One of the major drawbacks of the otherwise excellent (crawl, crawl) game Sunday by Dave E is that, possibly in the excitement of putting it together, he forgot to allow players to save and load their position. I for one got fed up having to watch scenes I'd completed well again and again every time I played it. Here is a program I devised to make life a lot easier - particularly if you want to try and get the highest possible score.

It works a little like the QSave on the Exile cassettes and disks: when you want to save your position you press BREAK and wait for the prompt. Unfortunately, it's not quite as professional and you need to enter a few BASIC commands before you load it. Don't worry though as, because all the Sunday information is held in integer variables A%-Z%, it's very safely held in memory.

The Sunday files are in BASIC and fortunately for us, Dave has put a REM statement in the first line of them giving its filename (plus the version number and computer it's intended for). So type in:

      >PAGE=&2000 (RETURN)
      >OLD (RETURN)
      >LIST 10 (RETURN)

You'll get something like, on the Burger King scene:

         10REM SUNDAY ELK Version "BURGER1"

Make a note of the "filename" (In this case, BURGER1) as you need to enter this scene name later when saving your position.

To save your position now, insert the EUG disk [Or a disk to which you've transferred the utility on it - Ed], *MOUNT it if necessary and type:

      >CH."U.SUNSAVE" (RETURN)

The utility will be loaded and you will be asked to insert either a readily formatted (although it doesn't matter if it has some files on) disk and press SPACE. You can choose to catalogue it if you want or you can save the position by typing S.

It's best to save your file in the $ directory and call it something like "savgam1" or "sun-A". Then you need to enter the filename of the scene you had reached (BURGER1 or whatever).

After a few seconds, there will be a beep and the position will be saved. To start playing again from that position, you then need to load the utility and put the save game disk in, press L(oad) and type in the filename. If using DFS, you will also have to specify which drive (0, 1, 2 or 3) contains the scene you want to pick up at with the stored data (For BURGER1, this is either 2 or 3 depending on whether you've got a double-disk drive). Then stick in the appropriate original Sunday disk and away you go!

I think that using this utility enhances Sunday quite enormously. You can play scenes to your heart's content and the hackers among you will have noticed you could even manipulate the variables so as to get different responses or sequences. [See the Sunday's Secrets Revealed article - Ed] Of course, it's not as good as a built-in game save position which surely wouldn't be too hard to incorporate, would it, Mr. Editor? And what about a high score table too, instead of just holding the one?!

Steven Thompson
Ipswich

This is a great way of saving and loading your position and, of course, thanks for enjoying and emailing about Sunday. As a lot of the Sunday scenes are so big as to fill almost all of the memory, I suspect though that you may have found the only way to do it. As the programmer, I know any other would require a major rewrite.

A minor niggle with using Steven Thompson's utility is that, if you decide to save your position in the middle of a scene, or a scene that doesn't draw the backdrop when it begins, then you 'travel back in time' and play the beginning of it again (and get a higher score than you ought!) or get a blank graphics area with weird effects for a while. I suggest that it's probably better to hit BREAK and use the utility only when a new scene is beginning.

Dave E, EUG #52

Steven Thompson