PROGRAM PITSTOP
Your Sinclair, April 1993

Something for the weekend, sir? We have a fresh Craig Broadbent
just over here, full of juicy listings.

Welcome back once more. I was lying abed this morning when a hideous
thought suddenly struck me. In the excitement of going to sleep at a
reasonable hour I had completely forgotten to write Pitstop. So as in
an effort to keep you from noticing I'm still finishing the bit at the
end, here is some wibble about university. Uni (as they call it in
Australia) is actually rather brill and I would recommend it to
anybody - I mean, there are fifteen pubs on the campus alone! And the
things I could tell you about Typography (but won't, because you'll
just ask what it is like everyone else, and I haven't got the time,
the patience, or the space left in this intro to tell you). (Sounds of
SAM saving text file to disk.) Phew. Finished. Let's look at some
programs instead, eh? (Pant pant pant.)

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CHARSET
by Guy Palmer

[RANDOMIZE USR 32862 to run. JimG]

Now for some reason, I've been bombarded with loads of bold character
sets recently - Guy goes one step further and gives us a choice of
four different sets to swap between at will. Just enter the code (I've
printed it as a Decimal Loader, as Jonathan seems to like them, and
he'd only change it anyway if I printed it as hex). Having done that,
POKE 32863 with an integer between one and four inclusive, and voila,
one instant character set change. Just so you know what to expect, set
one is that nice bold one which everyone seems to send in, set two is
a sort of bold/italic cross, set three is in reversed squares, and set
four is the normal Sinclair set. So there you go.

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ALTERNATIVE CLS
by Wayne Hunt

For those times when a CLS just isn't enough This chunk of code gives
you fourteen alternatives to everyone's favourite command. The
different routines, their addresses and lengths, are outlined at the
top of the very next column.

* Bar FX - 60000, 49
* Attributes - 60049, 51
* Mirror FX - 60100, 34
* Xer Scroll - 60134, 36
[This is wrong. There's a redundant routine at that address.]
[The correct address is 60149, size 21.                 JimG]
* Fader - 60170, 38
* Shutter FX - 60208, 22
* Pixels Up - 60230, 43
* Pixels Down - 60273, 53
* Pixels Right - 60326, 18
* Pixels Left - 60344, 18

If I were you, I'd type them all in first using the Decimal Loader
provided, then you can try them out and save the ones you like
separately. It's relocatable, so you stick them where you like (within
reason), and to get each routine going, just type RAND USR start
address, except for the character scroll, which needs RAND USR 60148
to start [(60148) is just a NOP; the routine starts at 60149. JimG].
Incidentally, you may have noticed, there are fourteen methods but
only ten routines; this is because you can use the horizontal and
vertical pixel scrollers together to make, erm, diagonal ones. Oh, and
xer stands for character. (Little throwback to Computer Science
lessons there. Schooldays, eh?)

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DRAW
by Guy Palmer

Guy's second offering is the complete opposite to Wayne's thing - just
type it in, RUN it and load a SCREENs$, and it will be plonked upon
the screen in an interesting manner. No fourteen different methods
here, I'm afraid, but what do you expect from fifty-eight bytes? Tch.

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SCROLL-A-LOAD
by Nigel Grange

[See YS9212PP.ZIP for original notes and full program. Jim]

As I mentioned last month, Linda's swanky Apple Mac file transfer
program decided to eat half of the listing first time round (some
might say that it was simply expressing its opinion of scrollers), so
here it is in its entirety. Well, sort of. This is the BASIC listing -
you'll still need the machine code from issue 84 to get the thing up
and running. Back issue, anyone?

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TOOTHBRUSH
Oh yes, I almost forgot that. Right, I'm all packed and ready to head
to the sunny sou'west to spend an unseasonably warm holiday with my
friend John. I'll see you next month when I'll be back in Reading, home
of ... er, Reading University. And me, of course. Send your stuff to
Craig B, at Poltroon Pitstop, YS, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2BW.
(I wonder what the 2AP postcode is for then? Keeps the postie on his
toes anyway.)

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