PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, December 1992

If it's comfort you're after then you've come to the right place.
Butter those crumpets and curl up with Craig Broadbent's numbers.

Well, as the festive season approaches, the Pitstop is more full of
life than ever before - I've got such a plethora of good stuff planned
for you! Quite apart from this month's ample offering, there's a SAM
special in the pipeline, as well as another stunning piece of work
from our old pal Richard Swann plus possibly a Chaos and Fractals
special, and hopefully the return of a popular feature from the
Pitstops of old, last seen in issue 33. (Can you giss what it is yit?)
Complex negotiations are going on even as we speak- what excitement,
eh? To put a relatively small dampener on things, I've been told I
can't have an extended Xmas Pitstop special, but never mind, I'm sure
I'll fit it all in somehow. In the meantime, on with this month's
packed show ...

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SCROLL-A-LOAD
by Nigel Grange

[Half of the BASIC listing was missing. The full listing]
[wasn't printed until the April 1993 issue.         JimG]

Just when you thought it was safe to leap with joy, swing your pants
and cry "The scrollers are dead, long live the scrollers!" and other
well-known phrases that don't actually make sense, along comes your
friend and mine, Nigel Grange, with a unique incarnation of the genre,
and absolutely the last message scroller I will ever print ('til next
month, anyway). This offering is unique because it actually scrolls a
message across the screen while simultaneously loading a program.
Amazing, eh? And if that's not enough, you can define the scroll line,
change the loading stripe colours, load headerless code and even use
your own font.

There's really no need for me to explain it all here (and take up
valuable space) when the CONFIG program supplied does such a good job
all by itself. Save the code first, then type in the BASIC program.
Stick your own message into line 117 and RUN it to select your
choices. Once customised you can save the code routine along with your
preferences to tape by following the on-screen instructions. It'll
even show you how to start your personalised copy of the routine. Once
the routine is up 'n' running, you can overwrite the code up to
address 64960 without incurring damage.

A Note on Hex
Yes, the machine code routine is shown in Hex form, and yes, that
means you need to use the notorious Hex Loader to enter it. So for
those who aren't regular readers, this is how you work the accursed
thing (deep breath): Type it in, run it, enter the first 5-digit
number as the start address, enter the 16-digit hexadecimal number,
and then the decimal checksum on the right. Then, unless you've made a
hash of things - which is very likely when you're working with - ugh -
hex, you'll have to enter the next hex line and checksum, then the
next, and so on, until you enter STOP as a hex line to quit the
program and save your code, which the Hex Loader will quite kindly do
for you.

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REMLIST
by John McIntyre

Next up this month is a utility for BASIC programmers, and, let's face
it, if you're reading this column, you're bound to be a BASIC
programmer really.

Picture the scene then - you type in your program in chunks, and put a
REM at the top of each chunk, as all good programmers do. Inevitably
your program soon gets uncontrollably large, and the only way to
squeeze in all those much-needed extra lines is to renumber the
program. And then what? You don't know where all your subroutines
start, that's what. And that's annoying. Of course, that's where
John's utility comes in - you just type it in and save it with SAVE
"Filename", and then MERGE it into your large program, in which you
have conveniently left lines 9990 to 9999 empty. Type GOTO 9990, and
RemList asks you for a starting line. It then proceeds to search your
program for REM lines, and when it finds one it PRINTs it on the
screen (change the PRINTs to LPRINTs to send the output to a printer),
showing you the location of all your subroutines at a glance.

By the way, the routine doesn't recognise REMs after colons, so give
each REM its own line. And there you have it. Superbly useful,
stunningly easy to use - what more could you ask for?

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ERRATA
To wind up this month, it's the questions and answers desk. First a
solution to Ben Jerrit's problem with Daniel Azzopardi's Sound Sampler
in issue 71 - the answer, it seems, is not in the typing in but in the
saving. Gary Seviour from Midsomer Norton suggests that SAVEing
"sampler" LINE 720 could solve all your problems.

Now yet more problems with Dicky's Manic Miner Editor. Sorry Mr A R
Cooper of Newcastle-under-Lyme - line 2810 of Part One should read
COPY, not GOSUB (a small bug in my BASIC to ASCII converter - you'll
be pleased to know that Jon's just acquired a new one so that this
sort of thing will never happen again ... possibly).

AAAAAAAARRGGHH! (to put it bluntly). Yes, it's TuneMaker time again. I
wish I'd never printed the darn thing now! This time it's lines 1530
and 1540 causing the problems- they ought to read:
1530 LET E$=B$+C$+A$: PLAY E$
1540 LET F$=F$+A$
Apologies to Wellingborough's own Keith Morton for that. And finally,
still on the TuneMaker theme another quick explanation of those
symbols that were supposed to help you but obviously didn't.
* <hash> means a #
* <space> means tap the SPACE bar
* <inv space> means press either GRAPH then CAPS SHIFT and 8, or else
INVERSE VIDEO then SPACE then TRUE VIDEO. And that really is it.

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VOON
... as a mattress from Squornshellous Zeta once said. I've already got a
load of corkers lined up for next time, but if you've got something that
really has to be seen, send it in as per usual to me, CB, at Preponderate
Pitstop, YS, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2BW, and I'll see if I can't
squeeze you in.

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