglected area has been the relationship with APPLE(UK) Although we have set up a relationship, meetings and contacts have been infrequent. We helped them put aut a marketing questionnaire, which they will now analyse and send us the findings. More could be done if the effort was put in, ives Brian Reynolds has agreed that information can be put in the boxes with the APPLEs sold, We have provided a number of services to members. Most letters have been answered satisfactorily. The group has PRESTEL facilities available which need to be developed in the coming year, The issues of HARDCORE are maintaining the same standard, and there have been many Ojriginal articles which have not appeared in other magazines, Both HARDCORE and UPDATE have meant a great deal of work by a small group of people, often into the early hours of the morning (in fact with one recent case, until 5 o'clock in the mornings Merchandising has become a major service to the group, with a steady increase throughout the year. Initially it took in software and ‘other items’, with John Rogers sending out software and David Bolton the discs, etc: In January the committee took the decision to pay a secretary to send out both as one order, This has now grown to be part time jab for three mornings a weeks Letters are coming into the PO BOX in a steady stream, in the region of 200 a week. It takes hours just ta sort them. At one time there was a peak after HARDCORE had been despatched, dying down when the next one was due, Now there is a steady flow. John Rogers has maintained an increasing stock of programs, almost certainly the largest of a user group in the country, A start has been made on documenting the programs, and an announcement on progress will be made soon. There have been problems with copies but there are few delays now, average turnover being within a week unless there is a specific copying problem, or stocks run outs At the beginning of April, the committee resolved to retain John Sharp as a part time paid consultant, not only to ensure the continuance of the group, but also in recognition of the effort already put in, Further developments in this direction are inevitable, The letters and general work has increased, and it is essential that someone be available all day to answer questions chase advertising, supplies, etc. HARDCORE still continues to fill 48 pages; and apart from providing a much needed exchange of ideas it usually manages to provide some new insight into the workings of the APPLE every issue, Advertising has dropped off of late, because there has not been time to chase it. The committee sees that its successor will have to make moves to put HARDCORE on a firmer more commercial footing as has been done with the merchandising. COURSES and events have been a ‘Cinderella’ service during the past years Events organiser Eddie Payne resigned in November leaving a vacuum until Fran Teo was co-opted, Despite this setback there have been a number of successes: As stated previously, BASUG has been prominent at all the major shows: The Machine Code course was very successful despite a struggle to make up the numbers, The same seems to be true of the PASCAL course, The LIBRARY has been another area where response has not been forthcoming. This is probably due to the high cost of postage, The ‘August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 21 exchange of newsletters/magazines with other groups has been poorer than expected, It is felt that perhaps we are too professional with HARDCORE, 3. The Treasurer pointed out that he was not in a position to present the report (see below). 4, The meeting not yet being quorate there could he no election for committee members, 5+ Discussion then began on a number of topics. a) John Wellsman asked whether as the TRS80 User Group have seminars and workshop weekends, which were well supported, could we not do the same, It was pointed out that the problems with course events organisation over the past year had not allowed such things to happen. Bob Raikes as nominee for the position thought something could be done along those lines: Mike Preston thought the lateness of disseminating information was one problem, that a three-day PASCAL course was too costly, that the need was for one-day meetings, etc. The Feedback from the show suggested that the majority of members wanted HARDCORE and the software and they were not too interested in courses/meetings. There would also have to be some changes with any new APPLES to add to the present ones. b) John Martin asked how financially viable the club was, and if so how much we could offload as paid work. The treasurer stated that there was no doubt of the financial viability. Prices were set to make a profit. The magazine does nat make a profit, The subscription basically pays for the £2000 approximate cost (incl postage) of each issue, Advertising needs chasing, contributions are not paid for, but there is a positive cash flow, which could be improved provided there was someone to put the effort in, Norah Arnold saw the need far more publicity. Mike Preston said that eventually a full time employee was required, We were not at the CALL APPLE level, but we were moving in that direction. At this stage in the proceedings, more members arrived, the meeting was quorate, VOTING FOR NEW COMMITTEE Three members were proposed for Chairman- Norah Arnold proposed by John Rodger and seconded by Bob Raikes ~ John Wellsman proposed by John Martin and seconded by Jim Panks ~ John Martin proposed by Fran Teo and seconded by John Welsman, The rest of the committee was nominated and seconded en bloc} nominated by Mike Preston and seconded by Cliff Wooton, The names were as follows!- Secretary John Sharp Treasurer Fran Teo Membership Secretary Jim Panks Hardcore committee Tony Williams members David Bolton Software librarian John Rogers Information officer John Rodger Courses/events afficer Bob Raikes Norah Arnold was voted Chairman and the rest of the committee was unanimously accepted, Mike Preston then proposed that John Wellsman, and John Martin be elected also, this was seconded by Fran Teo and carried unanimously, Discussion then ensued regarding the position of local groups. As there were only a small number at present, the committee could coopt a member from each, for a meeting when necessary, It was proposed by John Newell that it would he up to the groups to nominate themselves for cooption to such meetings, and by Cliff Wootton that a minimum of 20 members be in the groups to be eligible, John Martin proposed that the AGM sanction extending the practice of engaging part time support as and when needed at the discretion of the committee. This was seconded by Vivian Parkins, and carried by unanimously, The secretary put forward a suggestion by the outgoing committee that a work evening be held each Tuesday when there was not a local group meeting at Park Street. This was seen as a means not only of spreading the load, but also of involving more members in the running of the club. Discussion on the accounts led to John Martin Proposing and John Wellsman seconding that:~ The AGM agree to formally pass the authority for approval of the accounts to the newly formed committee and that the outgoing treasurer produce such accounts as soon as possible, with a view to the committee approving them and passing the active balance to the new treasurer, This was carried» John Martin volunteered to audit the accounts. Membership subscription was then discussed, with the following being proposed by John Martin and seconded by Bob Raikes!~ 4) The subscription excluding the joining fee be raised, ii) That it be not more than £15 4ii) The final amount be agreed by the committee PAGE 22 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group All points were carried. Discussion also ensued regarding the need for reminder of renewal, and of the possibility of starting a rolling membership (i.e, being annual From date of joining) This was referred to the committees liff Wootton suggested that publicity could be obtained by getting into the MICRO manarine bibliography. This was referred to John Rodger for action, There was also need for an information sheet for new members: There being no other business, Mike Preston proposed a vote of thanks to everyone who had helped during the past year and closed the meeting at 5.10pm, August 1982 A special purpose language for multiple choice tests and quizzes, questionnaires and Computer aided learning (CAL) — £50 + VAT # MICKIE programs can be written by people with no previous experience of programming. Many paople have neither the inclination nor the aptitude to master general purpose languages such as BASIC or Pascal * MICKIE can be used by people who have never used oF even seen & computer before. This is demonstrated by MICKIE's success with hospital patients % MICKIE is written in a simple to use. easy to remember format, designed specifically for the first time user who does not want to know more than is absolutely necessary about computers and computer languages. % Originally developed for medical history taking MICKIE has been evaluated in hospitals, schools and commerce. It saves time and provides comprohansive, legible and structured records, The original MICKIE was developed at the National Physical Laboratory by the late Or. Christopher Evans well known 5 the author of The Mighty Micro’ and The Making of the Micro’) Full Agpte implementation trom, SYSTEMICS LIMITED 21-23, The Br Harrow, Mide : 01-863 007: PFT 0081 seeman’ of nF ao APPLE SOUND EFFECTS & MUSIC BOARD - Built-in software means easy to use from Basic. Software included to easily create "Sound Tables". - ALLOWS SOUND WITHOUT SLOWING GRAPHICS Built-in amplifier gives volume control of all Apple sound output. - 3 voices + noise expandable to 9 voices Send £65. Tei: Leighton Buzzard (0525) 370621 ULE EKROSE _, Volume control / amplifier also available separately. Send £18. We also do l-off and small run PCB and assembly work. We do custom-made software, too. Ask ut Meekrose Lid 85 Waterdell Leighton Buzzard Bedtorashire LU7 SPL August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 23 INSTRUCTIONS Ala: RADTO — RTTY THE _VERY EASY WAY CONT A tx/rx switch by Derek Turner G3 LDR This article is aimed mainly at radio amateurs and others who are already familiar with radio teletype (RTTY from now on), and judging from the letters to BASUG and the interest shown at Apple 82 there are many who would welcome a description of the system I use. RTTY is a system which enables two machines to communicate text by means of radio waves. Radio amateurs discovered in the early sixties that they could use ex GPO Telex machines to communicate world wide in conditions previously possible using only Morse cade, In the last few years a renewal of interest in RTTY has taken place with the advent of the micro, This article describes one such implementation. Basically the Apple is connected via the games port to a modem which in turn is connected to a radio transmitter receiver. A real time clock provides once per second interrupts which provide the heartbeat for the intelligence routines. The program is written in machine code which carries out the fast bits and Integer BASIC which carries out control and string handling. The normal display consists of two independently scrolling windows separated horizontally by a status line about three quarters of the way down the screens Incoming tert is displayed without line feeds in the top screen while text for sending may be set up simultaneously in the bottom window. The receive store defaults to a size of 14k which constitutes a good few hours monitoring, The send side of the pragram is particularly powerful and includes many string handling features designed to allow the user to type ahead while the machine sends out the often repeated phrases or sayings that are heard all over the amateur bands» Rather than become verbose I am merely going to list part of the instructions and hope that the initiated will understand the finer points. The most powerful of these is possibly the set of routines which allow the machine to operate in unattended answerback mode. In this the machine if called will answer with the minimum of text and say that it is ready to receive a message. If a message for the station calling has been stored by the user then this will be transmitted, In any case if the station calling is known to the system then he will be greeted by name. CONT Q use second tx store CONT T repeat tx CONT R force letters shift CONT L run tuning routine ESC delimit keyword for message string CONTROL E SUBCOMMANDS QRZ capture callsign of station calling and update message strings NME input name of other operator BGN reset contact start time SER reset contest serial number ANS put machine in answerback mode MES update the five messages for specific stations CONTROL B SUBCOMMANDS CLR clear tx or rx store GET load text file to send PUT save text on disc DIR read names of text files on disc SYS display memory status AUT set software autostart mode REV review receive store » rx text normal » tx text inverse WRT dump receive store to printer rx text upper case . tx lower BUF change tx rx partition of memory CONTROL S SUBCOMMANDS SPD set baud rate CDE set baudot ascii or morse MDE send each character or wait for space then send word FIL set fall character WID adjust send width ALF suppress most punctuation characters TXT display BASIC’S stored messages LF suppress receive line feeds UNS force letters shift after space SPECIAL STRINGS (set up from BASIC) TIM TIME 1905 GMT Q@ 599001 AT 1905 GMT IN 7L28D WATFORD QSL? GéXXX DE GSLDR K K K CALL G&LDR DE G6xxXx OVER BACK TO YOU BILL . G6XXX DE G8LDR PSEK KK BYE TNX FER QSO BILL . G6XXX DE GELDR SKSK K PSEKKK CQ CQ CG DE G&LDR ete, PAGE 24 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 That's it so far, I am still working on more refinements such as a selcal system for recognising specific items on commercial RTTY stations and have been having odd thoughts about error correcting systems such as AMTOR} and as well as this a system for automatically scanning for a station calling CO, ‘The most interesting aspect of the whole system for me has been operating the answerback system, There is no feeling so strange as that when digging the garden and hearing the tones coming up From the shack and it’s your station talking to someone by itself! Sunningdale, Berkshires Gentlemen, T have run into rather a peculiar situation which has puzzled me, my son and all that I have asked so far. 1 ram “STOCK MARKET GAME’ which crashes if you respond to line 12’s question with a ‘Y’ (Branch Err) So I tried to list 12000 ~ nothing '' Then I listed the whole program - yes everything lists OK, well almost, lines 555, 560, 565, 570 all are repeated ! T took a hard copy and then deleted these lines then re-entered them, result still the same. Anyone got any thoughts 7777 My daughter who is now 10, has been found to be dyslexic and I am wondering if any members have had any experience with educational software in this context? It 1s her recognition of the written word that needs to be practised, She seems to have little trouble with her figures. We are waiting for her written assessment from the Centre which should enable us to choose her remedial instruction. Yours sincerely, Peter Trinder (Ed, There seems to be an observable correlation between dyslexia and compatibility with computers, So your daughter can count herself lucky to have such a father. However, for more practical help about specific packages to help reading, you could do worse than drop a line to BASUG member Bryan Spielman of Sinta Softwares who is working on the kind of package you need ~ and, of course, our very awn Norah ‘Arnold has quite a bit of experience in this area and will be glad to give advice) NICELISTER HEADINGS by MJ Parrott I was impressed by the program ‘Nicelister’ in the latest issue of ‘Hard Core’; it certainly improves printer listings considerably, However, 1 like to put a heading on my listings using an IMMEDIATE mode program and the use of the & and the PR# commands before NICELISTER precludes this, Hence I added a little more to the program (see the enclosed hexadecimal dump) which then gives the user the ability to print such a heading, With the madified version of NICELISTER the Applesoft program 1s put into RAM, NICELISTER is BRUN and the slot number, printer widthy and title, (if required) are entered after the appropriate prompt has been made. A slot number of @ merely causes a listing on the screen, One thing T noted is that printers which issue a line-feed with a carriage return are best used by entering @ printer width value of one less than the Full width. To modify the original NICELISTER, BLOAD it and enter the hexadecimal values as given in the dump, change the JUMP at $2000 to go to $8200 Ge. 80004C 80 82) and BSAVE it as LISTER, A$8000,L630A. HP RATEC TMA! iow TO AR259.BIOF 8S9- CS CE C5 D2 Ad Lo 9260- D2 CF CE D4 CS b2 AO 00 8268~- 13 CC D4 AD 00 D7 CF 3270- C4 D4 CB AD OO 4 CP DS @278- CC CS AV 00 00 00 00 00 G280- AS 36 AS 37 40 20 50 828B- FC AO 82 AP SF 20 3A DR 9270- AO 82 68 20 3A DE 20 G278- 20 0S 01 G3 20 FB ES 82AO- BA DO OF AS 36 48 AS 37 S2A8- 48 4C 18 A? 00 82K0- 48 8A CO 48 AO 82 AP 8b 20 DB AO 82 AY SE @2C0- 20 3A 82C8- G3 20 S20- AY 59 20 nS 00 DA 85 ¥ILO~ 03 AF G300- BP 60 20 2C WS 20 03 £6 86 EO AD 82 3A DB AO 82 AY 85 37 48 85 34 02 20 3A LR 20 65 81 20 FB DA 68 85 36 40 10 85 BE AY 02 85 SYVERSSASESASVSSSEBRARE 5 August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 25 FRENCH KEYROARD FOR appie IT by Tony Williams Hard on the heels of Apple’s long awaited announcement of foreign language versions of the Apple III comes a software product from Microsource which enables the trusty Apple II to display French characters on the screen, This package has been a long time in the making not because of any inherent difficulty but because of the restrictions presented by the Apple keyboard ~ there are just not enough keys to go round - and the large number of extra characters required by Frenchy Microsource, which seems to concentrate on devising packages for off-beat applications of microcomputers; developed this routine for Wida Software, the educational software specialists who produce computer aided courseware, mainly for the teaching of foreign languages, One year ago Microsource wrote a successful lower case and German loader which Wida has incorporated in its bumper ‘Apfeldeutsch’ package and other German teaching program The main stumbling block with French is the sheer number of extra characters ~ 16 in all - and there is no way to implement them on the Apple without resorting to a double keying sequence, Wida Software ruled out the use of hardware solutions, since its customers are almost exclusively language teachers and learners with only limited access to Apples, They insist on using the machine ‘as ic’. After long discussions it was decided to access the French keys in the following manner (as illustrated) which at first seems highly intricate but which in fact needs about ten minutes familiarization, comparable to that required by a dedicated French typewriter. If you want to access non-standard characters the Apple normally steers you towards use of the ESC, CTRL or CTRL-SHIFT conventions. However, in order to retain normal CTRL operations as far as possible, Microsource opted for the double dead key SHIFT-N solution instead, This means that on wanting to access, Say, a grave 2, you first sianal the coming change by typing SHIFT-N, then signal which change by SHIFT-> followed by the letter on which the grave is to be placed, ives e and voila, it emerges as ®. If a circumflex is needed, again signal the change by SHIFT-N, state which change by SHIFT-* and then the letter required, say a, producing 4. As far as possible the secondary dead key gives a visual clue to the sign it will produce, so that SHIFT-N gives * (the circumflex), SHIFT-2 (") gives a diaeresis, SHIFT-<¢ suggests an acute and SHIFT-> suggests a grave accent. Luckily French only uses these letters in lower case, except for ¢ cedilla. This is accessed by SHIFT-N alone, followed by C or c. Ca va? Another concession to the Apple’s original configuration is reflected in the QWERTY keyboard. While it would have been entirely possible to reconfigure it to AZERTY (and FRENCH KEYBOARD FOR THE APPLE II SHIFT SHIFT No m | Somer MICROSGURCE SHIFTN SHIFT> SHIFT N SHIFT< © vy O. Ses SHIFT N SHIFT2 6 suikT c SHIFT gon PAGE 26 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 ZWERTY in the case of German) it was decided that it was not worth the hassle, This concession also meant that there was no need for press-on keytops indicating the new keyboard, The keyboard remains essentially unaltered and a prop-up illustration (as below) is a sufficient memory prod. This sketch is pasted to the disk sleeve (an ingenious idea this) and also repeated in the package’s documentation, The Microsnurce/Wida Software lowercase and French character generator is written in machine code and after booting the special disk it is activated in your BASIC program by CALL 2048 (which accesses lower case) and CALL 2072 which specifies the language required, in this case French. German would be CALL 2069, The switch between upper and lower case is loggled by the ESC key. From lower case one press of the ESC key gives one upper case letter, a double press locks into upper case, One practical problem with conventions of this kind is knowing at any time just which case one is operating in (when an input is expected, for instance). This package dispenses with ugly status lines and exploits the cursor prompti 4 steady flashing underline indicates upper case} a rapidly flashing underline lower case. On the debit side, I have tu say that the lower case’s usurpation of ESC as the lower case toggle is irritating in that, naturally enough, SSC can no longer be used to get intu I-J-K-M cursor control. Microsource gets round this by using CTRL-Z instead, which does work, but I don’t like it. Fortunately the package is compatible bath with the Program Line Editor and with Super Editor (Boot PLE first) then RUN Super Editor then RUN the Hello program on the French disk which places the character set in memary,) Using these facilities enables one to largely forget the clumsiness of CTRL-Z cursor control. It would have been welcame to retain the neat Applesoft HOME‘TEXTIINVERSE! NORMAL instructions, but this seems to have proved impossible, The first two have been replaced by CALL 2057 and CALL 2054, INVERSE is activated by CONTROL-I and NORMAL by CTRL-N - which makes them extremely easy to rememer and use, FLASH 1s not available at all. Clear to the end af the window is now CALL 2060 and Clear to end of line 1¢ CALL 2063, When converting an existing BASIC program to Lower-case (French or German version) extensive use can be made of the Global Find and Replace feature of Super Editar to make these changes (before CALL 2049 has heen made) At the moment the French routine has been implemented in Wida Software’s authoring system, its ‘Teacher's Toolkit’, and in special French teaching courseware which it 1s developing, It has been designed for use within a BASIC program and not for word processing applications. THE HERTS. GROUP NEXT MEETING SEPTEMBER 7TH. A demonstration of the Alpha~Syntauri computer music synthesizer, This instrument is a high performance synthesizer featuring a —velocity-sensitive keyboard, a programmable eight-way keyboard split, sound on sound recording, plus extensive sounds definition softwares Reviewing the alpha-Syntauri in Byte magazine, December 1901, Steve Levine and Bill Mauchly wrote! “The system is more than just an Apple peripheral} it is a musical instrument in its own right. Tts price and performance clearly place it beside commercial synthesizers made by Mooa, Overheim, Arp, Yamaha and Sequential Circuits." Don’t miss this meeting if you are interested in computer musicr OCTOBER 5TH, PROGRAM GENERATORS. It is hoped that this will include a demo of "The . Last One" and C.O.R.P, Herts. qroup meetings are held at?~ ‘The Old School, ; Park Street, St. Albans. August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 27 APPLEWRITER IT A review of the latest word processor from Apple By Jim Panks and Richard Teed I have heard people say that the new Applewriter TI is the best thing to come from Apple, While I would not go quite that far T can say that it is superior to the old Applewrster 1.1, It is written by Paul Lutus and distributed by Apple Computers under the Special Delivery Software label. It is available from all good Apple dealers and it costs in the region of #75 plus the usual 15% VAT, The documentation is a very well written Operating Manual in the usual Apple Fashion, It consists of 106 pages divided into three main chapters, under the titles Text Editor, Printing and Word Processing Language. The last title is interesting, Applewriter II has a powerful language of it’s own called WPI. and it is used in the program} all the help menus and screens are written using its The Operating Manual is written to a high standard and it would be nice to find all operating manuals written to the same high standard. Applewriter II can be used in the normal manner, that is to say with 40 columns, It also has the facility to make use of a Lower Case Chip, and to my surprise it can be used with the Super ‘R’ Terminal 80-Column card. On booting up in the normal way: you are asked if a Lower Case Chip is present. After answering this, you are presented with the Editor Menu, This contains a copyright notice and a list of the most frequently used control characters} you are asked to make a selection from this menu, At this stage you can load a file directly into the Editor or you can ga into the Help Menu which consists of a tutorial on the facilities offered by Applewriter IT. A quick comment on the Help menu is in order here, If at any time you get stuck whilst using Applewriter, you can qo into the Help menu without touching the text already entered in the Editor, This is a nice facility and it beats grabbing for the Operating Manual every few minutes, There are three main menus, the Editor Menus Additional Functions Menu and the DOS Menu; they are all obtained by simple commands, The Editor Menu has already been explained and the next menu is the Additional Functions Menu, This is obtained at any time by pressing control Q. ‘This menu allows the loading of print, tab and glossary files, it also allows the display af carriage returns and use of the Shift Key Option, From this menu Applewriter 1.1 files can be transferred to Applewriter II files, which is a very good idea considering the number of users, This aspect is displayed throughout the program and the documentation, and from my point of view is a strong selling paints The DOS Menu allows the manipulation of files without the destruction of files already in memory; it allows you to initialize, delete, rename, lock, unlock and cataloa the disk of your choice. When you first enter the Editor proper you are presented with an inverse bar at the top of the screen} this is optional but helpful. The bar is full of information; it includes the current mode of the cursor, the amount of memory left, the lenath of text entered, the present position of the cursor, the current position in the paragraph and the name of the current file in memory+ The cursor is a flashing block with an underline in the opposite colour, and it changes when the current cursor entry made is changed, so that when entering capitals you get a in the centre of the cursor, When in the cursor move mode, it changes to a flashing ‘@’. In the cursor move mode the InW,KGL keys are used for single movements and the E,S,D,X keys for up;down 12 lines and leftyright 24 characters or one word. The arrow keys are used for deleting and retrieving characters. The control keys B and E put the cursor at the beginning or the end of the file, the key C gives automatic case change » and K locks uppercase, There are facilities to delete, move, retrieve and find characters, letters, words and paragraphs. It is possible to save parts of text to disc, and to retrieve parts, It can also display other text files from disc with the file in memory untouched, This 1s ideal when you want to find a piece of text from another file and enter it into the present file. Tabulation is looked after very well and it is possible to have ‘tab files’, This saves loading tabs manually every time you need a specific tab set. Applewriter II allows easy footnotes, underlining, subscript and superscript although you must have a printer that will obey the commands: To help users a group of special characters have been implemented, these include underline, reverse slash and brackets ©, PAGE 28 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 Printing the file is easy. You can set up print files and load them from disc, or you can alter the default file, so that the most used print file will be available every time, The file lets you alter the following parameters} Margins(Left,Paragraph,Top Bottom Right.)-Page number ~ Printed lines ~ Page Interval - Line Interval ~ Single Page ~ Printer Slot - Carriage Return - Printer Mode (Left,Fill,Centre,Right Justify> ~ Heading (Top and Bottom Line) - New Page - Continue Printing. All the above parameters ‘can be embedded in the text or set using the WPL. Other commands that can be used in the printing mode include the stopping of printing and the sounding of a bell followed by a message on the screen -- “Any one for tea - press return when last biscuit eaten," It is very useful when using single sheets or doing mailing shots. You can make it print a hundred then stop for tea ar to let it cool downs A useful addition is the ability to put relative values in the text, so that you can make pieces of text move around the paper. All you do is put sIm+5 and it will move the margin right 5 spaces from the previously set left margins (lm+5) Grm=5) To put the text back you just put slm-5 and it lets the left margin return to it’s proper place} it is very nice and works wells (am-5) Grme5) How many times have you wished that you could look at two parts of a file at the same time 7 NEVER ? Well, it is one of those split-screen routines, (just like Visicalc 2) You can work in either of the sections and it makes comparing text a doddle ! Now I will try to explain the WPL. It is fairly simple to grasp and uses a language that does not use line numbers, and if saved on disk it can be made into real structured sub-routines} that is to say, you can make a number of routines that will be capable of being strung together to form a larger more sophisticated program. On the Applewriter TT disk are several WPL routines that allow, for instance, the automatic printing of address labels, the counting of the number of occasions that a word is used, the automatic formatting of a letter with personal greetings on it, Altogether it is a very useful idea and will I think be of great assistance to serious users, If your spelling is as bad as mine, it is possible to use Goodspell to check the spelling in Applewriter II files, Well I hope my article does justice to Applewriter IT because I believe that without buying @0 column cards,220 cards or very expensive software , you will not find better value Richard Teed has helped in the writing of this article and his comments on his experience using Applewriter II over the last two months follow! The replace command has a difficult to use command structure, with special characters for wild cards and returns, if these special characters are needed in the search string as the characters themselves then a different set must be used, for example you can havet < for the delimiter = for any length > for return and ? for wild card If you want to use a "2" for example in the search string then you must choose from another set of replace characters such ast # for the delim:ter $ for any length % for return and & for wild card A much easier syntax which many other editors use 1s something like!- / or Cescape> for the delimiter = for any length <return? — for return control A to interpret the next character not as a special character control 2 — for wild card control N for any character except the next following the control Ns The above I feel would make the search and replace commands a lot easier to use, The manual is with out doubt very well written and easy to follow but it really does need an index, My final complaint is with the Word Processing Language! Paul Lutus clearly designed this program for editing blocks of text but it is so good that it can be used for creating assembly language files and other line orientated files, what is therefore needed of WPL is the ability for the macros to work on a line by line basis which they are unable to do at the moment. By August 1982 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 29 allowing All Applewriter II commands to be included in macros (that means cursor moving commands) this word processor / text editor would be one of the mast powerful available for any machine, and that includes larger computers, not just micros. I am grateful to Mass Micros of Welwyn Garden City for allowing me to borrow Applewriter IC for this reviews a Fatal anid nest artesian i) hal (ities Dear Mr, Sharp I recently attended the three day Pascal course (at Brunel University) organised by BASUG Although I am a virtual newcomer to computers in every way (I have had an Apple II for four months) I found the course extremely stimulating and enlightening Dr. Les Johnson, leading the course, provided an intensive ‘hands-on’ approach to Pascal. Briefly this incorporated lectures on programming languages, the = P=system, _ structured programming, control structures in Pascal, procedures, functions, recursion and data, The lectures were well supported by practical workshop sessions, With programming experience I undoubtedly would have gleaned much more from the courses However, thanks to the advice T received on books, to the moral support of the tutors and to the revelation that Pascal is a very manageable language, I feel now that learning Pascal is actually possible and well under way» I would strongly recommend such a course to any B.A.8.U.G. member and should like to thank Dry Tohnson for his help and support. T should add that the food at Brunel is also up to the standard of the teaching! As an afterthought, is there anyone in the Berkshire area, conversant in Pascal, who would be willing to discuss the occasional problems which arrise? If so please phone me at CROWTHORNE 5191, or contact me at the above address, ‘Yours sincerely, Roger M. Sherwin Selangor, Malaysia Dear Sir, T have just purchased an Apple II computer and I have a few problems which I think you might be able to help, Firstly, about the 'RESET’ key. How can I inhibit the ‘RESET’ key and at the end of the program, enable it OR create an autostart program such that whenever the ‘RESET’ key is depressed, it will not ‘break’ or stop the current program but will load and run a program called HELLO, Secondly, I would like to point out that the Copyright Act in my country is not strict, therefore pirate copies of programs are quite easily obtained, At the moment T am freelancing for a local company here which is dealing with APPLE computers, I find that some of my routines are stolen and used by the company for their benefit, I get paid about 40% each time my package is sold. T found out that the company makes copies of the packages and selling them without paying my share, As computer sales in this country is slow, it is the only company dealing with customised software that suit the Malaysian condition, Can you please tell me how to change the address of the Address Field or the Data Field of a disk thus avoiding copies being made. The Address Field normally start with the bytes $D5/$AA/$96. If any of this bytes were changed, DOS would not be able to locate that particular Address Field causing an error. Any alternative method to avoid copying would be appreciated, ‘Thank you for your kind cooperation and I hope in due time, there would be an APPLE club here toa. Yours sincerely, Derek Wee (Ed, There are programs available which allow you to protect your own programs which run under DOS 3.3, The protections include the ability to cause the program to self run if the user attempts to list or modify the program or press ‘RESET’, Also the disks cannot be copied with normal copy programs, An example of this sort of program is PROTECTOR III from SBD software. Other companies such as INNOVATIVE DESIGN or QUALITY SOFTWARE protect their own programs and may be able to advise you on protection schemes A dedicated pirate will copy your programs no matter what protection schemes are used, but the abave measures will put off most peoples) PAGE 30 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group August 1982 L.A.U.G.H.S. Leicester g Apple oo T —t sers Group for Help and support 1# you own or have access to an APPLE computer you need to be a member of L~A~U.~G.~H.~S. The benefits of membership ar: Automatic membership of the British Apple System Users Group (BASUG) . 2)This includes 6 copies of “HARDCORE” the club magazine per yea D Access to the software libraries of both the group and BASUG. 4)Access to the Library of both the group and BASUG. S)Membership of the International Apple Core through BASUG. 6)Discounts available from both local dealers and the main BASUS group. 7)Courses on various topics. B) feces to: teliog: Apple sufferersfor the Help and Come to one of our monthly aeetings at the “WINSTANLY ARMS” (See Kay it over on the first Wednesday in each month, phone Hazel Bown the club secretary on Leicester AFFILIATED TO B.A.S.U.6. August 1962 HARDCORE-The Journal of the British Apple Systems User Group PAGE 21 TIME. _MacHING Ir by Ian Pawson The ‘Time Machine Jf is a real time clock/calendar card for the Apple J(. It provides time and date information with programmable interrupts of 1/1024,1,60, and 3600 seconds, The card has a recharge: battery that will power ‘the clock chip for up to 10 weeks, It is trickle charged when the Apple is switched on, The clock provides six date formats and seven time formats, all software selectable, The onboard 2k EPROM accupies the $Cn00 RAM space and does nat conflict with the $C200 space, ‘The EPROM contains programs to read the time and date from simple BASIC statements, allows the user to send commands to the clock, and interrupt routines to display the date and time ‘on the top line of the screen, and to write the date and time into an Applesoft string, After reset or power up, the default date and 24 hour time format isi DD-MMM-19YY HHIMM!SS It 1s somewhat unusual for an American product to display the date in UK format. This can be changed, if required, with the Format command to one of seven time and six date formats, To display the date and time on the top line of the screen just type PREnIPR