About
The programs from Einstein User Vol 5 No 3, about autumn 1991, the last issue, on one bootable Xtal BASIC disc.
Roy Huffey's Triangle Power series, the winner of the competition set in Vol 5 No 1, plots the Sierpinski triangle faster and in more colour at each step, timing itself and counting its points; RUN-ME is the fifteen minute colour version. Pages 23 to 28.
Mike Smallman's Boggle deals 25 big letters and gives you three minutes. Clem Cole's function key filer sets the function keys and saves them as a program you run from DOS. Ted Cawkwell's Organising the Cat keeps a disc catalogue for FIND.COM; his CAT and MOD fail as printed by a character or two, and our corrected CAT2 and MOD2 sit beside them. Two Mandelbrot plotters from ?Power? take their time, and the C from Learning C Part 5 is there as source.
Printed page 27 is missing from every known copy of this issue, so the last three Triangle Power programs, FRACTA12 to FRACTA14, are not on the disc.
Running them
Boot the disc, type XBAS, then for example LOAD "BOGGLE" and RUN. Most of the Triangle Power programs and the faster Mandelbrot use WHILE and WEND, which need Xtal BASIC 5.02 from Crystal's System 5; the disc carries 4.2, under which they stop with Qty Error. FRACTAL3 and FRACTAL4 run under 4.2.
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, a README saying exactly what was changed and why, and the test notes and screenshots.
Verified
Run in MAME 0.289 with Xtal BASIC 4.2, and 5.02 from the System 5 disc for the WHILE programs. Every BASIC file loaded and saved back gives the same program bytes as ours. Every Triangle Power program ran with point counts close to the ones Roy Huffey printed; RUN-ME counted 19,870 points in its fifteen minutes against his 19,858. Boggle ran a full round, the catalogue programs wrote, changed and read back a file, and the function key program put the keys back from a cold start. The Mandelbrot plotters drew the whole set when made small for a test. The C was not compiled. Not run on real hardware.
The scanned issue is on this site as Tatung Einstein User Vol.5.No.3.
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