24 Usable Lines

Have you ever wondered why the TS 1000 won’t print to the last two lines in the display? The reason is because the last two lines are reserved for editing. But while the program is running, why can’t you use the last two lines then? The truth is, you can! The number of blank lines at the bottom of the screen is held in memory location 16418. If you PEEK this location, 2 should be the result. This variable is set by the computer when you power up. To print on the last two lines, POKE 16418,0. Now the computer has 0 blank lines at the bottom of the screen and 24 lines to print to! Don’t use PRINT AT or SCROLL, as the system will crash.

Having those last two lines are useful if you are handling a lot of data and want to fill the screen with as much data as possible. Lets say you have data you are storing in a DIM statement in say DIM A(44,4). Here is a program you can use as a subroutine to display all this data in four screens instead of five and still have nice clean headings. After the screen fills, press enter for the next screen. After runnig it once, change line 6020 to POKE 16418,2 and try it again.

6000 LET M=1 
6010 CLS 
6020 POKE 16418,0 
6030 PRINT " YOUR HEADINGS " 
6040 PRINT 
6050 FOR N=1 TO 22 
6060 PRINT A (M, 1); " ";A (M, 2);" " ; A (M, 3) ; " ";A (M, 4) 
6070 LET M=M+1 
6080 NEXT N 
6090 IF INKEy$="*" THEN GOTO 6090 
6100 IF M=44 THEN RETURN 
6110 GOTO 6050