About
The programs from Einstein User's December 1986 issue, on one bootable Xtal BASIC disc.
SAKI, the Self Adaptive Keyboard Instructor by H.D.M. Langshaw, is a typing tutor modelled on Gordon Pask's 1960 teaching machine: characters appear one at a time as sprites, you type them back, and the time allowed shrinks as you improve and lengthens when you struggle. Q gives you a percentage and a speed in characters per minute. Page 15.
Nigel Deakin's AUTO makes any disc boot straight into a program: type the DOS command line you want run at power on and it writes it into the disc's own DOS. Page 17.
And the two winners of the magazine's one line programming competition: Peter Hart's word processor in a single line, and D.A. Barr-Hamilton's spiral of coloured triangles. Page 25.
Running them
Boot the disc, type XBAS, then LOAD "SAKI" and RUN.
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. SAKI was played through two rounds by a script that read the sprite and typed the character back, then scored, quit and returned to BASIC. AUTO was run on a copy of the disc with the command line XBAS SAKI, and that copy then booted straight into SAKI with nothing typed. Both one line programs run. Not run on real hardware.
AUTO alters the disc in drive 0. The disc in this download has not been altered by it, so run it on a copy.
The scanned issue is on this site as Tatung Einstein User Vol.2.No.4.
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