Timely Tips

One of the great advantages of the TS 2068 over other computers is the ease with which you can create alphabets which may be reserved above RAMTOP and accessed from the keyboard. You need 1024 bytes for each alphabet. A possible way of accomplishing this is to PEEK the full character set in ROM and POKE it in the reserved section of RAM. Then the letters which you have created on graph paper may be put in a DATA statement, READ and POKEd into the alphabetic part of the character set. This allows many of the non-alphabetic symbols to be used for letters (Armenian has 38 lower case and 38 capitals) and all the functions of the computer are available.

A simple BASIC program changes the address of the start of the full character set to the new location. A machine code program puts one of several User Defined character sets into User Defined memory. Once the alphabets are in reserved memory, they may be SAVEd on tape with a CODE statement. An outline of the programs follows:

nUMBER oF pAGES, pAGE no., rOMAN

CLEAR ddddd (ddddd is a variable!)

10 REM characters
20 FOR I=ddddd TO ddddd
30 FOR J=(PEEK 15360) TO (PEEK 16383)
40 POKE I,J
50 LET I=I+1
60 NEXT J
70 NEXT I

10 REM [name of alphabet]
20 FOR I=ddddd [+256] TO ddddd
30 READ x
40 POKE I,x
50 PRINT I, PEEK I
60 NEXT I
70 DATA ddd,ddd, etc.
80 DATA etc.

9300 LET nop=d
9310 INPUT pno
9315 LET v=65356-pno*168
9320 LET phi=INT (v/256)
9330 LET plo=v-phi*256
9400 RESTORE
9420 For n=65356 TO 65367
9430 READ a
9440 POKE n,a
9450 NEXT n
9460 RANDOMIZE USR 65356
9480 DATA 1,168,0,17,88,255,33,plo,phi,237,176,201
9490 STOP

9500 INPUT Q$
9510 IF Q$="a" THEN LET Y=ddddd
9520 IF Q$="r" THEN LET Y=15360
etc.
9560 POKE 23606,(Y-256* INT (Y/256)): POKE 23607, INT (Y/256)
9570 STOP