Microreview for January/February 1998 Micropendium by Charles Good TI BINGO by Bruce Harrison A first class commercial bingo game requires lots of preprinted bingo cards as well as a ping pong ball blower machine to randomly mix the balls with bingo numbers printed on them and pop these balls up one at a tine. You have probably seen such machines on state lottery “live drawing” television shows. Well now anyone can operate a bingo game for fun or profit without any of this hardware. All you need is a 99/4A system and the TI BINGO software. When you first run TI BINGO you get three menu options; print some bingo cards, play a game, and exit. The bingo card option works with any printer, but was specifically designed for 24 pin dot matrix or bubble jet printers. You get your choice of large or small cards. The preferred option is small cards because this will normally print 4 different bingo cards on one 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper. After selecting large or small cards you next pick the number of paper sheets you want to print. Press and your printer grinds out the selected number of bingo cards. Numbers printed in the 5 rows under the “B” column are a random combination of numbers 1-15. Under the “I” column you get a random selection of numbers 16-30, etc. Each bingo card will show different combinations 24 numbers from with the range 1-75. There is a “free” space in the middle of the card. Bruce reports that on his Gemini 10X printer cards are printed but the box borders appear as strange characters. With my own ancient 9 pin “IBM Graphics Printer” I was unable to print multiple bingo cards on a sheet of paper. I could only get this 9 pin printer to produce one card per sheet. The bingo cards thus printed are nicely formatted. When you choose the play a game option just press a key to announce the next bingo number. The randomly chosen letter/number combination is displayed at the top center of the screen and then verbally spoken, if you have the speech synthesizer. The letter/number combination is also stored at the bottom of the screen. As each additional letter/number is announced it remains displayed at the bottom of the screen. These called combinations accumulate at the bottom of the screen in numerical order in columns corresponding to B I N G and O. When someone claims to have bingo, the game host can verify the winning card against the called numbers displayed on the bottom of the screen. One of the features I really like is the verbalization of letter/number combinations. Unfortunately the speech of TI BINGO doesn’t work on my Geneve. I have a Rave speech card in my Geneve which is normally the only way to add speech to the Geneve. TI BINGO is the only software I have found in which speech works on a 99/4A system but not on my Rave speech card equipped Geneve. TI BINGO is written in assembly and comes on a SSSD disk. You can load it from any assembly loader or from extended basic. On disk documentation and source code are included. Unlike much of Bruce Harrison’s software, TI BINGO is not public domain. It is commercial and costs $5 including shipping. Send your money directly to Bruce at the address below. ............................................... INTEREST CALCULATION for MDOS by Martin Zeddies These two programs are for Geneve owners. They have an 80 column display, run directly out of MDOS, and have been tested with MDOS 6. There are lots of interest calculation programs for the 99/4A. Many of these execute slowly because they are written in basic. Martin’s programs are they only interest calculation I know of for the Geneve, and they execute very rapidly. The first program asks for a starting balance, interest rate in percent, starting year, and number of years. You get a yearly table showing interest earned each year and balance at the end of each year, calculated as interest compounded yearly. This program lets you enter interest as a decimal percent, such as 5.8 percent. The second progrm asks for starting balance and a minimum percent interest rate. You get tables showing the ending balance for each of 20 years, interest compounded yearly. The tables show you data for the minimum interest rate you entered and the next five interest rate percents. If you entered a minimum rate of 3% then you get 20 year tables for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 percent so that you can compare possible yields at all these percents side by side. This program does not calculate decimal interest percent rates. These programs are public domain. Send me $1 and I will mail them to you on a SSSD disk complete with source code and on disk documentation. ......................................... TI SOFTWARE FROM EUROPE by TI Club Errorfree and TI Gebruikersgroep This DSSD disk was given to those attending the 1998 Chicago TI Faire. It has mostly new software, all of which is free. Copying is encouraged. Many of the programs on the disk have extensive documentation. Unfortunately all documentation is in German or Dutch. I found my German dictionary useful in figuring out how to use some of the software. DM2K, or Diskmanager 2000 v1.2 is the most significant software on the disk, in my opinion. This was described in Berry Harmsen’s article in the Nov/Dec 1998 issue of Micropendium. It is a must have for 40 column SCSI and HFDC hard drive systems because it is the best software available in 40 columns for creating, deleting, and viewing the contents of directories and subdirectories. You can easily move up and down the directory structure of your hard drive. You can also copy move and view in ascii or hex individual files. For Geneve users Clint Pulley’s 80 column Directory Manager v1.2 is a better product. This can do everything DM2K can do plus format disks and execute MDOS and EA5 software. DM2K loads using either the EA module or Funnelweb’s loader #3 (Program E/A). Be aware that DM2K seems to crash frequently with some non TI equipment. It doesn’t recognize the Myarc ramdisk on my PC99 system and I have reports that it has trouble with horizon and corcomp ramdisks. CELLGROW is an xb programs that resembles a fractal image maker. It also resembles a computer simulation generally known as the “game of life”. Continuously changing patterns are generated on screen. You can, before you run the program, change the “rules” which govern these patterns so that you get different sorts of patterns each time you run the program. BMP converter v1.2. This lets you manipulate bitmap images as large as 480x792 pixels that are normally stored as *.bmp files on a PC. No 80 column device is needed to do this. The software works on a basic 40 column 99/4A and it also works with a Geneve in GPL mode. After loading an image you can view it on screen. You can also save the bmp image as a TI Artist 16 color disk file or a black and white large Page Pro image. No other software lets you use PC bmp images on a TI system. There are lots and lots of such images available. For example, a standard installation of Windows 95 or 98 includes over 100 of these graphics. This is the standard format for the Windows “Paint” program. The main problem is how to get bmp files onto a TI disk. Image files can be downloaded with terminal programs and they can also be transferred from a PC disk to a TI disk using the software PC Transfer and its df128 option. Unfortunately not all PC *.bmp files can be viewed. I put several Windows 95 bmp files on a TI disk. Some gave me a file too large error. Others gave other error messages including “no hires allowed”. Others viewed and saved just fine. Backup-Biteremover v1.01. This program is updated in 1998 from an original written in 1993 by Tim Tesch. It removes the backup bit placed in floppy disks by the Myarc HFDC. This bit has caused problems accessing files on Horizon ramdisks. I don’t own an HFDC, so I haven’t been able to test this software. Bacteria v1.0. This is a two player game written in xb. You use the joysticks or arrow and “Q” key. Each player starts with one bacterium at opposite corners of a grid. Players alternately add a new bacterium to the matrix immediately adjacent to an existing bacterium. The object is to fill the matrix and prevent your opponent from doing so. There is a law in ecology I teach to my biology students which states that no two species of organisms can successfully live in the same physical area while competing for the same energy or food source. This game resembles a laboratory simulation of this ecological law. Copy-C v1.8a. This disk copy program will fast copy regular and many funny sector protected TI disks, and it will also copy a 360k PC disk onto another 360k PC disk if you have a DSDD disk controller. This version has been altered so that it will work on a horizon ramdisk. Hardware tests v1.2. There are two programs in this group. One tests keyboard and joystick functions. This is handy if you have an IBM keyboard interfaced to your 99/4a and it is also useful in calibrating the key delay setting (k value) when using PC99. Many of us already have this keyboard/joystick test program. The second hardware test program checks the functioning of the 9901 chip. Various register addresses are displayed and you are told if the byte is set for 1 or 0. Pressing some keyboard keys will alter some of these settings. On the TI Software from Europe disk are several interesting sounding 80 column utilities. Unfortunately none of them work on my Geneve so I can’t test them. Apparently you need one of the various 99/4A 80 column cards to make them work. These 80 column utilities include a SCSI sector editor, an updated GIF-99 gif file viewer now with mouse support, and a SCSI disk manager. The disk manager is supposed to show a split screen with information about the source and destination directories. If you want the TI Software from Europe disk, send me $1 and I will send it to you. I can also, for free, email it as an attached file in PC99 format. ................................ Access: Bruce Harrison (for TI Bingo) 5705 40th Place Hyattsville MD 29781 Phone 301-277-3467 email rottencat1@aol.com Charles Good (Interest calculation for MDOS, disk of european software) P.O. Box 647 Venedocia OH 45894 Phone 419-667-3131 email good.6@osu.edu