Category: Tips

What is K3b? It is a free CD/DVD/Bluray burning program for Linux (it can be compiled for the Mac as well). For the last little while, even before the last upgrade to the current version of Mint, I was having some trouble with the program. At first it no longer wanted to verify data disks. Just recently it wouldn’t even read the hard drive to pick up files to burn. It turned out the problem was a permissions thing. Unfortunately…

This article is a variation/enhancement to a post I found at http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=9289 for a FreeNAS server. Of course purely Mac folks would likely want to stick with the AFP protocol. In terms of generalities the NFS server does not necessarily have to be running FreeNAS. It just has to work. FreeNAS is basically a “Swiss Army Knife” of external storage. I find it does a lot of things very easily. It doesn’t work on all machines (I’ve had a 60%…

The Mac has a unique way of setting up its $PATH variable. These are the locations the BSD portion of OS X looks at to find programs to run. In this case the list of paths can be found in the file /etc/paths. To edit it the administrator needs to sudo their favourite editor since the file itself is owned by root. For example “sudo pico /etc/paths”. This is useful for the programmer who wants to have their programs accessible…

Apple and the BSD folks have included two of the four editors as part of the base install packages. The first goes by two names and is accessed via the terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal). They are either pico or nano (note the lowercase). These are almost as basic as one can get and still refer to them as full screen editors. The other editor included by Apple is Textedit. This is entirely accessed by the GUI. It has…

Text by Dave. Lingwood Programs by Brian Matthews (Action-Research NW) BASIC COMPARISONS Most Apple /// Business BASIC users also work with Applesoft, either from earlier ][ days, or through emulation mode. Business BASIC (hereafter “BB”) has all the professional features you need, but it lacks the flexibility provided by the openness of the ][. This article and attached programs recount some of the pitfalls we encountered and useful tricks devised in transferring a large statistical analysis package from Applesoft to…

Note: In line 400 after the first quote, hit the Control key and the “D” key at the same time. This is how the disk system responds to commands within a Basic program, with Control D in a print statement.

by Darrell Aldrich This is a brief description of the use of the color mask byte (Location 81210) for high re solution graphics in Apple Integer Basic. This mask specifies an 8 bit pattern of plottable X coordinates, with the pattern repeating itself every eight coordinates, going from left to right. The bits in this byte represent the colors violet and green, alternately. (See Figure 1). Suppose we want to mask off every other green bar on the screen as…

This handy little subroutine can be used in two manners; to fill a screen page with repetitive material or to determine the length of a screen page of print statements. Assume line 100 is a print statement with which you wish to fill the page. 100 PRINT” “:GOSUB 400 400 IF PEEK(37) < 18 THEN RETURN 410 POP:PRINT “FOR NEW PAGE HIT ANY KEY”:CALL 756:GOTO 000 Line 400 reads the cursor and finds whereitis on the page. If less than…

If you have a newer Apple with the silent keyboard, Don Williams has written a short and sweet machine language routine to solve your problem. 0300:  48              PHA 0301 : A9 20        LDA #$20 0303: 8D 30 CO   STA $C030 0306: 20 A8 FC    JSR $FCA8 0309: 8D 30 CO   STA $C030 030C: 68              PLA 030D: 4C 1B FD   JMP $FDIB 0038: 00 03 Once you store the address ($0300) in location $38 and hit return, your keys will click…

By Darrell Aldrich While written for Applesoft II, this article is also applicable to Integer Basic HIRES graphics mode. The High Resolution Graphics screen is composed of 280 vertical bars (X coordinates), by 160 units high (Y coordinates). The even-numbered bars are violet in color, while the odd-numbered bars are green. The color white is produced by plotting adjacent green and violet bars. (Green+Violet=White. ) By plotting only on even bars, (even X coordinates), violet plots can be made. However,…

By Val J. Golding Here are simple routines that will allow you to append programs in both version of Applesoft. While appending can be done under program control in App. II, it is really simpler to do it without. The routines are the same in both versions; only the pointers have been changed (to protect the innocent!). A word of caution: Apple soft programs store in memory just the opposite of Integer Basic, i. e., from the bottom up. Therefore,…

By Bob Huelsdonk I wrote this simple program to test new memory chips I bought. Just store the correct end address for your Apple in locations 4 and 5, run 300G and display 800 to the end. 300.32A 0300- A0 00 A9 55 91 02 D1 02 0308- D0 1D A9 AA 91 02 D1 02 0310- D0 15 20 18 03 90 EB 60 0318- A5 02 C5 04 A5 03 E5 05 0320- 3A FF 00 – 4C…

By Don Williams One of the minor deficiencies in Apple Integer BASIC is the omission of the Data statement. In search of a remedy for this, I wrote a program to save memory in a BASIC string assignment. This is listed as program lines 1020 through 1190. Upon embarking on the first routine, I quickly found a second omission in the language; a way to store a non-string variable into a string, the remedy for which is shown as program…

To set HIMEM at locations above 32767, use minus figures, i.e., HIMEM (-32767-1) would set it at 32768; -32766 sets 32770 .