Now I know what your thinking. You want to buy one of those new Portugese Disk Drive Systems, but you have a lot invested in your cassette software. You feel that you would have to use the cassette anyway, to run your favorite programs. Well, as you are about to find out, buying a Portugese Disk Drive may be the best investment you can ever make for your 2068.
Once you start to use the Disk Drive and witness the speed of which you can access files, not to mention save data to disk, and retrieve your data using random access…you will want to give your cassette a decent burial and start computing in the 20th Century.
But all this talk would be meaningless, unless you could convert your cassette software to disk. This column will help you to convert four Timex programs to disk; VU-3D, VU-CALC, VU-FILE, and Timex CHESS (a personal favorite!).
Now all of your personally made software is very easy to convert. All you have to do is put a * (asterisk) after your I/O command. In otherwords, SAVE now becomes SAVE*. LOAD becomes LOAD*, and SCREEN$ becomes SCREEN$*. It is just that simple. With that small amount of information in mind, you are now ready to begin to convert all of your cassette-based software to disk.
First, you must load the entire program to the computer. Once the program is loaded, you must now break into the program to the BASIC listing. The easiest way to do this is to tell the program you want to load a file into it. Once you do this, the program will begin looking for a file. It is now ready to break. When the program begins the loading process, do not load a file. Instead, hit the BREAK and the CAPS SHIFT keys together and keep them down until you get the “K” cursor. Now you are ready to change the BASIC, so the software will run on disk. You may have to do an INK 7, because the INK value may be the same as the paper value.
On all of the Timex programs, you will have to remove one command. This will be the LOAD SCREEN$ command, and it is found in: line 10 on VU-CALC, line 50 on VU-FILE, line 9 on VU-3D, and line 20 on CHESS. Make sure to DELETE only the SCREEN$ part of the program. Leave the rest alone.
After you have finished that, change all the SAVE’s and LOAD’s to SAVE* and LOAD*. They can be found at: lines 10, 1000 and 4000 on VU-CALC (change LOAD “”CODE to LOAD* “Calc.code”CODE on line 10); lines 50, 1005 and 2000 on VU-FILE (change LOAD “”CODE to LOAD* “File.code”CODE on line 50); lines 9, 11, 12 and 13 on VU-3D (change LOAD “”CODE to LOAD* “3D.code”CODE on line 9); lines 20, 40 and 70 on CHESS (change LOAD “”CODE to LOAD* “chess”CODE on line 20.
Believe it or not, that is all the modification you have to do to run these programs on your Disk Drive. Now all you have to do is SAVE them to disk. Here is how you you do that. For VU-CALC: SAVE* “Vu-calc” LINE 10 (on OK, type SAVE* “Calc.code” CODE 29327,5054). For VU-FILE: SAVE* “Vu-file” LINE 50 (on OK, type SAVE* “file.code”CODE 28287,6144). For VU-3D: SAVE* “Vu-3D”LINE 9 (on OK, type SAVE* “3D.code”CODE 30719, 34816). For CHESS: GOTO 40 (easy one).
There you have it. Four of the original 2068 software cassettes on tape. I am sure that you have others that with the knowledge of what you just learned, can be put on disk. REMEMBER: this column was written to help people who have paid their hard-earned money for these programs and not for the benefit of software “pirates”. It is my hope to help the consumer, and not the low-lifes who have no respect for the hard work a person puts into making a good quality program.