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.

