Nascom News­let­ter

Running NASPIC

Like anything it takes a bit of getting used to, but once there it is really quite easy. There’s no more tedious mucking about trying to remember how to get the ‘funny-bent-thing-with-a-blob-on-the-end’ out of the keyboard or having to print strings of CHR$(n). And it is FAST.

The BASIC program produced consists of 14 lines (line numbers in increments of ten) the format of each being :–

<line No.> PRINT"---- 47 chars ----"

Nascom BASIC doesn’t print the graphics characters when listed so what you see is “garbage”. These lines cannot be edited in BASIC, even with the Toolkit as they are too long. However, it should be possible to edit such lines in BASIC if you have EBASIC by Level 9 Computing. When listing with this utility program the graphics characters are shown as they will be PRINTed and the EDIT command allows the EDITing of BASIC lines up to about 700 characters long ! Of course you can go back and EDIT them in NASPIC – probably much easier.

Disadvantages.

The advantages are clear, so what are the disadvantages and/or annoyances ? Well the lack of wrap around is certainly a nuisance and the lack of use of the normal line editing facilities of NAS SYS i.e. opening lines with <SHIFT/​CURSOR RIGHT> etc. can be frustrating at first as it is usually second nature to Nascom owners. But I forgive the writer of NASPIC (Peter West by the way) as it would certainly have complicated things for him. After all, there are only so many things you can tram into 2K. A few other annoyances are apparent as described above.

Summary

Overall NASPIC is a well presented, easy to use and very useful graphics package as an adjunct to’ BASIC programming. However, there is no need to limit it’s use to BASIC. It should be possible to extract the code out of a BASIC program for use with machine code programs, etc. It certainly comes a lot cheaper than some graphics packages for Nascom BASIC being advertised at the present time.