TIMECODE

by Ton Mutsaers



This month's #50-winner will appeal to anyone who's into messing about

with multi-track tape recorders, VCRs and (mainly) mixtures of the

two. It's been written by Ton Mutsaers, who hails from the

Netherlands, and it's spookily simple but breathtakingly ingenious.



So what does it actually do? Quite simply, it turns your Spectrum into

a "real-time counter". Eh? Well, what you do is connect the computer

to an audio recording medium, like a tape recorder, the audio input of

a video recorder or anything like that and it'll record a series of

time codes onto it. When you replay them the computer will pick up

exactly where the tape is and display its position (in hours, minutes

and seconds) on the screen. So it works a bit like a tape counter,

only it's much more precise and a jolly sight more versatile. You'll

be able to use it for synchronising multi-track recordings, getting

audio and video signals lined up properly, all sorts of things. The

only limit (as so often seems to be the case) is your imagination.

You'll also find that the numbers are printed in nice, big letters on

the screen, so with the help of some suitable technology you could

superimpose them onto something else. (If you want.)



So all that stands in your path now is the interminably long hex dump

below. Before you tackle that however (and wait 4 weeks for us to get

round to printing the end of it), type in the Basic bit and save it

onto a tape with SAVE "timecode" LINE 9050. Then, using the Hex Loader

(of which I've slightly modified line 230 as I don't think it'll work

with this program otherwise), type in the hex dump remembering not to

type in any of the spaces - they're there purely for readability. Type

STOP (Symbol Shift and A) when you reach the end to save the code

after the Basic part. When you reload and run the program you should

be presented with a couple of options - Record and Play. Play isn't

much use until you've recorded something, so do that first. Simply

start recording on your cassette recorder/video/whatever and press the

key. Time codes will be recorded (starting at 0) until you press

Space. Run the program again, rewind the tape and select Play. When

you play the tape the computer will pick up the codes and display the

point it's at.



Various things can be tweaked, such as the time between codes (which

is normally one second), the responsiveness of the program to picking

up codes and the format of the display.