CURSOR #17 – February 1980
“At the Winter Consumer Electronics show, Commodore showed a number of
possible new products...One was an entirely new ‘home computer’ (whatever that is) that
attaches to your color TV set. It was definitely a prototype, and all I saw it do was flash pretty
patterns on the screen. Unofficial word is that if Commodore decides to introduce the color computer,
it will be priced ‘aggressively’. (If you aren't a marketing person, that means: ‘cheap
enough to scare Atari’.)”
—Excerpted from A Cursory Glance, Issue #17
COVER
Author: Stephen Rosset
Original file name: COVER17
PRG file: cover17.prg
This month's cover draws a series of nested rectangles, and continually updates the display with regions of regular and inverse video, creating a sort of strobe effect. The routine that updates the screen is written in machine language—you'll have to wait a few seconds for it to load at the beginning—so the strobing is quite fluid.
Pressing SPACE takes you to the
table of contents for the issue.
POLICE!
Author: Kurt Carpenter
Original file name: POLICE!
PRG file: police.prg
In POLICE!, you move around a city map, trying to locate a criminal controlled
by the PET. You can't see the criminal unless you're within a single city block, but you get
periodic alerts (such as ROBBED BANK) that give you clues as to where they might
be. You can place a limited number of roadblocks to aid your pursuit.
I did manage to catch the criminal a few times, but it always felt more like luck than good deductive reasoning—typically, I'd act on a hunch, stumble upon the criminal by accident, only to have them blunder into a roadblock and pretty much catch themselves. I think this game's concept is strong, but the execution could use a little work.
SPOT
Author: Art Carpet
Original file name: SPOT
PRG file: spot.prg
SPOT is a computerized version of the board game
Connect Four for two
human players. There's no way to play against the PET, which is a missed opportunity for this
program. The game of Connect Four has been solved, although there's no way a brute-force
solution could fit in the PET's limited RAM. I'd be interested in knowing whether a moderately
strong an opponent could be programmed to fit in 3K of free RAM that SPOT has
to work with.
RULER
Author: David Dwyer
Original file name: RULER
PRG file: ruler.prg
At first, I thought RULER was kind of a dumb premise for an educational program,
but that gorgeous PETSCII ruler won me over. The PET gives you a length, and you have to
draw a line that stops at the correct fractional marker on the ruler. This is a simple drill
program, beautifully executed.
LETTER
Author: Michael Contino
Original file name: LETTER
PRG file: letter.prg
LETTER is a fun little diversion where you press a letter or number key, and the
PET draws a large version of the corresponding character on the screen. This program does not
store the pattern for each character, but instead constructs its display from a common library
of individiual components.
MERGE
Author: Glen Fisher
Original file name: MERGE
PRG file: merge.prg
MERGE is a BASIC programming utility that combines two smaller programs
into one. Merge utilities were handy tools for BASIC programmers. If you were working on a
program, and wanted to include some nifty subroutine that you'd already written—say, a
cool title screen or a bullet-proof input routine—you would have needed a merge utility;
BASIC didn't give you any way to LOAD subroutines and append them to your
existing code in memory. (BASIC 4.0 did introduce an APPEND command, but its
purpose was to add data to an existing file on disk.)
According to the flyer, CURSOR magazine used MERGE to wrap reader-submitted
programs in their in-house standard
program template.
NPACK
Author: Glen Fisher
Original file name: NPACK
PRG file: npack.prg
NPACK is an updated version of CURSOR's PACK utility, which was published in
CURSOR #6. NPACK strips extra spaces from a BASIC program listing
to make it more compact. Packed BASIC programs become somewhat harder to read, but gain two advantages: (1) they use less memory (RAM was a precious
resource), and (2) they run faster, because there are fewer characters for the interpreter to parse.
Because it leaves the code in a less human-friendly format, packing was typically done at the end of
the development process—although many of us learned to write unreadable code at any stage
of development.
Because NPACK
does not work with older ROM revisions,
we can make a reasonable guess that the N in NPACK stands for "new".