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1. April June 1986 WHAT S NEW S PROMAL NEWS Dedicated to PROMAL User Community Debuts with First Quarterly Issue Welcome to PROMAL NEWS the newsletter for PROMAL program mers Our intention is to publish PROMAL NEWS quarterly to provide you with news programming support new product and upgrade notices User Group news and information on the latest additions to the PROMAL Public Domain Library This Newsletter is your forum as well as ours and we welcome your comments and suggestions about the newsletter s format and content Tell us what you would like to see and feel free to contribute material We at SMA continue to be gratified by the enthusiastic response so many of you have given us about PROMAL and we hope this newsletter will help you all become better PROMAL programmers Now for some more news The IBM version of PROMAL has been delayed until the end of May and will ship as a preliminary 1 9 version which will be followed by 2 0 later in the year You will all receive a mailing about the IBM version The PPDL is growing and has some great programs including a 6502 assembler See the PPDL section on page 5 and the order form for details Our publisher who is also President of SMA Inc has insisted on having his own column called The Last Word please humor him by reading it He has a special offer for those of you who are sometimes motivated by money And the best news of all2. Sincerely Version Address Was Should be Apple both 1785 F013 EAEA C 64 Regular 4C7F F0 13 EA EA C 64 GENMASTERed 4BDF FO 13 EA EA You can put this patch in your BOOTSCRIPT J file For example for the Apple add SET 1785 EA EA to the BOOTSCRIPT J file to make the patch For stand alone programs gener ated with the developer s disk you can use assignment statements to make the patch For example for a Commodore stand alone application IF MI 4BDF FO AND MI 4BE0 13 ba M S 4BDF1 EA Patch 2 0 bug M S4BEOJ EA in REAL output CONTINUED page 6 PROGRAMMING TIPS TECHNIQUES by Bruce Carbrey SMA Inc Safe Handling With PROMAL Arrays Programming in PROMAL after using BASIC is like getting a sports car after years of riding the bus It s fun fast and will take you anywhere you want but it s kind of scary too at first if you don t understand what the controls do or get careless you re likely to crash Here are some driving tips to keep you out of the ditch When using arrays and strings it is important to understand the difference between the address of an array and the value of an element of the array Suppose you had an array declared as BYTE X Now suppose you wanted to read a line of text into this array from the keyboard No sweat you say just use 81 GETL X 0 This will put it in the array X starting at the first byte right CRASH H
3. 25 PROMAL will oblige you by writing into whatever happens to be in memory after the end of the PAGE array hope you re wearing your seat belt Also note that the optional second argument 40 after GETL is good insurance Without it you could enter up to 80 characters even though the array was only dimensioned large enough for 40 To summarize if a PROMAL library routine or any PROMAL subroutine for that matter expects a string you need to specify an address If in doubt about how to make an address place the operator in front of the variable following are all exactly equiva ent PUT X PUT X PUT X 0 All three expressions will print the string which starts at the first location of the X array in memory and is terminated by a zero byte The following statement is not equivalent PUT X 0O This statement will print only the first character of the string because the expression will evaluate to the value of the first byte of the array X which is assumed to be an ASCII character code PUT is one of the few routines that can accept a single character or a string If the argument is less that 256 PUT assumes the argument is a single ASCII character and prints it If the argument is greater than 256 it assumes the argument is the address of a String to be printed With a little practice and maybe some studying of the SORT STRING S program on the demo diskette you ll soon be using arrays like a maste
4. 5 Improvements to the macro assem bler provided on Public Domain Disk 1 Apple and Commodore versions 6 SID programming on the C 64 with PROMAL 7 Modifications of S_PRT_IMAGE in the PROMAL GRAPHICS TOOLBOX for popular printers 8 Useful application programs that would have wide appeal Now the fine print We reserve the right to select what is published And Iwe cant return submitted disks Bulk Rate U S Postage PAID Richmond VA Permit No 729
5. PROMAL Graphics Toolbox Now Available Now you can program dazzling high res graphics in PROMAL The PROMAL GRAPHICS TOOL BOX provides graphics commands for the Apple II or Commodore 64 with performance to match the rest of the PROMAL system The figure below shows a screen created with the GRAPHICS TOOL BOX on an Apple IIc By adding this software package you can easily write programs to draw bar graphs pie charts function plots and other graphic images ad ray Cee ae aes Seem rd spleen The GRAPHICS TOOLBOX for the Commodore 64 draws in 16 colors using the 320 X 200 high resolution mode On the Apple graphics are done in 280 x 192 high resolution monochrome since the Apple does not have a high res color mode Despite substantial differences in the underly ing hardware graphics applications written for the Commodore are highly portable to the Apple and vice versa The GRAPHICS TOOLBOX pro vides two add on libraries the Screen Graphics Drivers SGD and the Window Graphics System WGS The SGD provides high performance primitive functions for drawing points lines dashed lines rectangles circles and arcs etc plus routines for This is my offer For each copy of PROMAL we sell as a result of your effort we ll commission in the form of credits to be used against the purchase of future PROMAL products upgrades or Public Domain disks Here s how it works You convince a friend to
6. we also think you deserve to know about bugs up front so you can deal with them So here are the problems 1 If you have a program which uses EXPORTs and has a FOR loop with an index variable which is declared globally the FOR loop will not work properly To get around this problem simply declare your index variable as a local variable i e inside the PROC or FUNC 2 If you compile a program with EXPORTs from the Workspace on the Apple you may get a Can t open EXPORT file error message at the end of the compilation To work around this just compile from a disk file instead 3 On the Commodore 64 or 128 with a 1571 disk drive the system may occasionally hang up while ilemm Since we re a relatively small company and don t have megabucks for advertising how will we achieve the market success that PROMAL deserves Every 10 000 spent on sales promo tion is 10 000 less available for future PROMAL product development My solution is simple but requires your help We need our existing PROMAL users t convince their friends and colleagues to try PROMAL classic word of mouth promotion If every current user of PROMAL could convince three or four other programmers to buy PROMAL we could triple our user base in just a few months with essentially no marketing costs This means we could invest more into accelerated PROMAL devel opment and support n nefi A rapidly growing PROMAL user base means more Public D
7. would comment Is that guy still here He died at the console Of hunger and thirst Next day he was buried Face down nine edge first And his wife through her tears Accepted his fate Said He s not really gone He s just working late Original author unknown Submitted by David Simpson Laurel MD ED NOTE If any of you under 40 programmers don t understand the last line of verse six ask an old timer what it means LETTERS TO THE EDITOR In future issues we will print letters from users in this section For this first issue we will paraphrase excerpts from some letters we have received According to Appendix G of the PROMAL manual up to about 32K bytes are available for loading programs on_ the Commodore 64 but I get an error message if I try to run a program which is larger than about 19K bytes What gives The EXECUTIVE is set up to pre serve the EDITor which takes up about 12K or so To use the full available space you need a boot loader which will overwrite the EDITor Here is a general purpose boot loader which will load a specified big program provided the program was written with OWN on the PROGRAM line PROGRAM BOOTBIG OWN 3 Commodore 64 only Boot program specified as the argument Clobbers the EDITor and workspace Does not unload programs except EDITor INCLUDE LIBRARY INCLUDE PROSYS BEGIN IF NCARG lt gt 1 PUT CR BOOTBIG ABORTED NO NAME GIV
8. EN ABORT cUSAGE BOOTBIG Progname HIFREE MEMLIM The max memory WORG MEMLIM No workspace please WPTR MEMLIM WEOF MEMLIM WLIM MEMLIM EDRES FALSE LOAD CARG 1 IF LDERR lt gt O 3 Goodbye EDITor Load amp run big prog ABORT cBOOTBIG LOAD ERROR h LDERR END I was really disappointed to see you cheated with the number of primes to calculate in the Eratosthenes sieve program from BYTE Your product is really good it doesn t need that kind of unfair tricks C N Mougins France We didn t cheat We bent over back wards to make the competition look good The reason the array size used in the benchmark tests in SMA magazine ads was reduced from 8192 to 1800 is because COMAL not to be confused with PROMAL could not run with an 8192 element array So rather than disqualify COMAL we changed the array size for all the languages to the biggest size that COMAL could accommodate about 1800 The relative performance of the languages is still the same with PROMAL way out in front The cursor blinks too fast How can I slow it down on my Apple For Apple PROMAL version 2 0 only SET BE83 0 The deserve designers of PROMAL as much respect as Wirth or Kernighan and Ritchie Your language is very good am also impressed with the other new features and extensions present in PROMAL 2 0 will pass on information to LOGIC Loyal Ontario Group Interested in Computers the la
9. aturally you don t make the patch if would lie outside the window area It also allows you to draw your graphics using measurement units suited for your application with scaling For example if you wanted to might plot Raleigh at X 372 4 miles and Y 75 28 miles If you are a rodent lover we are sorry to tell you that the GRAPHICS mouse input or Macintosh style pull down windows rather it provides graphics window support similar to that graphics packages such as Tektronix TCS system Of course you can easily develop your own pull in The GRAPHICS TOOLBOX cludes a manual and disk with numer ous demonstration programs only For 29 95 plus 2 50 shipping and handling 15 00 outside USA and Canada you can put the punch of high resolution graphics into your PROMAL programs It s fun O SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES 3325 Executive Drive PO Box 20025 Raleigh North Carolina 27619 Telephone 919 878 3600 automatic found on many mainframe the FIXES from page 2 you have selected the NOREAL option The preceding information applies to the latest version of PROMAL 2 0 as of the publication time of this newsletter You can find out if you have the latest version of PROMAL by typing the command WHORU from the EXECUTIVE If the displayed date is 01 08 86 or later you have the latest version Otherwise you may wish to contact SMA to find out how to get your upgrade o FAME from page 5 f
10. buy PROMAL and have him or her write Referred _by and your name and address on the registration form when they send it in Immediately on receiving the registra tion form we will send you credit coupons based on the following schedule PM 320 Developer s Version 10 00 PM 220 End User Version 5 00 PM 410 Graphics Toolbox 3 00 A personal letter from your friendly Publisher Dear Friends The credit coupons are cumulative transferable and have no expiration date So if you got four friends to buy I asked the Editors to let me have a small space in the newsletter to talk one on one to you You make it possible for us to be in the program ming language software business We want to serve you with the best possible product at a fair price From the feedback I get from you we seem to be on the right track with PROMAL It is truly a yalue packed product But I ve learned in the micro computer business that it s not enough to have a great product you ve got to have great marketing to become estab lished as a leader FIXES and The purpose of this column is to tell you about the known bugs in PROMAL and give you fixes or techniques to overcome them Many software companies seem to strive to hide bug information from users or even deny the existence of bugs even in the face of overwhelming evidence We think that all but the most naive users realize that all published software contains bugs and
11. e are a few topics we d partic ularly like to hear about 1 Interrupt driven T device support for the Apple IIc 2 Alternate character fonts for the PROMAL GRAPHICS TOOLBOX 3 Games 4 Utility programs CONTINUED page 6 _ _ INEWS from page 1 displaying text in graphics mode in various sizes horizontally or verti cally saving and restoring images or parts of images filling an area etc The SGD uses an X Y coordinate system based on the pixels dots on your screen For example to draw a rectangle 60 pixels by 40 pixels with its lower left corner 90 pixels from the left of the screen and 50 pixels up you would write S_MOVE 90 50 S_RECT 60 40 If you wanted to add a title inside the rectangle you could just write S_TEXT A Rectangle For maximum performance the SGD is provided as a relocatable machine language program occupying about 4 5K of memory reducible to 2K if no text or pattern filling is required The SGD can be used alone or in conjunction with the WGS The WGS is a collection of higher level graphic routines written PROMAL 4 draw a map of North Carolina you TOOLBOX does not directly support down window support with the GTB in It is supplied in both source and object form The WGS allows you to display graphics in various windows on the screen with automatic clipping of lines which N
12. e authors A documen tation file accompanies most programs A few have no documentation but they are easily understood by a look at the source code Hardcopy documen tation is provided when the amount is large or when hand drawn diagrams are present Disk 1 for the Commodore Contents 1 Macro assembler by C Martens 2 Disassembler by Steve Vermeulen 3 Disk Fixer program by A Ryan included also is a twenty page manual describing Commodore disk structures and how to change them using the disk fixer The delivered product consists of a disk and summary of contents plus the Disk Fixer documentation in hardcopy form Disk 2 for the Commodore Contents 1 Document formatter program by David Long It offers a powerful and well established method of word processing that begins with a manually created file containing text intermixed with formatting commands The commands define such things as margins and page size paragraphs and absolute lines of text underlining page headers and footers and page numbering The manually created file which makes no pretense of looking like the final document is fed into the document formatter program which acts upon the commands and produces a printer ready result A file is included that when fed through the document formatter produces the fifteen page user s manual that is also supplied in hardcopy form 2 Screen creator by Rev Mike Cargill 3 Printer control
13. fty little program or routine you ve been working on so others can marvel at your ingenuity and benefit from your experience These contributions don t have to be big or complex the best ideas are usually the simplest To submit a program for the public domain disk send the source and object code on a disk together with a text file telling what the program does and how to use it this may be obvious to you but without some documen tation it won t be much help to others Examples are great Put a label on the disk telling what kind of disk it is Commodore or Apple and add your name and phone number Enclose a note handwritten is fine telling us it is a submission for the PROMAL Public Domain Library and that you are the author Sign and date it That s all there is to it For articles for the newsletter you can submit a disk with a text file We can accept Apple Commodore or IBM MS DOS disks For IBM disks please use ordinary ASCII text files or WordPerfect WordStar or MultiMate files and tell us which kind of file it is If your article or program is selected for publication you will get the next volume of the PROMAL PUBLIC DOMAIN DISK free But more importantly you will be helping the PROMAL community and getting pleasure out of seeing your labors appreciated by others Besides the sooner we get enough good submis sions for a new disk the sooner you can get another volume of the PUBLIC DOMAIN DISK Her
14. issuer by Julia Christianson 4 PROMAL source file lister by Garth Ingram 5 Screen creator by W A Marsh 6 Graphics routines and demo by _ Roger Norrod 7 Lister that includes time and date stamp by Michael T Veach 8 C64 to Tandy PC2 data exchange _ program by Steve Vermeulen 9 Dumb terminal emulation routine and demo by Steve Vermeulen 10 KOALA touchpad support by Erik Vigmostad 11 Counter of word occurrences in a file by Erik Vigmostad 12 File lister for RS 232 printer by Erik Vigmostad The delivered product consists of a disk and summary of contents plus the Document Formatter documentation in hardcopy form Disk 1 for the Apple Contents 1 Macro assembler by C Martens 2 Disassembler by Steve Vermeulen 3 Printer control issuer by Julia Christianson 4 PROMAL source file lister by Garth Ingram 5 Counter of word occurrences in a file by Erik Vigmostad The delivered product consists of a disk and summary of contents Disk 2 for the Apple Contents 1 Document formatter program by David Long It is described above under Disk 2 for the Commo dore item 1 The delivered product consists of a disk and summary of contents plus the documentation in hardcopy form FAME AND FUN FOR YOU The PROMAL Newsletter and Public Domain Disks give you a forum to show off your software master piece see your name in print and benefit other programmers So come on Send in that ni
15. omain software more user groups more new PROMAL products and more support from accessing the disk Contrary to claims SMA But I woul like do some by Commodore the 1571 drive is not thing for each of you immediately in 100 percent compatible with the 1541 aa or your efforts to promote We are researching this problem In the mean time we suggest you turn 2 PM 320s you d get 40 00 in coupons to use anytime in the future If you want to let another friend have a good deal give him one of your coupons to send in with his order a truly selfless act or sell him one or more of your coupons at less than face value You get cash and he gets a discount Everybody wins We ll report in the next newsletter our top coupon winners Who knows you might even get offers from other users to buy your coupons Thank you for your support of PROMAL and I ll look forward to sending out those coupons pes John R Segner President SMA Inc UPDATES DYNODISK OFF if you have a 1571 or if you experience this symptom 4 For formatted output of REAL J numbers if you try to output exactly the smallest value possible in a given format it may print zero instead For example using a field descriptor of 12 3R with a value of 0 001 may display 000 instead of 001 How ever all other values such as 0 001000001 1 001 etc work fine This problem can be fixed by making the following patch to the PROMAL system
16. ope your insurance is paid up because that won t do it GETL like most string handling routines expects the address of the first byte of the string But typing X 0 with the brackets means get the value of the first byte of the array which will be whatever number between 0 and 255 happens to be in X 0 at the time GETL will obediently treat this number between 0 and 255 as an address and install the string somewhere in zero page of your computer tearing up the operating system innards in the process and probably hanging up your computer So how do you specify that you want the address not the value There are two ways The simplest is simply to write the array name without the brackets That causes the compiler to generate the address of the first element of the array Therefore a Correct way to input a line into the X array is GETL X Okay you say what happens if you don t want to install the string at the very start of the array Suppose instead you have a 2 dimensional array like BYTE PAGE 41 25 with room for up to 25 lines of text in it Say you want to get the string into the 3rd line This will do it GETL PAGE 0 2 40 The operator causes the compiler to generate the address of the specified element Remember that the subscript 2 is used instead of 3 because the first element is always 0 not 1 More importantly remember that the last element is 24 not 25 If you try to read a line into PAGE 0
17. r Keep it on the road OK m THE ECHO LESS GETC Several users have inquired as to how you can get a single character from the keyboard without having it echoed to the screen as is done by function GETC Here s a simple way FUNC BYTE GETC_NOECHO 3 Waits for key without s echoing to screen 3 Returns the key code BYTE TEMP BEGIN WHILE TESTKEYC TEMP 0 NOTHING RETURN TEMP END Unlike GETC this subroutine does not display a blinking cursor while waiting o PRINTER lt ESC gt SEQUENCES When sending escape sequences to a printer on the Commodore 64 you may need to defeat the ASCII to CBM upper lower case flip normally done by the PROMAL printer driver For example sending 27 76 ESC L will really be sent as 27 108 ESC 1 To correct this use EXT BYTE C64PUL AT 0DF4 80 FLIP CASE 0 don t C64PUL 0 Turn off PUTF 27 76 send raw ASCII codes as needed prtr case flipping Ridiculous Requiem for a Programmer No program is perfect They said with a shrug The client is happy What s one little bug But he was determined The others went home He dug out the flow chart Deserted alone Night passed into morning The room was cluttered With memory dumps microfiche T m close he muttered Chain smoking cold coffee Logic deduction Tve got it he cried Just change one instruction Then change two then three more As year followed year And strangers
18. rgest Apple users group in Canada Congratulation on a wonderful language and best wishes for continuing and growing success J M Toronto Ontario To you and all the hundreds of other users who took the time to write similar sentiments we thank you It is really rewarding to see so much enthusiasm for PROMAL When we first introduced PROMAL a lot of experts told us we were crazy to sell it so cheaply and more crazy to provide ongoing support We think the experts were wrong If you think so too we encourage you to tell your friends and write to magazines about PROMAL This is the most effective way you can send software publishers a message that you are more interested in quality and support than in slick ads and hype Again thank you for your encourage ment from all of us at SMA o 4 A AAAH LND Public Domain Disks Now Available These are public domain contribu tions by users You can freely use or copy them SUBJECT ONLY TO ANY RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROGRAM AUTHOR For example some authors may have copyrighted their programs and dis allow commercial use SMA serves only as a clearing house for the PPDL PROMAL Public Domain Library and in no way stands behind program correctness or pro vides support for them Don t even think about calling or writing us about PPDL problems All programs are written in PROMAL and supplied in both source and compiled form All documentation is supplied by th
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