80-Bus News

off the disk at once !! I discovered this after three nights, when in an inebriated state I used DDT on a file that had just dumped itself everywhere but I wanted it to be. (Actually it’s been scientifically proven that with a blood alcohol of approximately 12% you’re most creative !!)

Why Lucas Logic have chosen this tedious file handling systemy is difficult to determine. I was hoping that XBASIC would do all the file handling for ME. However, this method has a slight advantage. You can concoct a file of fixed length from mainy variables. Prepare it for input with INPUT £ <SV>,<I> alone, and then nibble away at the records using INCH$(N). This speeds things up a bit and you can bung all the data to the variables immediately afterwards.

What about GXBASIC ? Well the commands are the same as the Nas-Dos based G32 and G48 running with Rom Basic except the ‘SET’ prefix is dropped. However, it draws at a much faster rate, and dumping pictures off the disk has been turbocharged ! There is a command to dump graphics from the screen to a printer, but I can’t get that to work either. My printer is a Gemini-10X so it’s probably not compatible. It doesn’t bother me at the moment .... but, perhaps another letter to Lucas Logic ?

So is XBASIC worth sixty quid ? Well had I but known I wouldn’t have bought it. If only someone had told me about the CP/M Users Group (UK). This is an ‘amateur’ organisation on similar lines to 80-BUS. Membership is £7.50 p.a. with a really good quarterly journal. But, the real benefit is the software library. Over 250 Volumes (Yes !!!!) of software in the public domain i.e. NO copyright. Choose a volume, send a disk with £2.00 for copying and postage and it’s returned tout de suite. Theorectically, you don’t need to buy anything from the ‘big-boys’ again. If you want more information write to –

CP/M Users Group(UK)
__ ____ ____, Hawley, Dartford, Kent, ___ ___

Why havent our great leaders told us this before ???

So what do I use XBASIC for ? Well, it has a really good on screen editor in the old Nascom tradition, so I use it to write all my letters on! (If I bought a decent text editor I’d have to throw it away and my fiancee would be very annoyed at the cost.) Actually, this article was prepared on it. The AUTO command keeps churning out the line numbers as needed, then I edited it to something vaguely acceptable to our Editor (oh Lord and Master hear my prayer). Next, saved it to disk as an ASC file and then used EDIT (a much improved ED.COM from the CP/M Users Group) to remove all the line numbers. Not very difficult, tedious, but a damn site easier than using EDIT denoveau (from scratch !).

With regards to Lucas Logic, I personally think that many computer companies will be going to the wall next year, and that Lucas Logic will be one of them, but there won’t be anybody to buy them this time.