Overloader ver 1.2 (AERCO)

In the December issue of the newsletter, John Battey, my CO-EDITOR, came up with an exceptional program called OVERLOADER. When you download an ASCII file that is longer that the 15500 bytes that will comfortably fit in an MSCRIPT file, you must divide that file. John came up with an appropriate program to allow the computer to do the ‘thinking’ for you. He intimated that I might be able be come up with an AERCO disk version of the same program. I must confess, I never figured that I would need such a program, so I put it out of my mind saying that. I will get to it, sometime in the near future. Boy was that a mistake. When I finally found out how to send the .DOC and .TXT files for CP/M programs and utilities to E-MAIL on StarText, I found out that many of them were longer than could possibly fit in the MSCRIPT file. Well, I can live with documentation that is not “skipping” the perforations on the paper.

Nice try, but no cigar! I found myself downloading the Master Drive (all the file names and such) from the FWKUG MBBS & PSDE. I had not reached the end, but I decided to stop. The file was over 26000 bytes-now I needed John’s program very badly. But, as usual, all of my material was on disk and not tape. (Now, I do make tape back-ups of most of my material, just-in-case, but I still prefer to use the drives for the speed and size of storage.) Now I had to go to work and make his program work for disk, but there was some difficulty. I already use a program called BOOT.BAS by Chia-Chi Chao. This program allows you to read the directory of the disk and select the program via the cursor keys and RUN it. I decided that I should keep that program, for the most part, and ‘overiay* most of the original OVERLOADER program of John’s onto it. Nice an simple, until you get to the actual “SAVEing’ of the code.

AERCO saves the code with a .BIN extension on the end of the filename. This took some real figuring out to make it come out properly, but with the help of a friend-Chuck Dawson, the AERCO version is now a reality.