Letters: Cat's Eye & LCD

Hello LCD,

Unfortunately, I have to leave the club at the end of the year because my grades in school have dropped so significantly that it is quite possible I might have to repeat the school year. It is obvious that I spend a bit too much time on the Spectrum. For this reason, I must temporarily resign; simply becoming inactive wouldn't help, because every time a new Scene+ arrives, I spend hours sitting in front of it. Perhaps I will still be able to code on my projects during the weekends.

By the way: Many thanks for the graphics, they are brilliantly drawn (wait, where is your digitizer?) and will look great in the game. I also used your GET/PUT routine and simply cannot believe it was written in BASIC — I would have expected something this fast from assembly, but not from compiled BASIC. I am also following your tips regarding the soundtrack I want to integrate into the game: a great idea to simply put it into another bank and then switch banks via interrupts whenever the music needs to play. But why does it only work in USR 0 mode and not in standard 128 BASIC?

For "Remembrance", I used the story of a well-known animated series (as you already know!), ThunderCats, but what about copyright? On the Internet, I found out that the episodes shown on German TV were only the first season. Do you happen to know more about this?

Now I unfortunately have to stop, otherwise my parents will get mad that I am sitting in front of the Spectrum for so long again. Since my subscription runs until December, I will still get your answer. So, until then,

— M. Cat's Eye

Hello Cat's Eye,

It is, of course, regrettable that you want to leave ASC, even if only temporarily. ASC was fundamentally intended to be a club for Austrian users, but after your departure, it will be anything but Austrian. Still, of course, you are right: when grades in school drop, it is high time to drop everything unnecessary (tell me, aren't you also involved in a theater group?). And the Spectrum is definitely the most time-consuming hobby imaginable — at least for me.

It is nice that at least the weekends will remain free to do something on the Speccy. Many people only look at SCENE+ on weekends anyway and then say they don't have time left to code anything. If it weren't for the Russians, SCENE+ would only be 100 KB in size!

I am glad you liked the graphics. I actually could have digitized them, but at that size, they would have been barely recognizable.

As for the GET/PUT routine, I wasn't entirely honest: it has a few bytes of machine code in it, which are manipulated directly from BASIC. I had previously tried to achieve the same with pure compiled BASIC, but that routine was longer and about 10 times slower. However, it had one major advantage: it handled compressed image data directly. The new routine cannot do that, but if you set up a decompression buffer somewhere in memory, you can pack the images yourself with PK Lite or Turbo Imploder and then hide them away in other RAM banks. How exactly this works is demonstrated in the program "128ComprPut", which I am sending along in the hope that it won't keep you from studying.

I also puzzled for a brief moment over why the interrupts do not get along with 128K BASIC. It is clear now: the bank-switching routine sits in the former printer buffer and is constantly called by the interrupts. If I now integrate another routine that also uses interrupts, the two clash over bytes and fight each other until the Spectrum crashes. In USR 0 mode or in pure machine code, this cannot happen, which is why I recommend running everything in USR 0 mode. +3 users get the short end of the stick here, as they cannot use their disk drives in USR 0 mode (Amstrad is to blame!). But then again, who has a +3 without a +D anyway?

Don't worry about copyright: if the game is going to be Public Domain anyway, what are the courts going to do to you? Knowing you, you won't include your real address in the game itself, and nobody will learn it from me, as I already promised.

Regarding ThunderCats: as I mentioned before, there was a Spectrum game, which prompted me to look closer into the series in the first place. The season shown on Kabel 1 and Sat.1 ("Ich drücke Dich" — never again!) was indeed only the first one. In the second season, additional characters appear, some of whom are known from the comics, and there is even ThunderCats – The Movie, as well as several other seasons. As far as I know, these have not been dubbed into German yet because it was considered too expensive for German broadcasters. Since it is essentially a children's cartoon (notice the moral message in every episode!) and children are barely given consideration anyway, the costs were deemed not worth it. The toy industry made its profits, so the show became expendable, right?!

The comics are another story: Marvel bought the rights to the characters, altered a few things, and turned it into a comic series. Condor Verlag bought the rights for Germany and published the incredible total of... a whole 6 issues! (Why do you only have five of them?).

The animation of the series is outstanding (some Japanese names appeared in the credits on Sat.1), and it truly deserves to have the remaining seasons aired. On the Internet, there are already several homepages dedicated entirely to ThunderCats.

I hope to hear from you again soon, and please send me the program once it is finished.