PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, June 1991

He's the man with the toothbrush and pyjamas, and the very, very
smelly bed. JONATHAN DAVIES rubs his eyes and says "Oh no, not again".

What's your favourite programming environment? Do you feel more
comfortable with the curtains drawn, all the lights turned off, the
brightness turned up on the telly and the collar turned up on your
anorak? Or are you the get-it-all-out-in-the-open type - your Spectrum
laid out on the patio, shades perched on the end of your nose and an
elaborate cocktail sitting comfortably to one side of the keyboard?

However you prefer it, you're bound to take a liking to this month's
pair of rather good programs. Secondly there's an original, useful and
wholly corkendous listing called Timecode, from Ton Mutsaers, but
before that here's a demo to go with Paul Dias's WindowX (which you
may well have typed in last month). I suggest you read on

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WINDOWX
by Paul Dias

[see YS910506.ZIP]

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TIMECODE
by Ton Mutsaers

This month's #50-winner will appeal to anyone who's into messing about
with multi-track tape recorders, VCRs and (mainly) mixtures of the
two. It's been written by Ton Mutsaers, who hails from the
Netherlands, and it's spookily simple but breathtakingly ingenious.

So what does it actually do? Quite simply, it turns your Spectrum into
a "real-time counter". Eh? Well, what you do is connect the computer
to an audio recording medium, like a tape recorder, the audio input of
a video recorder or anything like that and it'll record a series of
time codes onto it. When you replay them the computer will pick up
exactly where the tape is and display its position (in hours, minutes
and seconds) on the screen. So it works a bit like a tape counter,
only it's much more precise and a jolly sight more versatile. You'll
be able to use it for synchronising multi-track recordings, getting
audio and video signals lined up properly, all sorts of things. The
only limit (as so often seems to be the case) is your imagination.
You'll also find that the numbers are printed in nice, big letters on
the screen, so with the help of some suitable technology you could
superimpose them onto something else. (If you want.)

So all that stands in your path now is the interminably long hex dump
below. Before you tackle that however (and wait 4 weeks for us to get
round to printing the end of it), type in the Basic bit and save it
onto a tape with SAVE "timecode" LINE 9050. Then, using the Hex Loader
(of which I've slightly modified line 230 as I don't think it'll work
with this program otherwise), type in the hex dump remembering not to
type in any of the spaces - they're there purely for readability. Type
STOP (Symbol Shift and A) when you reach the end to save the code
after the Basic part. When you reload and run the program you should
be presented with a couple of options - Record and Play. Play isn't
much use until you've recorded something, so do that first. Simply
start recording on your cassette recorder/video/whatever and press the
key. Time codes will be recorded (starting at 0) until you press
Space. Run the program again, rewind the tape and select Play. When
you play the tape the computer will pick up the codes and display the
point it's at.

Various things can be tweaked, such as the time between codes (which
is normally one second), the responsiveness of the program to picking
up codes and the format of the display.
