EUG PD
1st October 1995
Categories: Letter
Author: Tony Boarer
Published in EUG #22
I had a few problems with the latest EUG menu and had to CHAIN many of the programs directly to get them to work. Some of them seemed to be missing documentation though.
My set up is currently a 64K Electron (MRB off) through the Slogger Plus 2 (Mouse switched on through CLICK - BBRAM active) and into a Slogger Rombox+ with the Click cartridge and an ACP disk drive interface giving 1770 DFS. The two disk drives are from Slogger, linked together to the interface but separately powered. At the moment I have 1 and 3 power off though it makes no difference if I have power on. In the past with floppy problems I have had the PEGASUS 400 DFS active so it does not seem to be an interface matter.
I have a new switch from Derek Walker which is really an extension of his original RGB switch (which I still have!) but the "black box" is somewhat bigger. It takes the four leads from the RGB sockets of my two Electrons and two BBCs as input and has one output lead only to my CUB MicroVITEC monitor. A knob on the front of the box can be turned to any one of four positions to display on the screen whatever the current output is from each computer. So I can have four computers live at the same time if I wish. I current have two; the Electron and a BBC. If I am using the BBC, I like to have the Electron live to give me a warning beep for any programmed messages from CLICK! I now have three spare Elks!
Like John Crane, I have received a few job lots with recent purchases and have a tremendous amount of sorting to do, both tape and disk, Elk and BBC. If I ever get on top of this I will advertise the duplicated items and those I do not require! I will not be lost for wordprocessing as I now have STARWORD, View, INTERWORD, WORDWISE+ and the one with DOSPLUS 2. Also I have a 386 laptop with CEOWRITE and WORDPERFECT! Why have I no time, I wonder as I type this well into the small hours?
By now, you and other members will have gathered that I incline to be more a manipulator of programs and other software rather than a programmer. My own financial programs are very basic BASIC and I adapt software for say, pillar diagrams, without necessarily understanding the BASIC involved in the software itself. Again, for example, I do not understand some of the lines errors reported on the faulty EUG though I probably could with study and time. Another difficulty I find is that the program error is not always at the line thrown up by the computer.
I hope that you have Master copies of all the EUGs you have produced as I am about to go back in time a little. I'm sorry about this but as I have now started to go through the floppy disks EUG #16 to #18 more thoroughly, I have found the following:
EUG #16 gives "Bad name" reports at line 395 and 385.
EUG #18 has the same files on side two as on side one, hence many of the menu options give the report "Bad name", "Not found" or "No such variable".
I don't want to sound uppity but if these issues work on your master disks, how do these errors creep in when the disks are 'mass-produced'?
The latest prices for Electrons in Micromart vary between £15-£40 depending on whether they are 32K/64K and the number of addons and amount of software bundled with them.
Tony Boarer
There were a number of mistakes with EUG #21 as mentioned in the editorial of this issue. Please accept my apologies. The rehashed EUG #21 has eliminated every error members have mentioned.
Regarding back issues, I will find the time to go over them and print a list of all the problems with them. However, not all of them are brought to my attention and occasionally I miss some things resulting in a disk which is far from perfect. I need feedback from members - just a note will do or even a postcard!!
Sorry about the EUG #18 flipside. I did this once before and the member wrote back at once "I discovered that side one was in fact on both sides of the disk, even though one was cleverly disguised as side two."
Gus Donnachaidh, EUG #22
