MORE STRANGE ENCOUNTERS OF THE "03" KIND.

BY DAVID COBLEY.

On page 13 of the September/October issue of the ADVISA, we 
published a       review article by Dean Roades of 463 ADAM, 
on the software program            "SmartWRITER Helper" by 
Hexace Software. Bruce Walters founded Hexace, after  he and 
his twin brother James went their separate ways. Previously 
they had   worked together as Walters' Software, which company 
name Jim still retains.

Since their splitting up, Bruce has produced a number of 
useful and           inexpensive programs for the ADAM. They 
include SmartWRITER Helper (a         SmartWRITER enhancement), 
COPX (a comprehensive copy program), FORMAX (a disc 
formatting program that will format up to 8 discs at a time, in any 
size      combination), and EDIX (an editor program for machine 
code, text, fonts,      sprites and clips). Bruce has 
written a highly modified EOS (Elementary       Operating System) 
which automatically loads when you "boot" any of his        
programs. You can buy a medium of documentation texts of this 
new operating   system, which you can print out and retain as 
a small book.

In addition, he has produced disassemblers for the Z80 ADAM 
main              microprocessor, and for the various 6801 
sub microprocessors that support the Z80. And he can program 
disc drive EPROMS and 68701 chips that may be used to replace 
any of the 6801's in your ADAM, that go bad.

All in all Bruce has been extremely active in his support of 
our ADAM. And at very competitive prices I might add. Each 
of his items is priced at $10:00 a  copy, except for the 
System Documentation and new 68701 chips which are       $15:00 
each.

Bruce, when writing his new operating system, chose his own 
birthdate as the  default "installed date" ADAM entered in a 
directory when saving a file.  Bruce was born on February 
3rd, 1946 which means that his birthdate is entered 
as 2E/02/03. 2E being the hexadecimal number for 46.

Barry Wilson, former Editor-In-Chief of the ADAM News 
Network, is a dyed-in-the-wool SmartWRITER user. He says 
he can't understand why anyone     would want to use anything 
else. With the advent of SmartWRITER Helper, Barry obtained 
a copy and has been one of the programs biggest boosters.

So, when Barry loads SmartWRITER Helper, he also presets the 
date of any      files he "saves" to 2E/02/03.

And therein lies the problem that Dean and I have, and 
likely many other      confirmed users of SpeedyWRITE II, when 
trying to read recent ADAM News       Network discs.  

After I found I was having similar difficulties to those 
Dean had mentioned,  I wrote to tell him that we shared a common 
problem. And what I had done to   try to correct it. I 
copied this letter to Barry Wilson, who, in turn,        forwarded 
a copy to Bruce Walters for his information and comment.

Some time later I phoned Bruce Walters to talk to him about 
the situation.    Bruce told me he had determined that 
SpeedyWRITE will not "display" the next  file after a file ended in 
"03". Now, ADAM uses an "03" at the end of each    filename 
to tell the operating system that it has read the entire 
filename.   And once SpeedyWRITE sees a date ending in 03 it 
stops reading the next       filename and displays nothing for 
that file.

He suggested that we should approach a machine code 
knowledgeable programmer  to modify SpeedyWRITE II so that this 
problem would be eliminated. But I      think the shoe should be 
on the other foot. I think he should modify the      default 
date on SmartWRITER Helper which is, after all, much more 
recent, and likely less widely used as yet. It's simply a matter 
of editing bytes 74, 76  and 77 of Block 0 on the SmartWRITER 
Helper medium. Just as long as the       replacement date 
doesn't end in an 03.

In the meantime, you can overcome the problem much more 
simply by editing the dates on each file on any ANN discs that 
are giving you trouble. My problems  started with the October 
discs and continue. To make matters simple, I used   my 
favourite utility FILEMANAGER, chose 00/00/00 as my corrected date, 
and    went through each file entry on each disc until I had 
corrected them. It      works like a million dollars and 
it's not difficult, but it does take a       little time. I'm 
hoping that Bruce will heed my advice to change the default  
date on future discs, and perhaps publish a "patch" for those 
already in the  field.



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