Tricks Sinclair Never Gave Us

At the January meeting of CATUG, Bob Swoger said he would like to see a new article by me for our newsletter. Steve Cooper said, “Why don’t you write about some of the special things you can do with the keys.” I was puzzled about what Steve was referring to, then I remember something I had demonstrated to him and Bob. These things were not my original ideas but came from the April 1984 edition of CATS newsletter.

All the letter keys on the 2068 have at least five functions, the number keys on the top row have as many as seven. The colors on the strip above the keys mainly refer to preceding the numbers with INK or PAPER. The functions above the keys are accessed with the use of the CAPS Shift and not by the use of the E cursor as the letter keys are. The functions below the number keys are accessed only by use of the E cursor and SYMBOL SHIFT, whereas, the letter keys reguire the E cursor and either the CAPS SHIFT or SYMBOL SHIFT. My explanation of the two additional functions of the number keys follows.

The 8 and 9 keys can be used to turn the FLASH off and on without the entry of FLASH on the screen in the program listing. This is done by getting the E cursor and pressing the CAPS SHIFTED 9 key. This inserts a SETFLASH character. Everything printed on the screen following this will FLASH. To turn the FLASH off, you get the E cursor again and press the CAPS SHIFTED 8 key. If you want to set the BRIGHT on flag, get the E cursor again and press the unshifted 9 key. To set the BRIGHT OFF, get the E cursor again and press the unshifted 8 key. If what you enter is a string in a PRINT statement, It will FLASH or be BRIGHT on the screen when the program is RUN as well as in the program listing. Herb Bowers used the FLASH function in his “MONEY MACHINE II” program.

The remaining number keys can be used to change either INK or PAPER without the use of the INK or PAPER function keys. To use these functions on the number keys you again have to get the E cursor. Now pressing the CAPSSHIFTED number, 0 through 7, you get the corresponding INK color for anything entered after that. Pressing the unshifted number, with the E cursor, will give you the PAPER color. These changes will be in effect in a program listing and, of course, in a string following a print statement on RUNning the program.

The preceding bits of information were credited to Gyuri Grell of CATS. I added some of the additional comments.

I have purchased some programs on tape that have had the INK in black at the beginning of the listing and, in scrolling through, have found another color of INK. I presume that the above description of color changing is how it was done. Before I knew about this, I had accidently stumbled on this but didn’t know why. A while back, I purchased a program called “The TRACER”. When you load in this program and try listing it, you get a line 0 with nothing visible in it and that covers the whole screen. When you call for LIST 1, a line 5 shows up but the rest of the listing is covered by a blue mask. I tried getting rid of the blue mask with the EXTENDED mode number keys but it didn’t work. I wish I knew how that masking was done. I did find out, however, the listing can be printed out on a printer with LLIST.

I have, at times, typed in a long program with long lines. Sometimes I have found two lines that are exactly the same. I decide to bring that line down with the EDIT key and change the line number so I won’t have to retype the whole thing. When I have tried to delete the line number using the DELETE key, the DELETE token is printed after the number. Pressing the DELETE key again, deletes the DELETE but sometimes not the line number. This can keep happening over and over again. Ned Beeler, of CATS, gives this tip. Move the cursor in front of the line number and enter a keyword. After doing this, you move the cursor in back of the line number and you can delete both the line number and keyword easily. He claims that the computer now thinks that the number isn’t a line number.

The remaining little tip pertains to scrolling. If you are looking at a listing, and the word scroll? appears, pressing CAPSSHIFTED 3 or 4 lets two screens of data move by before it stops. This bit of information was supplied by David Hoshor, ATSU, Ohio.

There are some programs that cannot be broken out of with the BREAK key. If you come across such a program, try the down cursor, CAPSSHIFTED 6, key. One such program is Herb Bowers’ “MONEY MACHINE II.”