SHORTCUTS
ZX Computing, January 1987

Ray Elder with another prize winning collection of unusual, practical
or ingenious routines.


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SECURITY ALERT
[file: alarm]

M.A. Shortt has a similar liking as I do for "silly" programs and this
one has no real purpose except to give heart attacks to customers who
press the keys of a Spectrum on the shelves of local stores!

When run the Spectrum sits there with the usual Sinclair copyright
logo looking innocent and tempting, but when someone presses a key ...

(We take no responsibility for anyone who enters it into display machines -)


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HURRAH FOR CURRAH
[file: wordgen]

The Currah microspeech unit Is one of the most fascinating devices you
can add to your Spectrum, but it is not easy to program. A. Welsh's
program Word Generator will provide welcome assistance for owners of
the beast by enabling easy manipulation of allophones to enable you to
create a tape or microdrive dictionary. Change the lines 330 and 340
for cassette storage.


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SOUND SYNTH
[file: SoundSynth]

Robert Glavas makes it a hat trick with this, his third published
program in Short Cuts ...

A great little program which could keep you happy for hours, the
machine code reads sound data from address 40000 and each number
represents a "pause" which controls the output. This table of data
must end with a value 0.

There are a few demos to get you started but the best sounds will be
achieved by experimenting.


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DAISYWHEEL PICTURES
[file: daisywheel]

Two very short programs which perform a unique feat, producing graphic
style pictures on a daisywheel printer. Actually any printer could
produce this type of pic. and it could easily be modified to operate
via the Interface 1 RS232 Interface on a serial printer.

The author of this minor miracle is Charles Barron who lives in
Aberdeenshire. He explains:

"The copy routine normally looks at each pixel on the screen and
prints a dot if it is coloured (INK) and leaves it blank if it is not
(PAPER) coloured. My routine prints a * instead of a dot, this means
of course that it is also eight times the usual size!"

"First of all give the printer a command to print in as compressed a
mode as possible so the *s are as close together as possible, also use
the least line spacing you can on your printer, possibly 8 or 10 lines
per inch instead of the usual 6."

"The routine prints sideways and needs to get 176 characters per line.
If you cannot do this with your printer then you will have to settle
for only printing part of the screen. This can be calculated by taking
the maximum CPL your printer is capable of from 175 and replacing the
0 in line 60 with the result."

"Finally switch off the automatic perforation skip if it is enabled on
your printer, and then, at last, load and run the program and have
your screen picture ready on tape for the program to load and then print"

See Figure 1 for example. These clever printer routines win Charles
Barron the Star Cut award for this month.


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UDG GRIDS
[file: UDG Grids]

We haven't printed one of these for many moons now and we know that we
have quite a few new readers who would find It useful. Mr. J Plater of
Kent sent in this rather neat version and they are great for those
off-computer planning sessions (Figure 2).

Designed for use with the ZX and Alphacom printers it'll keep churning
out the grids until BREAK is pressed.


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POSTER PRINT
[file: P.DUMP]

John Scott of Stroud sent us a huge screen dump to demonstrate his
Spectrum Serial 8056 printer routine. To use It load in the screen
picture you want to print and save it to RAMdisk with:
 SAVE !"DUMP" SCREEN$

Now load your saved version of his program. If you saved it using the
autorun line number then you can go away and forget it for half an
hour as it takes that long to print it.

The print is done in two halves sideways on the paper and once
completed then you will have to sellotape the two halves together to
produce a unique wall poster, especially if you used a graphics
program to create an original picture.
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