About
The programs from Einstein Magazine & All Micro News No. 78, 1996, typed in and on one bootable Xtal BASIC disc.
TWP40, by Ted Cawkwell, is a word processor in nine lines of BASIC: type on the screen, ESC saves and prints it, and it reads back files whose names begin with T. His Printer Guard checks the printer port and waits until the printer is on line, so a program does not hang. His Highlighted Files, after a PC original by John Briggs, turns the disc's BASIC programs into a menu with a moving highlight, and ENTER runs the one chosen.
Area, by David Williams, works out the area of any triangle from its three sides. The character set lister, by A. C. McRobbie, from the beginners' page on printing the pound sign, prints the character set with its codes to the screen and then the printer.
The listings were printed on pages 2 to 16 of the magazine and its Late Items sheet, which are on this site as Einstein Magazine & All Micro News No. 078. This disc saves you typing them in.
Running Them
Boot the disc, type XBAS, then LOAD "QR2" and RUN to see the disc as a menu, or LOAD "AREA", LOAD "TWP40", LOAD "PG" or LOAD "CHARSET2".
What Is in the Download
A zip holding the disc image as a DSK, the same disc as an MFI for MAME to write to, the listings as BASIC text and as tokenised Xtal BASIC, a README with the full account of each program, and the screen captures and MAME scripts used to test them.
Verified
Transcribed from the page images and run on the Einstein in MAME 0.289 with Xtal BASIC 4.2. Every program was loaded into BASIC and saved back, giving the same bytes as our files. Area, TWP40 (writing, saving and reading back a file), Highlighted Files and the character set lister all run as the magazine describes. Printer Guard reports an error under MAME, whose printer port does not answer as a real printer would, and waits for SPACE as the article says it should. Not run on real hardware, and no real printer.
Printed Twice, Here Twice
Two programs are on the disc as printed and again corrected under a second name. CHARSET has a comma in its printer line where Xtal BASIC wants a semicolon, so its printer half stops with an error; CHARSET2 has the semicolon. QR tests for PC cursor key codes, so only the down arrow moves the highlight; QR2 uses the Einstein's own codes and all four arrows work. The README gives the exact changes. TWP40 is typed from the Late Items sheet, which reprinted it because page 10 printed faint. No addresses are in the listings.
The programs are their authors', published in Einstein Magazine in 1996.
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