PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, November 1990

A solitary teardrop fell across his cheek. As he stood by the bus,
with his packed lunch and pencil case the wistful tremor of JONATHAN
DAVIES' bottom lip betrayed the misery of having to return to
university. "I'll miss you, guys," he said. We broke open the champagne.

I was thinking the other day (Oh no. Ed), how is it that whenever you
bite into a Just Brazil, or the Brazil nut choccies from Roses and
things, the nut inside is always completely intact? I mean, whenever I
try to crack a Brazil nut, nine times out of ten it disintegrates into
hundreds of little pieces, and even when I do manage to get a whole
one it's got lots of little pieces of shell sticking to it. Surely
they don't have a huge factory somewhere with thousands of people
fiddling about with nutcrackers, huge piles of broken nuts all over
the place and every so often someone standing up, shouting "Hurrah!"
and holding up a complete, unblemished nut. If you know how it's done,
do write in and explain.

Onto the programs then, and we've got another throbbing, pulsating
collection of listings to type in. First up, there's a very spooky
pattern generator sent in by regular contributor Rick O'Neill and then
a thing called The Ghost from M Harris. A trifle weird, that one, but
a bit of a corker nonetheless.

Right then, off you go.

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PATTERNS
by Rick O'Neill

Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But, believe me, it is. The
first clue to its excitingness is that it's been written by Rick
O'Neill, a chap who's provided recent Pitstops with some of their most
genuinely exciting programs, including last month's Distorted
Scroller. But to find out more I think you'll have to type it in and
see what happens.

The procedure is simple enough. You need to type in the Basic section
and save it onto a tape. Follow this with the hex section, typed in
using the Hex Loader (full instructions last month). Specify the start
address as 33024 and the filename as "PATERN_C". Then save the code
that's generated after the Basic bit, reload the whole lot and bingo.

Rick actually sent a couple of extra programs on his tape which he
suggested I used in preference to this one. The first, an Address
Book, was jolly good but a bit long. You may just see it in a future
Pitstop when I've got more room. And the second was a bit crap.

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THE GHOST
by M Harris

Now I've come across some pretty unintelligible programs in my time,
but this one really takes the chocolate digestive. From what I can
make out (but don't quote me on this) it converts your Spectrum +2A or
+3 into a normal, friendly, cuddly 48K Speccy, as far as is possible,
so that 48K- only games will run. But surely, you cry, that can be
done by selecting 48K Basic after switching on. Not so, according to
former Hacker Of The Month M Harris, the guy who wrote the program.
Doing it the usual way apparently won't work with older games. But
with The Ghost, as it's curiously called, even titles like Bombjack,
Frank Bruno and Locomotion can be fooled into working. Some things
won't though, like Speedlock-protected games and (I quote) "others
that check 0000 for what should be there but isn't". Eh?

Getting it going
Right, so off we go then. The procedure is non-standard but pretty
simple. Just type in the first program, save it just in case (but you
don't need to keep this bit) and then run it. The computer will appear
to reset. Now type in the second program and RUN 20. It will save a
copy of itself, plus a copy of the code the first program generated,
so have a fresh tape handy. If you now reset the computer, and reload
the thing you've just saved, you should find your +2A/+3 has become a 48K.

Techno Twaddle
There's always someone who wants to know more, who's never satisfied.
It makes my life so much harder. (Just get on with the job. Ed) Sigh.
Righto, as I really haven't a clue what all this is about I'll quote
Mr Harris directly ...

"Blah, blah, blah ... puts a copy of the 48K ROM into page four, then
shuffles the memory map into one of the special configurations (so it
would, if you could actually see the pages, be in the order four,
five, six, three). The only problem is that as the ROM will be in page
four, and that page is in the contended RAM list, everything happens
slowly (including the Load/Save). So I've changed the delay loop in
the Loading routine, but left the Save one alone ... blah, blah, blah
... replaces all the bits that Amstrad moved ... fills new 128K code
area with C3s to generate a new interrupt table for all those games
that use the blank addresses that used to be there ... instead of
jumping to FFFF on interrupt (using 39-3C as the vector) it will now
jump to C3C3 which will then redirect to FFF4 ... if loading problems
arise, try POKEing 1512 with numbers around five to nine (originally
seven) ..."

And so he goes on. And on. I hope all this makes sense to someone. I
was okay up to the interrupt bit, but then everything went all black
and I woke up inside a spaceship and ...
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