Scor­pio News

The last point concern his idea that it was ‘silly’ to split the program up into so many sub-programs which to him seems to slow every thing down. If he has written any program using a compiler (in this case Turbo Pascal) then it should be apparent that the user has a limited space in which to write his program, i.e. in Turbo this tends to be around 88 statement lines maximum including any allocated variable space, any one program segment, and in this case all the most commonly used commands being centred around this central core.

The SVC PCB program has been tested by a few other Gemini enthusiasts (including university technician and othe rpeople who might use the program in their work) and has gathered a fairly favourable response.

Regarding the bugs in the small version of the pcb program, I will pass a new rectified listing and .COM file to the Editor shortly.

The full range of byte values from 00H to FFH is available direct from the Nascom keyboard – a fact which only becomes apparent through detailed study of the NAS-SYS listings, although the actual keys required are not specified. The table below gives a quick cross-reference to the required key combinations

The MAP-80 CBIOS for CP/M also supports this full range, and it is probable that it also applies to Gemini’s CBIOS. (Note also that if ‘values’ (e.g. <CNTL>L or <CNTL>Z) are typed as a filename in response to the CP/M prompt and it cannot be found as a filename, CP/M will echo the ‘filename’ unaltered to e.g. a printer if <CNTL>P is active.)

Characters not shown in the table below are available direct from the keyboard, using the shift key where relevant.

In the KEYS column, ‘c’ represents the <CTRL> key, and ‘s’ represents the <SHIFT> key.

Values in the range 80H to FFH may be obtained by pressing the <GRAPH> key as well (It sets bit 7, and depending on the character generator, may display either reversed video or a graphic character.)