The source page

Right on this page I get to give away a few of my trade secrets, so be nice to me cos I'm going to release some source code of past programs for you to have a look at and not steal..hmmm, that reminds me:

The source code featured on this page is for informative purposes only and may only be used with my consent. I am releasing this source code as a tutorial and thus don't expect to see other people releasing new versions of my programs. If you don't agree with this then get out of here, and go back to the root Speccy page.

First up, there's a brand new source, I haven't released this one yet, so you're the first to see it. It's a little utility to grab pieces of sprite graphics from the screen - the machine code version to the program that published in YS's program pitstop. Anyway, the title of this program should be grabsprite!!

Next up is the source to quite a useful little program - my more viewer - a nice text viewer which will do its best to cope with just about any ASCII format you care to through at it - up to 85 columns on screen is supported, the source has been cleaned up a little and a few comments added in here and there - it's still not totally completely clear what is going on, but just mail me for info and hopefully I'll clear it up!!

As everyone knows a demo isn't a demo without some kind of scrolly text, and when I was writing demos - several years ago - more than I care to remember - I developed my universal scroll routine just after Quark, and then found out that Vision had just released Uniscroll, which did pretty much the same thing (except mine was more flexible of course), so I kept it to myself, just optimizing it for certain usages etc - perhaps the finest moment was in Verisimilitude Minidemo where it handled a 24 or so pixel FLP. The source here is very flexible, contains lots of text commands which can change the appearance of the scroll. In the datatable itself there is the ability to change the appearance of the scroll from FLP to FSLP to fixed etc etc - experiment with it - I'm sure you'll enjoy it!!!

Ever been to the newsgroup alt.arts.ascii? Well, if not there's lots of exciting ascii artwork there - which would be impossible to draw by hand - have a look at some of it - it's quite scary!! Theres programs to do this sort of conversion on virtually every computer format, so naturally I thought, why not do it on a Spectrum, and Picture Texter was the result - not very impressive admittedly, but heres the source!

Well, I've exhausted all of the source code that I have on this system now, so go away, have a look at it, learn, and ask questions if you want, and more importantly, go away and code something new for the Spectrum - we need it after all!!