PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, November 1991

Life isn't all strawberry mousse and treacle pudding, you know.
Just eat all your listings and you'll grow up big and strong -
just like that JONATHAN DAVIES.

Hold it right there! I saw you about to turn that page, hoping I
wouldn't notice. Come on, a regular diet of long listings is just what
the doctor ordered, and they'll keep your mind fresh and alert in
between playing all those boring games.

This month's prescription consists primarily of Daniel Azzopardi's
Really Sound Sampler which is, erm, another sound sampler. Hurrah!
Type it in and then wash it down with Neil Highley's Fade Away. Give
me a call if you're not feeling any better in the morning. (Or something.)

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REALLY SOUND SAMPLER
by Daniel Azzopardi

Yes, its another sound sampler. Yes, it'll actually work this time.
But no, it's not just the same as all the others. It is, in fact, much
better. The main difference is that Daniel Azzopardi (Does he? Where?
Ed) has incorporated lots of 128K features into it. He says that not
only can you record samples up to 96K long (which is roughly three and
a half weeks of recording time, according to my calculations), but the
program also takes advantage of the dear old AY sound chip. I'm not
quite sure what he means by this second bit, but I've a sneaky
suspicion it might be something to do with the different volumes you
can play things back at. It also boasts variable frequencies and a
sort of graph thing, like at the beginning of Angels. (You know! That
crap BBC drama about nurses where everybody died!) But all of this
doesn't make it a 128K-only program. It'll work fine on 48K Speccies
too, but without quite so many features.

Before you start worrying about how it all works and everything, the
first thing to do is get it up and running. To do that, type in the
BASIC section of the program and save it with SAVE "sampler" LINE 720.
Then you'll have to load up the Hex Loader and type in the Hex
listing. (Oh no! Several thousand rapidly dispersing Pitstop readers!)
Save the code produced after the BASIC part and there you are.

Upon running the sampler, lots of writing will appear, along with a
little line that moves slowly along the bottom of the screen. That's
your graph thingy, which will jiggle up and down if you play something
through the ear socket. (The ear socket being where you play in what
you want to sample, of course.)

I won't bother listing all the keys the program uses, as it displays
them all on the screen for you. The extra 128K functions might need
some explaining though. Keys 1 and 2 swap between the various 16K
pages of memory, so you can store a sample in each. G, on the other
hand, "glues" all the pages together into one long sample. E does an
echo (echo, e c h o) effect, which apparently works best with small
samples.

Don't expect to be bowled over by the sound quality or anything, but I
defy anyone to come up with a better Speccy sampler. (Although if you
do, you'll have to wait a few months to see it in print, as I've had
it up to here with samplers for the time being.)

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FADE AWAY
by Neil Highley

Here's one of those slightly sad little programs that gets squeezed
into the gap at the end of Pitstop. But that doesn't mean it's crap,
not by any stretch of the imagination. Lord, no! Just don't expect it
to do a great deal, that's all. What it does do is "disintegrate" your
screen, making it a handy alternative to the usual CLS command.
Hurrah! There's no Hex, the REM lines are optional so just type it in
and go (as Vidal Sassoon might say). There are some parameters you can
fiddle about with, but they're all explained in the listing so I won't
go into detail.
