Datasoft (me)

Address:

John Garner (email: jmg7@ukc.ac.uk)

The Orchard

Moor Road

Langham

Colchester

Essex

CO4 5NR

Ha-ha! It's me! Well, now that I come to it I have done pitifully little coding on the Spectrum - well actually, quite a lot but it never gets anywhere. The rather small list is almost an embarassment to include. OK, so it's a big embarassment then. I'm mainly a coder, although every now and then mess around with tunes (using SQ Tracker, Soundtracker, SampleTracker) and graphics (although I'm no good at realistic pictures, just about ok-ish at logos and line-drawings).

I also think that Datasoft is a very crap 'pseudonym' (or name) so I'm desperately trying to think of other ideas - ones that have cropped up include: a register name (ie AF? HL/Aychel?);softdata (naa thats rubbish too); Alpha-one (lots of fun for logo drawing there eh?); LDIR (a lovely assembly language instruction). Possibly Breezer (my conf/talker/mud name). Any thoughts? Actually, Robot has come into some meaning recently. It's a story I can't be bothered to repeat here. Write and ask if you're that desperate to know why.

My released creations so far (and a few not finished yet) are listed below:

1. Dataspread - a spreadsheet written in BASIC (quite big actually! Try 24Kb of BASIC without the variables)
2. Demo C's - my first very crap demo, just a double height scroller (my first one) my logo bouncing left and right above it, and a choice of three very (very) poor pictures below in the bottom two thirds.
   The loading screen from Demo C's - about the best bit of it really!
3. fractal- a simple BASIC program to draw a very simple 'I' shaped fractal, I did it just to see how easy it was to do recursion in BASIC. It uses a string as a stack.
4. Mini-Mega demo - it's nearly done. Honest guv! (not - wait til 1996!) Well, two parts are written although one is being rewritten at the moment (nearly done) and there's routines hanging around for other parts (mainly the first intro part) but not a lot else - except for one massive scroller text for part 3! Oh, and there might be a tune part with mine (arrgh!) and other's creations. Also several other people should be writing either guest scrolls or small bits of code to it. Watch out for it!!!
5. part forBeyond Help (ok I shouldnt include this but it helps the list!)
6. Toppers - 128K ROM menu style controlled Top Tens and stuff, nearly done, and it's been nearly done since mid-April now! The truth is I spent a week writing it and got virtually all code for menu handling and selection done, plus most of the text then gave up due to lack of motivation. Not done anything to it since - maybe soon, after other things are finished.
7. TAP2Code - a file converter from the .TAP format used in Z80 emulator to normal Spectrum CODE files - for disk ideally, although could work from tape with a few modifications. BASIC files not supported (yet).
8. Not Dead - completed 16 May 95 this very little demo took just over 4 hours to write, over the four days before it was released. Four Tunes, a cool (uni-)scroller (20K of text!) and suitable background picture. Simple, but nice (IMHO).
9. WAV Player (V1.11) - a program to play .WAV files with proper headers on the AY sound chip. Works, but I aim to do a far better one and release it after Christmas '95, with stereo and mono 16 support.
10. +D Rescue - Ever lost a whole disk of data because something corrupted the directory sectors? (I have). Well this program tries to fix the disk by searching for sectors that look like the first one of a file. Loads of options and checking levels.
11. WAV Player (V2.0) - Hurrah! At last, this program was finished during holidays, built more for including in programs to play samples. It can manage 47kHz playback using 8-bit mono samples, played at 4 bits on any ACB channel. This is cos it uses the stack to pop the sample bytes so there's no chance of an interrupt routine running alongside unless you don't mind messing up the sample.
12. Hex-Files - ok so I didn't do it on my own. Me, the Spirit, LA and Dok/Orson of United Minds were up in Scotland for a few days where it got started.

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File last updated: 26 April 1996
Author: / jmg7@ukc.ac.uk