PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, April 1990

What's smooth, dry and goes down a treat at parties?
(And isn't a bottle of Martini.) Why, it's Jonathan Davies!
Let's find out what he's been up to today, shall we?

I've just come back from a couple of stultifyingly tedious lectures,
eaten a decidedly bland lasagne in the canteen and been subjected to
almost an entire episode of Neighbours, so I'm in just the right state
of mind to churn out a few hex listings. No, hang on. There's
something missing. Click! That's better - The Smiths on the stereo.
Perfect. My mind is now a blank.

Actually I couldn't find any hex dumps this month, so you're off the
hook for now. Instead there's a double bumper-pack of goodies (sort
of) from Jeffrey Sweeting. First up, we've got his fabaroony
Function-Key Mode program and then it's onto Recovery +D a handy file
recovery thing for swanky +D owners.

Hmmm ... "useful" programs, really, and very nice too. But howzabout a
few thoroughly frivolous and pointless ones? Come on, you lot, get
your First Steps With The Speccy For Utter Wazzocks / Advanced Z80
Opcode Manipulation For Intellectual Demi-Gods (delete as applicable)
books out and get programming. No, now! Come on, Program Pitstop needs
you!

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FUNCTION-KEY MODE
by Jeffrey Sweeting
from Your Sinclair, April 1990

[The program crashes if the EDIT key is used ]
[after a function key has been selected. JimG]

Have you ever looked at that mysterious row of keys marked F1 to F10
on flashy, expensive computers and wondered what they do? Have you
ever wished you had some, whatever they are? Well, pine no longer.
Jeffrey Sweeting, a veteran YS reader (two years no less), has come up
with a solution.

Function keys are what it's all about. They're a rather useful breed
of key which can be pre-programmed to do what you want, rather than
being restricted to printing up boring single letters and numbers.
Obviously the Speccy's a bit lacking in this department, so Jeff's had
to make its normal keys double up as function keys too.

Once the program's been typed in and run, pressing Symbol Shift and
Space together will give you a new 'F' mode, with its own cursor. Once
you've done this, prodding a letter or number key will call up one of
your pre-programmed definitions. These are strings of characters - up
to 7,000 each, if you've got a couple of days to spare.

The program has a built-in key programmer, and is well documented, so
you should be able to see what's what. Just type it in and off you go.

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RECOVERY +D
by Jeffrey Sweeting

No, not just a coincidence. Jeffrey Sweeting has been busy this month,
and here's his other contribution. It's been written for the opulent
+D interface owners among us (among you, rather - I'm way down on the
social scale), so the dosh-less majority will have to give it a miss.
It does the same job as the +3 file recoverer printed a while back -
recovering files, basically.

Say your secretary's just written a letter with Tasword 2 to your
personal financier asking him to buy gold bullion, and saved it onto
disk. Suddenly you notice that the price of gold has gone sky high, so
you get her to delete the letter and forget about it. But, hang about,
what's this? A temporary fluctuation. You change your mind again. So
what do you do? Whip out Recover +D and recover the file, that's what.
The only catch is that you'll need to remember what type of file the
one you lost was (Basic, code, array or whatever) and give the program
the relevant info. Once you've done that though the rest is easy. So
fire up your velvet-trimmed Speccy and get typing.
