Each program is recorded twice.
1K side:
#1 – ALIEN-BASE
A graphic game program where an ALIEN SHIP descends from the sky to build a BASE on earth which when completed will have 7 stars.
The SHIP comes down in corridors from 1 to 5. Each time it descends 1 level, a point is added to its score in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When the SHIP reaches the bottom of the screen and deposits equipment for the BASE , 100 points are added to its score.
You can stop the SHIP by entering the number of the corridor it is presently in. If you enter the wrong number, the program may break and you lose the game (1K only, try it without the RAMPACK).
If you enter the right number, a YOU GOT ME message will be displayed.
NOTICE – ZX-80 owners add line #55 PAUSE 50
#2 – CLOCK
Run this program and enter the correct time in the 24 hour clock mode such as 3:35 in the afternoon would be 15:35 or 1535.
The screen will then display the time in hours, minutes and seconds. You will notice that when the seconds hit 60, the minutes automatically advance one and when the minutes hit 60, the hours automatically advance one.
The time however, will not advance beyond 12 midnight.
NOTICE – ZX-80 owners add line #140 PAUSE 100.
#3 – MORTGAGE-1
Ever wonder how much money the bank gets from you when you are paying your mortgage according to their rules?
Quite a bit.
For example, let’s say that you were buying a house in today’s market for $100,000 and you got a 30 year morgage at 16% interest.
Your monthly payments for the principal (money to be subtracted from the loan) and for the interest (the money the bank gets to keep) would be $1344.75 per month.
How much of that payment do you think goes against the principal? Would you believe that during the first year, less than 1% (from 11.42 the first month to 13.29 the 12th month) is applied against the principal?
And what happens to the other 99 plus percent? That’s right, the bank keeps it.
Sounds crazy but it’s true. These three figures pretty much represent what an average home goes for these days in the U.S.A..
The bank would get all of their money back in about 6 to 7 years and the rest, less their costs, is gravy.
The majority of the principal however, does not get paid until approximately the last 6 to 7 years of the term.
In other words, the bank gets the majority of their money before inflation has had a chance to devalue its purchasing power.
Fortunately in most states, lending institutions by law cannot penalize the mortgagee for pre-paying the loan, as long as the lending institution is notified that excess in the payments are to be applied against the unpaid principal and NOT TO BE HELD IN ESCROW for taxes or insurance.
In this program, it will ask PRINCIPAL. That is the amount of the loan such as $100,000 in the example.
It will then ask PERIODS. This is the amount of months left in the loan. For 30 years, you would enter 360. 29 years would be 348, etc.
It will then ask for INT. RATE. That would be the interest rate such as 16 (not .16).
If the principal is $100,000 or over, change the last TAB in line #210 from 26 to 25.
If the interest rate is over 15%, change line #190 to LET B = INT (100 * (M – A) + .05) / 100
If this program is running on a 1K machine, it will run out of memory after displaying a few lines. Just enter CONT each time this happens.
NOTICE – If you wish, you might want to change line #215 to INPUT Z$ especially for ZX-80 machines. This way, you can press the enter key when you are finished studying the last line of figures.
This program along with the 16K program MORTGAGE-2 can give a person a real insight into not only how lending institutions make a tremendous amount of money from the people they lend money to but also how the mortgagee can turn the tables on them and prepay the loan and save immense amounts of money in the process with only a small pre-payment schedule.
#4 MARQUEE-1
All these 1 and 2 programs this month. Oh well, LOAD this program, but DON’T RUN it. Instead, type in GOTO 20 and then ENTER.
Pretty neat, huh?
After you’re sick of looking at the message, you might want to try entering your own.
BREAK the program and RUN it this time. Now start entering your own message (on 1K machines, you are limited to about 50 characters) and then enter.
If you have a message you want to save, just BREAK the program and save it on another cassette. Then whenever you want to show it off to your friends, just LOAD it and ENTER – GOTO 20.
For you 16K owners, wait till you see MARQUEE-2.
If MARQUEE-1 is too hard to read, BREAK the program once it is running and ENTER – CONT.
16K side:
MARQUEE-2
If you liked MARQUEE-1, you ought to love this one. If you would list the program, you would notice that it is fairly short about 500 bytes. It will not however load into a 1K machine as is. This is because there is an INVISIBLE VARIABLE.
Load the program and again ENTER – GOTO 20. A lot easier on the eyes, this one is.
We plan to use this program or others like it in the cassettes you receive from now on for a BULLETIN BOARD on your screen. It will only work on ZX-81s with at least 16K.
Topics that will be covered will be News, New Products, User Group Info., Advertising (boo), and any other information that we think will be of interest to you.
I have some plans to really dress up this program in the future. I hope you will like it.
If you want to enter your own messages, enter the line #10 INPUT A$ and use the same format as outlined for the MARQUEE-1 program for saving messages.
NOTICE – ZX-80 users add line #90 PAUSE 75.
#2 – CIPHER
The INCREDIBLE CIPHER MACHINE. I intend for us to have a lot of fun with this one now and in the future. This program is the topic of an article in this issue.
Basically what it does is converts a message you have entered into a code of numbers.
A keyword is used to scramble the numbers so that they cannot be deciphered by looking for duplicates.
To decipher a coded message which is a list of numbers, enter the numbers and then the keyword. If you have entered the wrong keyword, the message IS THIS RIGHT will appear on the screen. If you haven’t used the correct keyword, the program will allow you to try again without having to enter the complete code list again.
#3 – SCRAMBLED WORDS
If you read the article in the APRIL/82 issue about the READ, DATA and RESTORE techniques, they are used in this program to create a list of 200 five letter words.
This program is an educational game for two players. Each player will have ten words, each picked at random. Each time a word is picked, it will be scrambled and displayed on the upper portion of the screen. A black box will appear in the center of the screen and a 60 second timer will appear in the upper right portion of the screen and start counting down.
Enter the letters, one at a time. Press the key firmly and hold it until the letter appears in the black box and then let go. If you hold it too long, the letter will duplicate.
YOU CANNOT BACKSPACE. If you make a mistake, finish the word and the computer will allow you to try again.
If you find any repetition of words, particularly when just starting the game from the last time you played, enter the line #203 RAND.
If you do not believe there are 200 words in the DATA line, BREAK the program after the first word appears on the screen and ENTER this statement : PRINT LEN A$.
If that doesn’t convince you, ENTER this statement : PRINT A$. That only shows you the first 704 characters of the string variable because that’s all the screen will hold. Now ENTER this statement : PRINT A$ (705 TO LEN A$).
This program would probably hold over 2000 five letter words in your machine if someone wanted to type them in.
NOTICE – unfortunately, this program does not run properly on the ZX-80 machines as is. I have tried various methods to make it usable on that machine but it seems too many input errors can occur for the user. The problem lies with trying to use the INKEY$ function at the same time the 60 second timer is operating.
If anyone can come up with a solution, I know our 16K ZX-80 subscribers would appreciate it and we would be happy to print it.
#4 – MORTGAGE-2
This program was originally entitled, HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON YOUR MORTGAGE BUT NEVER KNEW HOW OR REALLY DIDN’T CARE but I was afraid that those who wanted to recall it from tape by the title, might get mad at me.
As explained in the reference to the 1K program, MORTGAGE-1, lending institutions stand to make a lot of money if you play by their rules.
You don’t have to as most states make it illegal for a lending institution to penalize the mortgagee who wants to pre-pay the loan.
What this means to the mortgagee is that if he or she wants to put extra money against the principal, the lending institution cannot charge him or her any money for doing so.
You are probably wondering if pre-payment can make that much of a difference. I assure you it can particularly in this day of double-digit interest rates and 25 to 30 year maturities.
I have asked people how much they thought their mortgage maturity would be shortened, that is how many less years would they have to pay if they increased their payments by 5% or 10%
Most people said they thought with a 30 year mortgage and a 15% to 17% interest rate, they would save 2 or 3 years.
I then asked them how much money would they think that they would save with a 5% to 10% increase.
I was usually told at the most a 10% to 20% savings off the total amount.
Well, get ready to be surprised if this is what you believed. A 5% increase in monthly payments of a mortgage of $75,000 with a 29 year maturity, will save the owner over 10 years of payments and over $100,000.
That’s right – instead of having a 29 year morgage, it is now paid off in less than 19 years and the money saved is more than the original loan.
What would that loan cost you if you paid it off the way the bank wanted you to pay it? Run the program and find out.
The program starts by asking you for the amount owed, the years till maturity and the interest rate.
Someone might want to convert this program to ask for the amount of months till maturity and then show the listing by the month rather than by the year.
The program then displays 5 columns. The first is the amount of years needed to pay off the mortgage at the payment rate as shown in the second column. The third column shows the EFFECTIVE INTEREST RATE. This is not the true mortgage interest rate as if you were to RUN the program using this interest rate and maturity period and would expect to see the same figures from that point on. Rather it is calculated to be the rate that would occur from the proportions of the original loan against the total that would be paid using the corresponding monthly payments and balancing that against the original interest rate.
Although not the same, it should be close and is actually a more practical rate in terms of visualizing how pre-payment can also lower the interest rate.
The fourth column shows the extra amount per month needed to achieve this goal and the last column shows how much money would be saved if the corresponding extra amount from the fourth column were applied.
If anyone is in this situation, they might agree that their SYNCHRO-SETTE subscription was a good investment.
To make the program a little easier to see while it is running, change line #595 from PAUSE 100 to INPUT Z$.
In the August cassette issue, we will start seeing some programs on cassette from some of our readers.
