About
The programs from Einstein User's first issue of 1986, on one bootable Xtal BASIC disc.
Attack, by Stephen Whiston and Dave Taylor, is a Space Invaders game done entirely in Xtal BASIC with sprites and sound: your cyan UFO against the invaders, four minutes on the clock and a high score table at the end. Pages 8 to 10.
As printed, Attack can count a hit when no UFO is flying, and then stops with a Division Error in line 1870. The disc keeps the listing exactly as printed as ATTACK, and adds ATTACK2, our correction, in which only a flying UFO can be hit. Play ATTACK2.
Databases-3 is Peter Morris's names and addresses filer, with records added, searched, altered, erased, saved to disc and reloaded. The magazine printed it in BBC BASIC and invited readers to convert it; the disc carries that conversion ready to run, and the BBC BASIC original as a text file for anyone who has that BASIC. Pages 21 to 26.
Running them
Boot the disc, type XBAS, then LOAD "ATTACK2" or LOAD "DBASE3" and RUN. The filer wants a writable disc for its data files.
What is in the download
A zip holding the disc as a DSK, the same disc as an MFI for MAME to write to, the listings as BASIC text and as tokenised Xtal BASIC, and a README.
Verified
Run in MAME 0.289 with Xtal BASIC 4.2 and MOS 1.2. The fault in the printed Attack was reproduced: the score went to 7.5, then Division Error in 1870. Two full games of ATTACK2 ran without an error, with 15 hits, each scoring 10 or 30. Databases-3 was taken through add, duplicate check, review, search, save to disc, erase, alter, load and quit to DOS. The BBC BASIC original was not run. Not run on real hardware.
The scanned issue is on this site as Tatung Einstein User Vol.2.No.1.
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