MICROPENDIUM MICROREVIEWS for March 1996 by Charles Good LOAD MASTER by Mickey Cendrowski This is designed for the owner of a minimal expanded disk system with one or two floppy drives as an aid in loading disk software. It is written in extended basic with assembly language subroutines and is the first software I have seen that utilizes John Bull's XB Windows. Using Bull's product, Load Master displays drop down windows at appropriate times. As you use Load Master you are in 40 column mode and are often presented with several choices. Press the first letter of the choice you select. When you boot Load Master as XB DSK1.LOAD you are given your choice of Load manager, Funnelweb, Boot, or Exit. You must add Funnelweb or John Johnson's Boot to the Load Master disk to make these choices operative. Pressing "L" for Load manager gets you to the guts of Load Master. Here you have your choice of Catalog, Options, Back, or Exit. If you press "O" for Options a little window appears and gives you these options; Colors, Drives, Printer, and Back. Colors changes the screen colors. Drives lets you specify the drive that is accessed with the Catalog option. You have to go through the Options window each time you want to change this drive. Path names are supported. Printer lets you change the name of your printer, and you can supply a path name if you want to save output to a file. Once your options are configured you have to press "B" to get Back to the Load manager menu. Catalog is by far the most significant part of Load Master. Pressing "C" displays a screen full of file names from the drive specified with the Options menu. A cursor is positioned next to the first file name, and you also get a choice of Page?, Label, or Back. Page? asks for a number and displays that page (screen full) of file names if there are too many to fit onto one screen. Label prints nicely formatted disk labels using superscript sized print in a format that fits fan fold sheets of 1x3 inch sticky labels. If there are too many file names to fit on one label, Label will automatically space down to the next label on the fanfold sheet and continue printing file names. From a Catalog display you can put the cursor next to a file name and press . If the file is DV80 or DF80 the text is displayed on screen. You press a key to advanced to the next line of text. I like this method of displaying text. Some DV80 viewers just scroll the text continuously until you pause the scroll, and the scrolling is almost always too fast to read. If the program next to the cursor is an XB program it will run if you press . If the file next to the cursor is anything else, pressing gets you an error message. Load Master is a product under development. What I have described above is v1.2, and the documentation states quite clearly that this version is less than finished. The stated goal is to allow the user to load and run any type of runable file by placing the cursor next to the file and pressing . This can now be done using Funnelweb's disk review. Another goal stated in the Load Master docs is to inform the user of the software needed to load any file that cannot be run by itself, such as identifying a TI Artist picture file as such. The author requests user input concerning what users want future versions of Load Manager to be able to do, and programmer input on ways to accomplish her stated goals. Send me $1 and I will mail you the latest version of Load Master on a SSSD disk. It is fairware, and the author requests that you send whatever you think the software is worth. -------------------- QUIZ FAMILY by Charles Kirkwood Jr. This is a group of separate but related extended basic programs to help teachers create multiple choice and true/false examinations You type in data banks of your own test questions and the software creates nicely exams with a specific number of questions from these data banks. You can either manually select particular questions from one or more data banks, or the software will randomly pick the specified number of exam questions for you. As a university professor I am familiar with this type of software and have used several packages similar to Quiz Family. There are at least two similar products for the 99/4A. One was created by Jim Peterson, and one was published years ago on Home Computer Magazine. There are many similar programs in the PC world. Almost any textbook publisher of high school or introductory level college textbooks will supply such software free to teachers, complete with already created test question banks keyed to particular text books. In my opinion almost all of these 99/4A and PC testmaking software packages are difficult to use. Editing existing questions in a test bank is cumbersome, and you almost always need a hard copy printout or bound hard copy of the test bank questions in order to create an exam. With the PC software I have seen, if you lose the book containing the exam questions in the data banks you are out of luck. Your only other option is to view on screen the data bank questions one at a time and select or not select that question for your exam. This is very very cumbersome. You can't check them in big bunches because the software only displays the questions one at a time. Based on my experience with similar products I consider Quiz Family to be as good as any and better than most, which means I rate it quite highly. This is because of the ability to use any DV80 text editor such as the Funnelweb editor to enter, edit, and quickly view exam questions in a data base. The other quiz making programs I have tried don't give you this ease and flexability. Alternatively, you can create your quizes using an included extended basic program called BuildQuiz. This uses several lines in xbasic's 28 column screen display to simulate a single 80 column text line. This is workable, but the results are visually kind of confusing. There is no word wrap. Whether using a DV80 text editor or BuildQuiz, you have to preface each 80 column text line (record) with an upper case code letter to let the software know what to do with the line of text. The first text line of a question starts with a "Q". Each subsequent line of the same question starts with a "C". The first answer line must contain the correct answer and start with "A". For a true/false question, the first and only answer line might read "ATrue". Subsequent answer lines, such as in a multiple choice question, start with "C". The question/answer group ends in a line containing only "E" (for "End") in the first column of the line. I had no trouble modifying my existing DV80 files of multiple choice questions to this format. I just inserted the appropriate upper case letter at the beginning of each line of the DV80 file. Since these are DV80 files, they are very easy to go into and edit questions, add questions, or delete questions. DV80 question files are than run through a supplied program called Convert to make them into the Internal/Fixed 80 format needed by Quiz Family to generate quizes. These exam question data files can also be directly manipulated (edit add or delete questions) with a program called Correct if you don't mind the 28 column screen. PrintQuiz is the real guts of the Quiz Family software package. This program actually creates and prints your exams from the question data bases. Questions are printed in random order, and the possible answers to multiple choice questions are also printed in random order even though you always entered the correct answer first. You tell PrintQuiz how many questions to put in the exam. You then tell PrintQuiz which exact questions to include or you let PrintQuiz automatically randomly select questions from the data base. The exam can have any combination of personally selected and/or automatically randomly selected questions, a feature not found in other quiz making software I have used. You can tell PrintQuiz to generate several different versions of the same quiz each containing the same questions but in a different random order, discouraging students sitting next to each other from paying attention to their neighbor's answers. A record of the quiz, listing which questions in the data bank are used in the quiz and the correct question answers, can be saved to disk. A couple of additional utilities are included in this very complete package. A program called MergeQuiz lets you combine several data banks into one larger bank. The program Select lets you make an exam file using questions from several different database files. You can you get a hard copy of a question data bank, complete with correct answers indicated, using ListQuiz. If you are a teacher who has access to a textbook publisher's IBM compatible test bank of questions for a particular text book, you can convert these questions to a DV80 file on a TI disk for use with Quiz Family. Using an IBM compatible computer print the entire question test bank to an ASCII disk file on a 360K IBM disk. Almost all IBM quiz making software will let you do this. Then on your 99/4A or Geneve with a DSDD disk controller use the commercial product PC Transfer to convert this list of questions to a DV80 file on a TI disk. This is what I have done over the last several years. For the college courses I teach, all my exams are created with the Funnelweb editor using questions I write myself or questions that have imported from publisher's IBM compatible test banks. Quiz Family is public domain. The author doesn't request any money for his work. Send me $1 and I will mail it to you on a SSSD disk. --------------------- ACCESS: Mickey Cendrowski (LoadMaster author): 100 Pine St. Russellton PA 15076 Charles Kirkwood Jr. (QuizFamily author): P.O. Box 1241, Clemson SC 29633 Charles Good (your humble columnist): P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894. Phone 419-667-3131. Email cgood@osulima1.lima.ohio-state.edu (preferred) or good.6@osu.edu