ot Newsletter of the _ Long Island Sinclain/Tinex LIST INGS à Users Grou Oaa. NEWSLETTER
Issue: MARCH 1996
ececeesecensceseuses Next LIST meeting April 14th, 1996 peuesesecsesecesece
L.I.S.T. officers
Pres. Harvey Rait Vice Pres. Bob Gilder Tresurer Robert Malloy Cor. Secy. John Pazmino Assoc. Editors Fred Stern
Harvey Rait Publisher Bob Gilder Libr. Tom Skapinski ei ea Please send all inquiries and
submissions (including dues) to: L.I.S.T. Mr. Harvey Rait 5 Peri Lane, Valley Stream, N. Y. 11581
rr
COMING EVENTS: The next L.I.S.T.
meeting vill bs Sunday 4/14/'96
at 2 P.M. at the home of Harvey a Rait (see address above).
Listing Policy Annuak Dues $16.06
One ‘sample' copy sent upon receipt of Business size SASE.
Copies provided on EXCHANGE BASIS with other bona fide user groups. LISTing is published monthly except July and August by LIST (Long Island Sinclair Timex) Group, a not for profit user group We are always looking for articles, programs, reviews etc. to keep our
members informed and entertained. You maintain full credit and copyright. Portions of this publication may be reproduced, without written consent. Please give credit to LIST when reprinting articles.
LIST disclaims responsibility for any damage you may do to your computer a6 a result of reading any articles in LISTing.
PAGE 1
KAII S RAMBLINGS
The officers and members of LIST wish to extend our deepest Sympathies to the family of a long time member, Dr .Armand Drucker whom we have learned has recently passed away. Armand was a devotee of the Sinclair Timex community and an ardent supporter of LIST for over ten years. Although he did not attend meetings recently, from his correspondence we know that he had progressed over the years from the TS-1000 to the QL operating system. He will be missed.
We also wish to extend our condolences to the members of the CATUG users group who lost a long time member, Steve Cooper. Steve was their Vice President and took a very active part in their continuing successes.
OT OON
We always take for granted the talents of some of our members. A case in point is LIST’s own John Pazmino. John attends most of our meetings here in Valley Stream,Long Island. In order to attend, he takes an arduous trek with subway and the Long Island railroad, and then walks a mile from the train station to my home. Even though we offer to Pick him up at the Station, he would rather walk. A one mile walk to John is a blink of the eye to him since he is attuned to distance in light years.
To clarify the allusion of space travel that I presented,I have to go a little bit further. Whenever John comes to the meeting he empties his backpack of literature for us to read. John is a very active member of the AAA. No he does not own a car and belong to the Automobile Association of Ameriica, he belongs to the Amateur Astronomers Association. Did I just say that he belongs to that association? John was its president from June 1988 to June 1990. He was awarded the Amateur Astronomers Medal in 1992 for meritorious service to the science of astronomy. He is an instructor for a basic astronomy course that is approved by the New York City Board of Education for in-service credit. The AAA has John as the chairman of their computer group,where members share information regarding astronomical programs and computer accessories and their availability through metro area outlets.
If you would like further information contact the AAA of New York,Inc. 1010 Park Ave. N.Y.,N.Y¥. 10028. Or take note of their new INTERNET address: RN .5305@0ROSE .COM
What! You think his work is done? Not by a long shot. John is also the chairman for the Brooklyn College Observatory use of the large refractor and accessories that are available for group and individual use.
Lest I forget he is also a coordinator the Jane H. Douglas Memorial Library housed at the Hubble Planetarium in Brooklyn. The library contains over 2000 books and Periodicals on astronomy and related subjects as well as the archives of the AAA.
A monthly publication called "EYEPIECE" is the Journal of the AAA of New York. Throughout the Eyepice, John Pazmino’s name appears as the contributor of articles, or just the fact that he is the instructor for a physical astronomy class held weekly.
John is an active online user and is always bringing us downloaded information concerning the TS world (which is Probably out there in space between galaxies).
PAGE 2
Although 1 am not an astronomy buff, I find the field exciting and interesting, and enjoy reading about it. Look for comet Hale-Bopp’s latest competition-designated 1996-B2 (Kyakutake) during March and April.
ENIAC
On Feb. 14, 1946 a large machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was introduced to the world at the University of Pennsylvania.
Its original purpose was to compute ballistic trajectories for artillery shells; its end result was the modern computer. The Eniac had 17,468 vacuum tubes;the Intel Pentium, a popular PC brain, has 3.2 million transistors.
The Eniac could add 5,000 numbers in a second; the Intel Pentium can add 70 million.
Five women were used as Eniac programmers because the war effort absorbed so many men. Four of those five married men who worked on the project; the fifth married a dentist.
Who said that computer nerds have no family tree.
re ne
TOKYO, Feb.29,1996-Making a dramatic leap in the speed of communications, three separate groups of researchers have succeeded for the first time in transmitting information at a rate of one trillion bits a second through an optical fiber. The achievement is the equivalent of transmitting the contents of 300 years’ worth of daily newspapers in a single second, or conveying 12 million telephone conversations simultaneously through a wire made of glass.
This is 400 times faster than the fastest commercial systems in use today, which carry 2.5 billion bits, or 2.5 gigabits, a second. Systems with capacities 10 gigabits a second and 20 gigabits a second will be deployed this year.
The new speed record will be termed in terabits,(one trillion bits per second).
Is there really such a thing as "WARP DRIVE" ?
assigned numbers over those same local
Be | l Compa n ies lines are exempt from access charges.
That exemption is the result of a ruling
. oF. 9 the Federal Communications Commission
A ssal il A T&T S made in 1983, when computer modems , . were stil! a novelty item and the Internet
' was an arcane technology experiment
used primarily by military researchers nte rnet a n and university scientists. PA
“The exemption from access charges
was meant to be temporary exemption for
n IOUN MARKOFF = what was then a fledgling industry,” said Dave Dorman, president and.chief execu-
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 28 — A day tive of Pacific Bell, which provides local
after AT&T announced its ambitious new strategy to offer millions of consumers low-cost access to the Internet, its arch- rivals, the loca! Bell telephone companies,
service in California and Nevada. “The line-services market has now matured. With giants like AT&T entering the mar-
ket, it is no longer a fledgling industry, and sar tame a, AAS dies Gai the exemption is no longer justified.” little-known loophole in the nation's tele- -The local telephone companies attempt-
ed in 1987 and again in 1989 to have the
phone accounting rules that will force the exemption lifted, but failed, in part be-
seven regional Bel] companies to provide
i cause of significant consumer resistance
Da itso with free local connec- to paying higher rates for on-line and
Mere T's network. electronic data-base services. But now
e telephone voice calls, for which that more than 11 million consumers use
AT&T now pays the Bells billions of dollars the local phone network to connect to on- a year in "access charges” to connect
local customers to AT&T's long-distance Une services like Americe Online and
Compuserve, and AT&T plans in March to begin marketing Internet access to its
PAGE 3 Continued on Page 6
network, computer connections made to
SS Last week I had received the NESQLUG news letter. They are (a CORNER hosting the QLBoston QL show in Bedford, Mass. The show schedule states: at 8:00 AM the vendors will set up their
eases wares; at 9:00 the room will be open for the QL arrivals and at noon to 1:00 PM, lunch. From 1:PM to 4:30 the room will be open for sales and demonstrations. There will be numerous hardware/software doorprizes given away all day. John Taylor, QUANTA Treasurer stated that of ALL The QL SHOWS SCHEDULED, WORLDWIDE. in 1996, the QL BOSTON show will be the show of the year! Please, don’t miss it!!
lL eee!
A Saturday night reception and banquet will be held on the second floor in the Ramada Inn. The banquet will cost $19.95 per person. There will be an awards presentation and a QL Quorum of a panel of knowledgeable QL volunteers will try to answer any questions pertaining to QL hardware and software. The evening ends with a folk song sing-along plus elbow ending and general discussions until midnight.
Sunday, May 19th, at @9:AM, a Qlunch will be available at Dorothy and Al Boehms home at 33 Selfridge Rd; Bedford, MA. There will be several QL and QXL setups for demos and discussions. Coffee and Tea with donuts in the AM and buffet sandwiches for lunch - leave when you: want to. It appears that this will be lots of fun... and I am looking forwards to being there! Please come, one and all!!
I have just received eleven Quanta library disks from Vic Avery, Head Librarian. Five disks are replacements for library disks already in the Quanta library. The remaining six disks are NEW additions for the library.
5 replacement disks: LG-@1, GR-®3, MA-@®2, UD-@1, & UG-@8.
6 addition disks: DE-10, ED-@3, GS-07, GS-08, GS-09, & UG-14
LG-@1 The Library Guide disk has been updated reflecting new additions and
some changes.
DE-10 contains a ’THESAURUS DEMO” program.
ED-®3 is a collection of morse code; ’MORSE SUITE’.
GR-@3 An upgrade of Mark Knight’s programs, *MOLECULAR GRAPHICS’
GS-07, @®8, & @®9 Three new disks in compressed format, *TEXT ADVENTURES’.
MA-@2 ’POP CALC’ a calc program.
UD-@1 An upgrade which cures an obscure bug in ’SUBCOPY’
UG-®8 An upgrade for Dilwyn Jones ’VIEWER’, now can read IBM text files.
UG-14 AN upgrade of ’HBUTILS’ previously on UG-®9, and ’*PROCMAN’, a collection of Procs and Functions to include in your own programs.
PLEASE NOTE FOR ACTION: Delete the old ’HBUTILS’ files from existing Disk
UG-09 and RE-NUMBER GR-@4 to be GR-10.
Please contact me for any QUANTA LIBRARY disks you require: Bob Gilder, 69 Jefferson Place, Massapequa, NY 11758.
I have lots of items that I wish to talk about; however; I find myself somewhat grief stricken about a loss of a long time member of LIS, QUANTA and a subscriber to IQLR; Dr. Armond Drucker; died recently. I’m not sure that I have met him and all I know about Dr. Drucker, that he was a member of LIST. There had been many occasions which, we, the officers of LIST, would ask each other if one of us knew Dr. Drucker.
during the middle 1980’s our meetings were held at the Huntington, LI Library. Our member turnout was great; approximately 40 plus local members attended our monthly meetings. There were lots of demonstrations of hardware and software, helping some members assemble Spectrum emulators, who were not inclined to use a soldering iron.
PAGE 4
During the meetings, many members asked questions about their favorite computers, and some members never asked questions at all. Those members who participated with demonstrations, asked questions, were those members we knew. Was Dr. Drucker one of those members who attended our meetings and digested as much as he could without reveiling himself.
With hindsight, I have begun to realize that we, the officers of LIST, failed to realize that there were members that may or maynot have been helped during our meetings as they sat silently. IF only we had a sign in book so that we would be able to know some of the LIST members that may have slipped through the cracks! Was Dr. Drucker one of those? I will never know. Dr. Armond Drucker, may you rest in peace.
The past few months I’ve been busy with formatting disks for quite a few USA, QUANTA members (approximately 400 disks). Finally, I decided that formatting disks with my ED drives may unnecessarily shorten their usefulness in the long run ( wear and tear ). I decided to use some of my "Real cheap’ SONY, 720 K drives for formatting disks.
I am sure that many QL users, tend to find the task of formatting disks kind of boring, well, I, do! Anyway, I wrote a small formatting program in SuperBASIC which I call "FM". The program appears below:
5 TK2_EXT
10 FORMAT flp3_
15 BEEP @,30 :PAUSE 25: BEEP 20 FORMAT flp4_ 30 BEEP @,30 :PAUSE 100: BEEP 40 PAUSE 50 RUN 10
As soon aS I insert disks in drives 3 and 4, the program is RUN. I get up from my chair and start some of my chores, such as house cleaning, cooking and so on. When I hear a short BEEP, drive 3 has completed formatting. When I hear a long BEEP, both drives have completed formatting. When I am free from my chores, I remove both formatted disks and insert two disks in the drives and press any key & drive three starts to format the disk and that is how I accomplish both house work and formatting diskettes. The program is simple, however, it will never make it to the market but it does the job for me.
At the end of the business portion of the March LIST meeting, we settled down into Harvey’s computer room, where Bob Malloy demonstrated OQTPI, a Pointer. Environment communications program. Bob’s presentation really went over "“BIG’, and all of us in attendance sent letters to Fred Stern in Florida.
Bob was the professor and Harvey (including several of us) was the student. We were able to ’hook up’ to several boards and down loaded some files. Some of the files had margins set at 10 left and 90 right, so printing the text would be cut off at the right margin. Harvey attempted to change the margins in Quill, however, they didn’t budge. So, we *printed’ the files to disk( _lis extensions) and loaded them into The Editor SE. The files were then formatted left 1 and right 80 and the files printed beautifully.
I have just received a Super Gold card from John Taylor, of QUANTA. It operates just fine and it comes with a parallel cable , manual and a female connector for operating the Super Gold card from an external 5 volts DC. I noticed that the ROM on the interface has been upgraded to version GC 2.49 as my first SuperGold Card, has version GC 2.47. If any One requires an upgrade, let me know. See you next month........ Bob Gilder
PAGE 5
bell Companies Assau A lai s internet Flan
Continued from Page 3
nearly 20 million customers who have modems, the Bell companies contend that they are subsidizing their competitors in a business they themselves plan to enter.
AT&T drew industry attention on “Tuesday when it introduced plans for its new residential Internet serv- ice, which would be free for fewer than five hours of on-line time a month and cost $19.95 a month for unlimited usage.
Underlying AT&T’s new strategy is the company’s vision of the Inter- net and the World Wide Web as om- nipresent information resources that will be instantly available to its ‘customers’ fingertips without re- quiring a separate dial-up modem connection for each use.
“We think that'peaple yill leave their telephone lines on all the time,” said Tom Evslin, vice president for AT&T’s Worldnet service, as the company’s Internet business is called. “The Web is not useful to them when they have to wait a: minute for their modem to connect.”
This new model of on-line all-the- time connections would allow cus- tomers to be alerted immediately ‘when E-mail arrives, for example, or when there are news updates. In fact, some software companies, like Pointcast Inc., plan to take advan- tage of such continuous Internet con- nections by providing software that would turn screen savers for person- al computers into the equivalent of a newspaper that continually updates itself throughout the day.
But the load these open circuits:
will place on the local phone compa- nies’ networks represents a cost that the Bell companies contend that they should not be forced to bear. Local telephone engineers say the modern phone network.was never designed to handle millions of computer data sessions, which tend to be longer than voice telephone calls.
“AT&T is paying nothing for their usage,” said Alan C'amporcero, vice
THE BORN LOSER
president of F.C.C. relations at Pa- cific Bell. “It’s in their interest for the connection tb stay nailed up
` whether anyone is using it or not. That puts a lot of pressure on our network. We're simply not engi- neered for that kind of use.”
AT&T's Internet plans, word of which began to circulate on Monday, have taken a toll on the stocks of other on-line companies and Inter- net-access providers, which do not have the resources or the huge cus- tomer base to allow them to easily match AT&T’s offer.
The selloff continued yesterday, hitting in particular three of the cur-
New questions about alecpholein pkene .. accounting rules.
rent Internet-access leaders: Net- com On-Line Communication Serv- ices Inc., whose shares fell $2.375, to $20.375; PSinet Inc., down $1.75, to $9.375, and Uunet Technologies Inc., down $3.375, to $28.625.
Nationwide, long-distance carri- ers paid local telephone companies about $30 billion in access charges to local voice networks in 1995, accord- ing to Daniel Rheingold, a telecom- munications industry analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York. But when it is a computer modem on the line, rather than a human voice, the
_ local call is free.
“It’s a really inappropriate use of the telephone network because the voice users are being asked to subsi- dize data users,” said Michael Klee-
man, a telecommunications industry . expert at the Boston Consulting .
Group in San Francisco. “1 think the local phone companies will go to the F.C.C. and request the commission
.competitors weaknesses?”
to eliminate the exemption. If that doesn’t.happen, it will drive the local phone companies crazy.”
But other analysts contend that in the face of rapidly changing technol- ogies and exploding consumer inter- est in the Internet, the local phone Companies may find it almost impos- ‘sible to restructure the rate system in their favor. -
“As these previously separate in- dustries converge, the question is can you find a way to use your assets to your advantage and exploit your said James F. Moore, president of Geo- partners, a consulting firm in Cam- bridge, Mass.
Ultimately, the local telephone compantes may need to look for a technological edge that takes advan-: tage of the fact they they — not long- distance companies like AT&T — have a direct connection to each customer’s home. While AT&T's In- ternet customers can use a modem to place free local calls to connect to AT&T's network computer, the transmission speed of such connec- tions is limited to 28,800 bits a second using today’s fastest modems.
But the Bell companies can offer much faster Internet connections through special types of lines called 1.S.D.N, or Integrated Services Digi- tal Network, which offer speeds of 128,000 bits a second. An even faster circuit, called a T1 line, can transmit data at more than 1.5 million bits a second.
Already, some Bell customers around the country are willing to pay $30 or moe a month for 1.S.D.N. connections, or several hundred dol- lars a month for T1 lines. But most Bell companies are not able to offer such connections to all customers.
“We're progressively entering a‘ data-intensive world and the local companies have to re-engineer their networks,” said Jerry Parrick, pres- ident of enterprise network services for U S West, the regional Bell com- pany based'in Denver.
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
PERSONAL COMPUTERS.
The Computer Ate My Homework |
By PETER H. LEWIS
N Valentine’s Day in 1946, a half-century ago tomorrow, scientists in Philadelphia unveiled the Electronic Nu- merical Integrator and Computer, Eniac. The first electronic computer weighed 30 tons and filled a room. A few years later, experts were predicting that computers might . Someday weigh as little as 1.5 tons, and that dozens of them might be installed around the world... s=
Today, computers weigh far less
than 1.5 tons. Tens of millions of them go into service each year, rang- ing from massively parallel compu- tation engines that simulate weather patterns to humble little chips in wrist watches and dolls and automo- bile dashboards.
What about 50 years from now?
Even the experts know it is reck- less to forecast computer technology more than five years out. Bill Gates once said that 640 kilobytes of RAM Ought to be enough for anyone. But what the heck, here goes:
In 2046, we will still be complain- ing about slow computers, lack of bandwidth, incompatible standards, high prices, rapid obsolescence, in-
_comprchensible documentation, computer bugs and Viruses, smut on line, invasions of privacy and poor technical support. It is just that there will be more computers to complain about.
If this last week was an indication of things to come, ] am tempted to go back to the typewriter and rotary dial phones. From a technical stand- point, it was the Valentine’s Day Massacre.
First, my laptop died (R.I.P., 1991- 1996). It would cost more to repair and upgrade it than it would cost to buy a new model.
Then, my new digital voice mail system went on the blink, cating the first 10 or 15 seconds of each new message and sometimes garbling the rest.
Then there was a curious electron- ic-mail message from the chairman of my Internet provider company, assuring me that the company was aware of the technical problems and that it was hiring more people and installing new equipment to fix the
problem.
Sure, it was often a problem to get through the busy signals, but I had not noticed any significant troubles.
As if on cue, that was the last message I received before my elec- tronic mail vanished.
When I tried to retrieve the next batch of my electronic mail, a euphe- mistically. named ‘‘dialogue box” popped on screen. The dialogue. con- sisted of the message “ERR: Mail- drop lock busy.” The only repartee | was permitted was to click on a button that just said “Sorry.”
Just then, poof! More than 100 electronic messages I had received in the preceding two days, most of them still unread, simply vanished from my mailbox.
AS a seasoned computer profes- sional, I realized instinctively that the proper technical response was to grab my head and scream.
The sudden rush of carbon dioxide had no effect on the computer, and
the voice-recognition system had not .
been trained to recdgnize the phrase “Aaaaarrrrgh!” at as
Plan B, beating on the keyboard with the mouse, was equally ineffec- tive.
However, I discovered in the pro- cess that while I was barred from receiving my mail, I could still send messages. So, I composed a terse memo to my Internet provider's technical support electronic hot line. “Dear Incompetent Morons,” it be- gan, and the tone grew less polite from there.
PAGE 7
` Cause of a se
My Internet provider is not named here, because years of experience have taught me that the angrier and more accusative J get with technical support people, the more likely it is that the problem can be traced back to something stupid I have done.
With the humbling possibility in mind that it was my fault, not theirs I took a deep breath and called tech- nical support, by telephone. A re- corded voice told me that the aver- age wait to speak with a human was 18 minutes and 45 seconds.
-No timeto wail An emergency
call went out to an executive at the company who promised to pull some Strings to help me. Several hours later I checked voice mail.
As expected, the.phone system ate the first few seconds of the message. But I caught enough of it to hear: “... you reported that something was wrong with your electronic mail. We've checked it out, and there does. not appear to be a problem. If you have any other questions, you can
reach me by E-mail at...” ` Duh
1 waited until midnight, hoping
` that the telephone waiting line might
be shorter. It was, by a few seconds. Finally, a human answered. He as- sured me the problem was easy to fix. The trouble, he said, was that the people who had the tools necessary to fix it would not be in until the following day.
Dusting off my Unix skills, which can be completely buried-under not much dust, I dialed my Unix shell account and successfully logged on. tw my taii system: The réiief was overwhelming as two days worth of backlogged E-mail began pouring onto the screen. . f
One of the last messages was from Technical Support. It was an autó- matic reply, generated by the com: puter, acknowledging my cg competent :Morgn” , message. Be `
serious backlog in techni- Cal support requests, the reply stat- ed, I should not expect an answer to my query for 2 to 3 weeks.
Fifty years ago, on the day they pulled the sheets off Eniac, no one could have imagined the wonders of. personal computers, digitized voice mail and electronic mail. One can only imagine what marvels await us in the future.
AIQI EXpands Its Wed —
Phone company offers local dail-up access to Internet
COMBINED NEWS SERVICES
In a long-awaited move, AT&T Corp. yesterday said it will begin offering local telephone dial-up access to the Internet, jump-starting it with a free one-year trial for residential customers.
AT&T said it began taking orders yesterday for the service, which will be available March 14. It includes 200 dial-in locations in large cities, with local phone numbers for 80 percent of the U.S. population. Internet customers search out local
‘phone numbers to avoid long-distance charges as they spend time online. .
Under AT&T's trial offer, home users who en- roll in 1996 get their first five hours a month of Internet use free for a year, with no minimum sub- scription fee. Unlimited access is available to all AT&T customers, including businesses, for a monthly rate of $19.95.
The company said it will offer two plans for non- AT&T consumers, with one priced at $4.95 a month for the first three hours of access and $2.50 for each additional hour, and a second uulimited service plan priced at a flat $24.95 a month.
That’s similar to prices charged by other Inter- net access providers, which range from $14 to $35 a month. The $19.95-a-month plan is comparable to offers from H&R Block Inc.’s CompuServe unit and Netcom. America Online Inc.’s Internet access
WHO ’S
service, GNN, costs $19.95 for 20 hours.
Subscribers can receive an AT&T-branded ver- sion of Netscape Communications Corp.’s Naviga- tor browser software, although users can log onto the service through any other Internet search soft- ware, the company said.
Spokesman Mik? Miller said AT&T planned to offer a new stsacard of customer support, with hundreds of op: ra-ors answering customer inquir- ies around the c ack.
On Wall Street. the AT&T plan was seen as a threat to smaller Internet access companies, given AT&T's 80 millio 1 residential long-distance phone customers. Stork in one such company, Netcom On-Line Comm inications Services Inc., fell sharp- ly yesterday. :.-1t David W. Garrison, the com- pany’s chief o, erating officer, said Netcom has faced big competitors before and been successful.
The AT&T service is the “opening shot in what will be a very hot commumcations war,” said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a Be- thesda, Md., research service.
AT&T first began offering its WorldNet Internet access last June to businesses that pay thousands of dollars a month for private high-speed lines. Ri- val MCI Communications Corp. has teamed up with Microsoft Corp. and is reselling the Microsoft Network online service.
ONLINE
Some of us here at LIST have been wondering how many of our members are using modems with their Sinclair computers. It would be helpful if those of you who are into communications would take a few minutes to let us have the following info.
COMPUTER USED COMMS. PRGRM BAUD RATE 6s 6s vs ctee cess EMAIL ADDRESS............. ONLINE SERVICES USED...... SUGGESTIONS FOR LIST......
You.can reply to me at sithsr 74776 .2342@compuserve.com
bmalloy@chelsea.ios.com
of tne following addresses: (Internet ) Or, you can use our snailmail address.
Bob Malloy
PLEASE RENEW NOW! Time to renew! Don't Miss out on news and information about our S/T computers.
PAGE 8
Subaitted by John Pazmino PC GRAPHICS ON SPECTRUM by Andreas Schraepel {From COMP.SYS.SINCLAIR with minor editing by John Pazmino. Mr Schraepel is at 100661.1052@COMPUSERVE.COM. This conversion utility is designed ONLY for the 290 Spectrum emulator, which has the facility to attach its Interface serial port to a file.)
I did a simple program to convert PC-pictures to the Spectrum last January [1995]. I just got my copy of Z80-3.02 {Spectrum emulator for the IBM] and wanted to try its features. You have to create some B/W PCX-files for it (256x192 of course). I suggest the wonderful PAINT SHOP PRO for Windows for this. [PCX is one of the standard Windows graphics formats accepted by Paintbrush. ]
It's just a Sinclair BASIC program, but it works fine! And a nice
work for you to type in the following BASIC. Fire up the emulator, switch on Interface 1, type in the following listing, save it!
Then connect your PCX file to the "RS232 Input". [That is, assign this port to the PCX filename.] Execute the progran.
0 REM No binaries allowed here. [A reminder to Internet callers that this is a program for offline use, not as an approval to post PXC files on COMP.SYS.SiINCLAIR. ]
1 DEF FN m(Z,S,Yr)=16384+2048*INT(z/8)+32*(z-8*
INT (2/8))+256*r+s:REM [Get this code correct or else!)
2 DEF FN a(x,y)=USR 30000
3 FORMAT "b";19200:CLEAR 29999:CLS #:INPUT " *PCX to SCREEN converter*"''' "Give me a name for the"'"outputfile.."'"The picture will be saved"'"after conversion "'t'Name:"; LINE n$
4 INPUT " *PCX to SCREEN converters"!!!
"Now connect your 256*192%*2 PCX- picture to the R3232/Disk-Input.Then select the colours for the picture by the following three INPUTs. Thereafter reading and conversion will start.."''"Select value for INK (0-7)";ink'"PAPER (0-7)";pap'" BRIGHT (0 or 1) ";bri'!
5 BRIGHT bri: BORDER 6:PAPER pap: INK ink: CLS:PRINT #0;AT 0,0;BRIGHT bri; PAPER pap; INK ink;CHRS$ 6;CHR$ 6;CHR$ 6;CHRS 6:DATA 221,42,11,92,221,126,4,221,166,12,79,221, 126,5,221,166,13,71,201:FOR f=30000 TO 30018: READ w: POKE f,w:NEXT f
10 CLEAR #: OPEN #4;"b" 20 DIM h(128):FOR f=1 TO 128:LET h(£)=CODE INKEY$#4:NEXT f£:REM This gets the PCX-header in h()
The following two lines are unused. [They can be missed out.) 30 LET pwidth=h(9)+256*h(10)+h(5)+256*h(6)+1 32 LET phgt=h(11)+256*h(12)+h(7)+256*h(8)+1
89 REM get the bytes If the PCX contains many informations, the second value (46144) is not big enough. Try 50000 or more.:
90 FOR f=40000 TO 46144:POKE f,CODE INKEY$#4:NEXT f
fag \this number]
99 REM Conversion part
100 LET from=40000:LET ct=0
PAGE 9
120 FOR k=0 TO 23:FOR i=0 TO 7:FOR j=0 TO 31
150 REM FN a(valuel,value2) is an logical AND 160 IF NOT ct AND FN a(192,PEEK from)=192 THEN LET ct=FN a(63,PEEK from)
165 REM FN m() translate to ZX screen/memory format 170 IF NOT ct THEN POKE FN m(k,j,i),PEEK from: LET from=from+1:GO TO 190 185 POKE FN m(k,j,i),PEEK (fromt+1):LET ct=ct-1: IF NOT ct THEN LET from=from+2 190 NEXT j: NEXT i: NEXT k
199 REM save the work. The "Start Tape" message destroys the lower two textlines. Use either saving to micro drive (SAVE *"m";1;nS$SCREEN$) or save the result as a SCR file from the emulator. [That is, save this SCREENS by the emulator's special menu selection.) 200 SAVE n$ SCREENS
SPECTRUM UPLOAD UTILITY AND MORE! by Tomaz Kac
[From COMP.S¥S.SINCLAIR 16 January 1996, with minor editing by John Pazmino. This utility loads an IBM file of a Spectrum program, as used by the various emulators, into a real Spectrum. Tomaz Kac is at TOMAZ. KAC@UNI-MB.SI. See that '.SI'? Yes!, the lad is from Slovenia! ]
If you always wanted to store all the snapshots and tapes (.Z80, .SNA,
-TAP,..) files on PC and then load them error-free to the Spectrum then this program might be for you. It lets you load the file to Spectrum directly via SoundBlaster. The Snapshots are first converted to .TAP files with 3 blocks and then uploaded. It uses a nice looking browser to browse through tapes and
snaps and load in only the desired blocks. Apart from that it can have all the snaps, tapes, etc. archived with your favorite archiver (ZIP, ARJ, RAR, ...), so they don't take up so much space.
The filename is SPECCY.ZIP. For now [January 1996) it is in PUB/SINCLAIR/
INCOMING on FTP.NVG.UNIT.NO, but you can get it from RCUM.UNI-MB.SI/INCOMING now :)
Spectrum File Selector lets you do things like :
- Load ANY Tape file (.TAP) or 48k Snapshot (.SNA,.Z80) to Spectrum via SoundBlaster (Of course you can move through the file to any place, etc.)
- Archive all Snapshots, Tapes, etc. files with your favorite archiver (like ZIP or ARJ) and then just select the file you want to load to emulator(s) or SoundBlaster
- Define upto 4 emulators that will be used with the archived files
- Convert the file from .Z80 to .SNA before loading it to the emulator (Useful for i.e. JPP, which can't load .Z80 files)
- Convert the file from -TAP to .VOC before loading it to the emulator (Useful for Tapes that use CUSTOM load routines, and it looks real :) )
- If you don't like archiving the files, you can still browse through the directories and use any files instead of dearchiving them
- Make a simple LIST file which will be used to hold all the archived filenames and the Long Filenames that will be displayed in the Selector instead of 8.3 filenames, which plainly suck :) ...
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