ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MICROPENDIUM P.O. Box 1343 Round Rock TX 78680 Phone 512-255-1512 Internet jkoloen@io.com MICRO REVIEWS for August 93 Micropendium by Charles Good Some of the software I review is shareware or public domain. In order that my readers can have ready access to this software I will sometimes offer to directly distribute some of these products (such as TIME CALC reviewed in this column) if you send me $1. Your money pays for a disk and postage, and the rest goes in my Florida vacation fund. This is done strictly as a service to the TI community. I suspect it will be a long time before my "Florida" fund will be large enough to get me to the edge of town. Loan me your products for micro reviews by sending them to Charles Good, P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894. My phone is 419-667-3131. All products will eventually be returned ----------------------- MAIL ROOM by Larry Tippett This is Asgard's top of the line "name/address/phone" data base. There are lots of public domain name-and-address programs for the 99/4A written in TI BASIC or Extended basic. I have been using one for years to handle the mailing list of my user group's newsletter. All these PD programs suffer from a bad case of the "slows". Most will handle only a limited number of names (usually about 100) because all the names and addresses have to be loaded into memory at the beginning of program execution. Many have problems with foreign addresses because there is no place to put "country" in the name and address data. Although written in Extended Basic, MAIL ROOM deals effectively with all these problems. No file size problem-- MAIL ROOM saves name, address, city, state, zip code, and phone on a disk file whose data is only loaded into memory as needed. Thus, large files are possible. A DSSD disk can hold the program itself AND a file of 1000 addresses, although 500 is the limit if you want MAIL ROOM to sort the file for you. A SSSD disk can hold the software and a file of 388 addresses, which is more than the membership of the largest TI user group. You can print labels, envelopes complete with your return address, or just a hard copy list of your data. You can print these things for all the addresses in your list, for just one address, or you can mark specific addresses in the file and print only those addresses. The data file is in INT/FIX 128 format, but MAIL ROOM allows you to convert the file to DIS/VAR 80 for use with the mail merge option of TI Writer. No foreign address problem-- There is plenty of room in the "zip code" field for non standard foreign postal codes AND the full name of a country. When printed, the zip code or country name is the last line on the address label, and because it is indented several spaces it stands out very strongly from the rest of the address. Good speed for extended basic-- Although MAIL ROOM is largely written in XB (and is thus easily modifiable by the user) there is lots of imbeded assembly code to speed things up. Sorting in particular is done with a nice fast assembly routine. Prior to printing you can sort your file by any field. If you sort by name the result is alphabetical by last name, except for addresses you specified as "corporation" when the data was entered. Corporations will end up in the sorted list alphabetically by first name. For example, ASGARD SOFTWARE will be with the A's. Speed is very noticeably enhanced by using a ramdisk. MAIL ROOM is very disk intensive, loading different parts of itself into memory from disk and then going to disk to look up parts of its data file. Assembly code can speed up things when already in memory, but can't do much to speed disk access. Other nice features-- If you have a modem you can display an address, press ial, and MAIL ROOM will dial the phone number for you. The program package comes with two disks containing a 40 column and an 80 column version. The two versions are functionally identical, but the 80 column version really looks great on my AVPC equipped 99/4A system! There are lots of overlaping windows. The 80 column version is written in XB using Alexander Hulpke's X80. In my opinion, everyone should try to upgrade to 80 columns because there is now a nice variety of useful TI/Geneve 80 column applications. These include MAIL ROOM, Funnelweb, Spell It, First Draft, Y.A.P.P., 80 column Multiplan, and Telco. Conclusions & complaints-- I like MAIL ROOM enough that I now use it to handle the newsletter mailing list and the membership list of the Lima User Group. The only other TI software comparable in terms of ease of use, speed, and list size is the RAMBO specific mail list program (I can't remember its title) written by Gary Bowser. I do have a couple of complaints about MAIL ROOM, however. The printed documentation does not explain how to set the program up to run off of some drive other than DSK1, and the CONFIGURE option from within the software won't do this either. With no hints in the docs, it took me a long time to get MAIL ROOM to run off of my ramdisk as DSK5. I finally discovered that there are 4 or 5 separate parts of MAIL ROOM that you need to OLD into memory, change the XB code, and then SAVE back to disk. There are REM statements near the beginning (but confusingly not exactly at the beginning) of each program segment that tell you which XB program lines to modify. This procedure should be spelled out in detail in the printed documentation, or at least in a -README file on 40 and 80 column program disks. My other gripe is that removing an entire address record (deleting a name) is difficult, though not impossible. MAIL ROOM requires only a minimal SSSD disk system with 32K. An 80 column device (or Geneve), printer, and modem are usefully supported. It is available for $14.95 plus shipping from most TI dealers and from Asgard Software, 1423 Flagship Dr., Woodbridge VA 22192, phone 703-491-1267. ------------------------ TIME CALC by Bruce Harrison The TI community has been greatly enriched by the efforts of Bruce Harrison. Assembly programmers have told me that his assembly column in Micropendium is first class. Also, he has contributed lots of useful assembly language and assembly/XB hybrid software to the public domain for us to enjoy for free. His latest public domain offering is TIME CALC. Have you ever tried to do simple math with time? For example, lets say you want to fill up one side of a C60 cassette tape with specific music tracks from your CD or record collection so you can play the music in your car. Each track of music has a time listed in minutes and seconds; 7:25, 2:15, etc. How many tracks can you fit on a 30 minute C60 tape side? Simple: just add up the individual times on a pocket calculator. Well..it really isn't very simple. Just try it some time. The problem is that pocket calculators do math using a base of 10 whereas time has a base of 12, or 24, or 60. TIME CALC does this work for you with an accuracy of one second. TIME CALC does the following using either 12 or 24 hour time: --Elapsed Time: Input start time, input stop time, and you get "elapsed time". --Cumulative Sum: Input a time and either add or subtract it from the running total. You can keep adding and/or subtracting from this running total indefinately. --Time Multiply or Divide: Input a time and then divide it by a number such as 3.5 or just 3. For example, 5 hours and 35 minutes divided by 3 equals 1 hour 51 minutes and 40 seconds. Just try that on a calculator! Inputting time is easy because you can ignore minutes and seconds if you want. 12 and is the same as typing 12/00/00 and . As a comparison, the TIME command in MS-DOS usually requires hours, minutes, and seconds even if the minutes and seconds are zero. I like TIMECALC enough to keep it on my ramdisk and listed on my Funnelweb XB menu. You can get a copy by sending me $1 to the address above carefully wrapped in a piece of paper upon which is written your name, address, and a request for TIMECALC.