Just when you'd given up hope, Stephen Brunton comes to the rescue with two useful machine code utilities to help your programming on the Atmos

These two short programs provide handy machine code utilities for the Oric Atmos, presented in the form of Basic programs that load the machine code into memory. The Basic can be deleted after loading.

The text screen dump is interrupt-driven, and so will execute whenever CTRL-P is pressed. It is assumed that the printer does not add a line feed to a carriage return code. The ROM printer routine is used, and I have included the minor changes that should enable this routine to run on the Oric 1.

The second routine is an aid to constructing Basic programs that use machine code subroutines. When called this program will construct DATA statements from a given area of memory, and these will be appended to any program already present.

The routine needs the address of the first memory location to be DOKEd into location 0 and the address of the final location plus one to be DOKEd into 2. The starting line number must also be DOKEd into location 4. This should be greater than the last line of any current program, as the data is appended to the program.

The DATA statements will be numbered in increments of five, starting with the given line number. This routine allows any machine code subroutines to be entered using an assembler and, when working and tested, to be transferred easily to the Basic program. The DATA statements in my Basic program were constructed using this routine after I'd written it in assembler. As far as I'm aware, the routine should work without modification on the Oric 1.