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* * * E D I T O R I A L * * *
It never ceases to amaze me how I get this mag together. One
minute I'm sittng here with only a week to go before publication
and not really a great deal of stuff to put in, and the next
minute I'm up to my neck in discs and letters. I think that you
lot all get together, and send all your post on the same day!!!
On the Sam front, things seem to be a little quiet at the
moment. There are mumblings about Prince of Persia being nearly
ready, and Crash Magazine is supposed to be putting a demo of
F16 Strike Eagle on their cover, but no sign of it last issue.
I think that as a magazine with a constantly rising membership,
we could do our bit by canvassing the software houses and
telling them that there are people out there, who want Sam
software. What I thought was to include with one of the issues a
ready printed letter to, say, Tasman Software. All you would
have to do would be to sign and post it.
Alright it will cost you 17p, but who knows, we may get a new
bit of software out of it.
Phone or write to me, and let me know what you think of the idea
and we'll get it started if there is sufficient support.
This could be done to several software houses over the months,
and ideas for who to canvass would be welcome.
Right, now a plea from me. Could you PLEASE put a REM in any of
your programs that you send to the mag, with at least your name
in it. If you send a letter and a disc, they don't always stay
together, and I have instances of the letter saying something
like "and I hope you like the program that is on the enclosed
disc". This means that the letter doesn't say what the program
is, and the program doesn't say who you are, and I'm left to try
and get them matched.
Also, it would be helpful to mention on the disc label if the
program only works with Masterdos or Masterbasic or needs a
special memory setup to run. This saves time and confusion this
end in trying to get a program running with the wrong setup.
I have to report a change of team members this month. Our good
friend Keith Purcocks, who helped a lot of you out with Spectrum
conversions, has left the team to do other things.
His place is taken by Henry Stanley (known to everyone as
"Stan"). Stan is a qualified electronics repairer by trade, and
is a wiz with the soldering iron and all those little coloured
thingies that go on a circuit board.
If you have a problem in that direction, Stan can be reached at
19 WESTBROOK AVENUE,
ALDRIDGE,
WALSALL WS9 0BZ
TEL: 0922 55398
Anyway, I've wittered on long enough now, so I'll leave you to
read the rest of the mag....
Bye for now
Dave (ED)
OOPS Dept......
Yes, by popular request, the OOPS Dept. is back again. Last
issues most popular clanger was the program notes extra question
marks. All the notes are there and readable, but the end marker
for the text is set wrongly. To cure it, LOAD up the Supplement
and ESCape to BASIC.
Now edit line 170 and near the end of it change it to read:-
:LET LL=13
Now resave with:
SAVE OVER "MAIN" LINE 1
The next slipup is in "XTREE", you can't display the directory
on the screen. To cure this LOAD "XTREE" and then ESCape to
BASIC. You first need to edit line 670 and change it to read:-
670 IF A$="S" THEN CLS:GOTO 50
Now edit line 1000 and change this to:-
1000 POKE SVAR 14,79: LOAD"MAIN"
Now resave with:- SAVE "XTREE" LINE 1100
Finally, I have promised Les Phillips I will really try harder
to spell his name correctly!!
From Dave Kingsnorth. HADLEIGH. SUFFOLK. IP7 5HN
Dear Ed,
This is in response to the letter written in issue
nine by Frank Harrop.
I agree with his sentiments in every respect. SAM
does deserve a better Word Processor, one with a spell check
would be bliss. At present I am using Tasword Two, which as
Frank says, is mutton dressed as lamb. The Spectrum versions
were far more sophisticated and did not suffer from this
infuriating keyboard problem. When I contacted Tasword about
this, they were not even mildly interested. It would appear that
the only real mods made were to the price.
Masterfile was another really good program written
for the dear old Spec. and while Steve Nutting has written a
filer/database (SC_Filer) which I have purchased and can
recommend, it will never be in the same league as Masterfile,
with its facility to produce various screen formats to display
the data. Also with its ability to search in any of its fields,
it really was a quality product.
Where does all this leave us dedicated SAM users? It
is perhaps a sad fact of life that everything comes down to
CASH. The Spectrum was a seller and as such its software was
developed to its maximum potential and while we all know that
SAM is a vastly superior machine in so many ways, it has not as
yet arrived. Its the old chicken and egg situation. On the one
hand SAM will not sell without good software, on the other hand
the software companies will not write software until there are
more SAM's sold.
All we can do to help the situation is fully to
support the individuals and organisations that are writing
software for the SAM. Programs should be recommended to friends
and colleagues but never illegally copied and given to them.
This will only contribute to, and eventually bring about the
demise of SAM. Also, perhaps SAMCO,the organisation, could adopt
a more professional approach. Some of the ON STAGE presentations
at the All Formats Fairs at Westminister have left a lot to be
desired. The business image projected by them will influence the
decisions of prospective customers. And finally, I suppose we
have to be patient, cross everthing that its possible to cross
and just hope that SAM is recognised as the great computer that
it most certainly is.
Finally, like the Ed, I was very disappointed not to
see Bruce Gordon or Alan Miles at the last London All Formats
Show in May. I began to wonder whether this might have sinister
undertones and Sam, was going down the tubes yet again. As if in
answer to this inner fear I received the latest Samco newsletter
and what a joy it was to read. The plastic case for the Sambus,
a mouse, the messenger and a wealth of software. So, buy as much
as you can afford or if you're like me, slightly more than you
can afford, and then I think we will see SAM hit the HIGH Street
and then the Software houses will fall over themselves in an
effort to get in on the SAM action.
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FROM: Derek Burn 24 June'91
Dear Dave,
I was pleased to see the letter from Frank Harrop in issue 9 of
Sam Supplement; it complements my own thoughts exactly - as in
my letter to you dated 9 June.
Since that letter I have had the opportunity to try out the
updated version of OUTWRITE! and I have to say that it is an
enormous improvement over the original. Most of my reservations
have been dealt with, and I now believe that it is a truly
worthy successor to Tasword Two. In fact, it will from now on
become my standard word processor.
However, my comments in my previous letter still stand, and echo
Frank's. We surely deserve a Tasword PC, or even PC2, equivalent
for a machine as good as the Coupe.
Apart from word processing, there are several other notable gaps
in the Coupe software library, as Frank points out. I have
spoken to Campbell Systems about Masterfile, but it seems that
they are now only interested in PC software. I have also spoken
to Hisoft about their excellent Spectrum Basic, Pascal and C
compilers, but they appear to believe that the demand for
similar Coupe software does not exist. It would also be nice if
a Coupe DTP program was produced, then perhaps we could finally
put away our Spectrums (Spectra?) for good!
How on earth can we persuade software companies that the Coupe
is here to stay, and that it is worth supporting? In the hope
that this contribution also may be suitable for the Supplement,
if only to add fuel to the flames, it is on the enclosed disc as
a Tasword file.
Yours sincerely, Derek Burn.
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From Mathew Collinge
Dear Readers,
Well I don't know about you but I have come to the
conclusion that the Supplement's standard of programs is
dropping, this is not the fault of the magazine's editors and
team but is YOUR FAULT! Come on it's now the summer hols and I
hope that after you realise that there's very little to do, that
you get down to some programming, some good sound demos might be
a start then some games with reasonable graphics. As the holiday
is a long one you might consider learning machine code and
produce some mash routines which you could send in. Please don't
send in any of the pointless database systems e.g a decorating
database, who's going to use that! Coming soon a stone database
to keep a record of all your favorite stones! I also don't
understand why things like the vat calculator were not put in
the Odds and ends menu, they are only very small programmes and
don't deserve to be put on the main menu, I don't think many
people will use it when they can do it on a calculator without
having to switch on their computer, load in the Dos, then load
up the vat calculator. What might be an idea to raise the
standard of the programs entered is to offer a small prize for
the best program each issue or make a programmers challenge eg,
make an alternative scroller that is different from all seen
before. Well how about it Brian? A hacking section for the
Supplement is another idea - anyone willing to contribute a
tutorial please write to Brian, the hacking section wouldn't
have to include that boring old tat about hacking the loader as
in YS because we can SnapShot the speccy prog then hack it from
there with no trouble.
Editors reply...
You have some interesting points to make in your letter, but I
think somewhere that you are missing the point of the mag. I, in
all honesty, don't think that the standard of the mag is
dropping. If fact over the last few issues, we've had some
excellent programs sent in. I think that you might be confusing
standard with type. Yes, we do seem to get what you might call
the more serious type of program in, but I try and balance this
with a demo or 2 and some pictures. I in fact could make an
issue entirely of pictures and demos, but what would be the
point? We would then be of no real use to the majority of our
members, who, if they want that type of thing, are catered for
in many other disc mags. You say that you could use your
calculator to work out VAT, but it could be said that you could
look at pictures in a book, rather than go to the trouble of
loading them up on a computer. The point being, is that what
ever the type of program, and whether or not the program is of
use to everyone, it has still given the writer a challenge to
write it, and no doubt he has enjoyed writing it. Even if other
members never use it, it can still be useful to break into it
and see how it was done, or even modify it to work better or do
something completly different. In fact we are now starting to
receive programs that have already been published, but someone
has rewritten to his or her own requirements. A case in point is
Samscratch, which was published in our first issue as a means of
writing to us, but has been modified, and re-modified, until now
it is a very good PD wordprocessor. In fact Darren Talbot has
taken it a stage further and has made Stylewriter from it. I
agree that no one would want a disc full of databases, and that
a balance must be found. I also agree that the more people that
submit items the better, but I don't think that the quality
would go up just because of the quantity sent. One last point
that I would like to make is this, that not everyone is up to
the same standard of programming skill.There are many out there,
who are just starting to grasp the fundamentals of a computer.
It may take them a week to write a short program that would take
a more experienced person only minutes. By publishing their
efforts, a) they feel a sense of achievement and b) they may get
some constructive criticism and help from other members. This to
me, is what the Supplement is all about. It doesn't take much
effort or skill to sit and watch another persons demo, or play
another persons game, but to have actually written something
yourself that works, no matter how small, deserves some kind of
recognition. I would be very interested in other members' views
on this subject (good or bad), so please write in and let me
know what you think.
ED.
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