A FAST LOADER

by Richard Swann



Or (and I quote) "the next best thing to a disk drive". This program

was originally titled Rich-Load by its creator but that was a silly

name, so I was forced to exercise my extensive editorial powers. As

you will no doubt have noticed, your friend and mine Dicky is back

once more, and I'm beginning to wonder how he can manage to work on

his degree and churn out vast quantities of Speccy programs at the

same time. Oh hang on. He's doing Computer Science isn't he? That

would explain it.



Cutting sarcasm aside, this is a jolly good fast loader, and, credit

where credit's due, Dicky's done a marvellous job. To use the thing,

type in the BASIC (all code to be generated is contained within the

main BASIC program) and save it off with SAVE "filename" LINE 0. At

this stage, the program is completely untainted, ready and waiting to

be customised for your individual programs. Easily done. Just RUN it,

answer the searching and highly personal questions with which you will

be presented, and then save it off wherever it'll be of most use.



Just to give you some idea of what it can do, the options are

backwards or forwards loading, start and length of code to save/load,

speed of tone (the blue and red bit) and bytes (the yellow and blue

bit), and a choice of four predefined colour schemes. Once you've

customised the loader, you can only use it to load in code of a

particular length to a certain address, so make sure you keep the

"pure" copy on tape. When all's done and ready, enter RANDOMIZE USR

64900 to save your code (make sure the tape's running), and RANDOMIZE

USR 64914 to load it in again.



And finally, a quick hint for people who don't know the memory map

like the back of their hands - the default address and length given

are those needed for saving/loading a screen, so just use these to

achieve the same effect as SCREEN$.

