A LA CARTE by Peter Kecskemety Ever looked at the menus on the 128K Speccy and thought "Gosh, they look impressive"? No? I didn't think you had. Okay, so they don't exactly look impressive, but they're useful you know, and "useful" is a good word if you're on the lookout for a routine that you want to use. Stunningly enough, a program to emulate the 128K menus is exactly what Peter J. Kecskemety has delivered to my door. Now there's a coincidence. Let's have a look at it. A LA CARTE Just in case you're wondering, the menus we're talking about are kinda rectangular, garishly coloured, and have irritating little coloured stripes on the top which make your eyes water if you turn up the colour too much. And with Pete's little (587 byte) program you can copy every facet of those magical boxes, position them anywhere on-screen, fill them with anything, define the background colour, highlight the options and title colour, and then select a specific option. Cor. FOR STARTERS ... Firstly, use the hex loader program (from Password) to enter the hex block. Then, save the code with SAVE "name" CODE 64696,587. If you wish, you can type in the demo to see what 128 owners experience every evening (fwar). THE MAIN COURSE Before you dive into the menu you must decide what you're going to put in it. It can be anything from the days of the week to the different makes of biro you keep in your pencil case. While pondering over this problem, decide on your colour scheme: POKE 64696, background colour POKE 64697, option highlight POKE 64698, title colour Once you've POKEd in these variables, use the following method to create your menu: PRINT USR 64700;AT x,y;"TITLE","OPTION1","OPTION2","OPTION3" etc So if you wanted to make a menu of your top three rave albums at screen co-ordinates 2,7 you'd: PRINT USR 64700;AT 2,7;"Dave's Fave Raves","The Soul Mining","The Infected","The Dog Containers" Simple or what? But if you're still perturbed have a peek at the demo program to see how that works.