Re: Readers' Enquiries

By Robert Sprowson

Originally published in EUG #27

The only company that I can think of which might be able to help Alan Richardson is Grandata, here in the UK. I couldn't see an exact equivalent of the flyback transformer he was looking for, but maybe a nice letter from New Zealand would prompt them.

Mention page 192 of their catalogue.

The rest of this letter is directed toward Mark Bellis who was wondering about how Citadel/Thrust screen-scrolling worked. Judging by the comments in his letter he knows what he's doing so...

If getting the LOADER program to EOR the file and then disassembling this to find out how the screen works is too hard, let IT do the work for you.

Write a ROM which traps the 'BRK occurred' service call (Number 6) then, having detected that, issue a *TAPE (i.e. *FX140,baud) and *SAVE the whole of the BBC's memory to tape.

Tape is obviously used as it does not gobble the 2.75K that DFS does, and also most games relocate themselves over the language and NMI workspace from &DFF and below (in the BBC).

Now all you need to do is cause an error - ESCAPE usually works - but this may have been turned off to allow it to be used instead to toggle between the scoreboard and the game. If this is the case then trap service call 5 (IRQ not recognised) instead, and short pin 7 to pin 8 on the 1MHz bus.

Hope this has been of some help. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the games you're producing!

Robert Sprowson, EUG #27