Recent Goings On

By Robert Sprowson

Originally published in EUG #39

Over the last couple of years, countless people have mentioned to me that they are always short of Master 128 ROM cartridges. After much research I have found a company that does good double-sided plated through hole PCBs and am now able to offer these to EUG members. See the separate article elsewhere in the issue.

I built computer-controlled TV over Easter, as I intend to use two of these to pick up Nicam sound and colourvision in a tiny box, without the need to cart round two 14" picture tubes too! The TV card itself was simply an "off the shelf" project from Maplin which was originally designed to pick up Teletext on a PC. But the £45 card that slotted into the back of a PC was too much to pay, so I decided that it would be easier to design my own for a fiver. All that was needed to control the selection of the station was a voltage from 0 to 12v. The digital to analogue converter I used in included on this issue as part of my "Build It" series.

While working on my OS Prettyprint ROM image (Users of RISC OS machines will be familiar with this - it's a compressed text printer), I had the need for a wordwrapper. Since this is also of use in other areas (e.g. a word processor), I decided to submit this as a standalone machine code program.

While I'm getting my Wordsworth (pun definitely intended), I've also sent a simple word counter that I use to estimate how close I am to the 2,000 word limit on my reports that I have to do for university. Hope it is of use...

Robert Sprowson, EUG #39