XL TYPO I'm glad I found you. Being the owner of a 1200XL and Microsoft
BASIC, I was becoming more discouraged each day before finding your June
issue on the XLs.
I noticed that the typographical error Atari made in their
table of OS changes from Revision B to the XL was copied (in
Robert DeWitt's
article on the evolution of the XL computers). The last hex address
should be 03FB-03FC instead of 033FB-03FC.
John Tilton
Carlsbad, CA
MEMORY WINDOW
In your program "Memory Window," (April 1984), Line 160 should read.
. .";MEM+255" This will give the proper memory reading in the window.
For example, page 0 resides in location 0-255, not 0-256.
Bill Travis
Salt Lake City, UT
ERRATA
In our review of Ultima I (Antic, July 1984), the author's name should
have been Keith Valenza. We apologize for the error.
APX LIVES ON
Many readers have asked us how to get APX programs now that Atari has
closed that division. Al Thomas, Manager of Sales and Manufacturing
for APX tells us that twenty of the best APX programs, including EXCALIBUR,
GETAWAY and ATARI PRINTER DRIVER, will continue to be sold. You can
obtain a complete list of titles and a new order form by calling: (800)
672-1404 inside California, (800)538-8543 outside California or by writing:
APX
c/o ATARI CUSTOMER SERVICE
1312 CROSSMAN AVENUE
SUNNYVALE, CA. 94088
Al informs us that the turnover on APX orders is just 3-4 days using
the new forms. If you use an old form from the catalogue to order
a product no longer available, the turnover can take weeks!
SCROLLING INTO TROUBLE
I'm a student who is fascinated by what my Atari 400 can do, but I've
stumbled onto a few problems. Specifically, I've had trouble setting
up a horizontal-scrolling routine and creating my own character set.
Any help you can offer would be most appreciated.
Richard Tan
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Antic's publisher, James Capparell, has written an article
on scrolling that may help You. Entitled simply, "Scrolling" it appears
in our recently-published anthology, The Best of Antic, Volume One. Several articles that explain how to create your own
character set have recently appeared in Antic. See "Odd Man Reforms"
by John and Mary Harrison (Antic, page 36, December 1983) and "Character
Graphics" by Chris Chabris (Antic, page 60, Feb 1984).-ANTIC
ED
ANIMATING TANKS
In your June 1984 article "
Use Basic to Animate," you stated that the
Antic staff was unable to eliminate the instructions for Players 2 and
3 because the remaining tanks would not fire.
You cannot eliminate the entire line. The first
item on the line must be retained. The listing below allows you to
select either a two, three or four player game. It then disables
the unused tanks and eliminates them from the screen.
Please keep up the good work. I learn something
every time I type in one of your listings.
Charles Barker
Lawrenceburg, IN
SCROLL YOUR WAY TO THE TOP
There is a typographical error in the article "Scroll Your Way to the
Top" (Antic, June 1984). In the last paragraph on page 44, the number
1586 should be 1536.
DISKREAD SECTORS
I typed in "Diskread" from Antic, March 1984, and found a small flaw.
If you request the utility to display the "next" sector, it finds the next
sector from information in the "pointer" in the last three bytes of the
current sector. The sectors (360-368) that contain the VTOC (volume
table of contents) and disk directory don't use this pointer, so attempting
to display the next sector while displaying a directory sector won't work
correctly.
I've made a change that corects this problem. Insert
the following line into the program:
215 IF NUM>359 AND NUM<369 THEN NES=NUM+1:GOTO 250
Edward Aubitz
Bloomington, MN
LOADING GLOOP
Bravo to you and to Guy Aitchison for "Galactic Gloop" (Antic, February
1984) it's one of the best games in BASIC I've ever seen. The song
is great, and the graphics are out of this world!
I have a disk-based system, however, and I quickly got
tired of typing in special commands each time I loaded the game, so I wrote
this little program to ease the task. To use it, first SAVE or rename
the game program as "GALACTIC." Then type in this program and SAVE it as
"GLOOP" Then RUN"D:GLOOP".
Please print my full address, so that other readers who'd
like to talk computers or swap programs can get in touch with me.
ANTIC VOL. 3, NO. 5 / SEPTEMBER 1984 / PAGE 10