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- If you are anything like me, well then you really dislike ever having to
- swap disks, and then adding insult to injury, having to load and run the
- program from CBM's sys.
-
- One alternative, I quess, is GEOS128, but that is sorta confining,
- limiting you to their parameters.
-
- Another, and more elegant solution, especially for those with multiple
- drives (I use 4), is to set up a series of menus from which you select the
- programs you wish to run.
-
- Now, even with 4 drives it is necessary to disk swap, and the menus
- painlessly lead you through the process. For example, what to swap when
- running from the CP/M sys, running 64 mode programs, etc. The important
- thing is to put on the main menus, and have in your drives those programs
- that you use most often, and frequently, and then 95% of the time at the
- computer everything you need is only a selection away, by menu.
-
- In my primary menus, and on four drives, I have, I quess, 30-40 programs
- that I run often. These programs, once selected, will then call up their
- related files, so that all together there may be 350+, and more, programs
- on-line, and instantly available. One other nice feature of using menus,
- is that when your disks begin to carry 200+ programs, you won't "lose" or
- forget about what is there in all the confusion, because your menus will
- direct you to the main calling program.
-
- I've uploaded 7 related menus which you can modify to call up your
- programs. They will download as one file, which you can then seperate
- into their 7 parts, at your convenience, off line.
-
- The program itself is a short 16 CBM blocks. Download and save the
- program as "menus".
-
- Once off line, and to extract the 7 files, you would do the following:
-
- But first, take a fresh disk, (either #1571, or #1581, whichever is your
- drive #8) and run your auto-boot program, telling it to look for and boot
- "HAL". HAL is in capital letters, so if you are in CBM/Graphics mode, it
- will show as graphics. This is correct.
-
- In basic mode load "menus". Then do a DELETE 1000-. Save the remaining
- file as "HAL" to the auto boot disk.
-
- Next, load "menus", and do a DELETE -1004, and then a DELETE 2000-. Then,
- renumber the remaining basic lines, removing the 1000 prefix, so that 1005
- becomes 5, and 1060 becomes 60, etc. [Don't forget to do a CR, after
- changing each line number.] Then save this file as "menua".
-
- Next, load "menus", and do a DELETE -2000. Then a DELETE 3000-. Then
- renumber lines, removing the 2000 prefix, and save as "menub".
-
- Next, load "menus", and DELETE -3000, and DELETE 4000-. Remove the 3000
- prefix, and save as "menuc".
-
- Next, load "menus", and DELETE -4000, and DELETE 5000-. Remove the 4000
- prefix, and save as "menu1".
-
- Next, load "menus", DELETE -5000, and DELETE 6000-. Remove 5000 prefix,
- and save as "menu3".
-
- Finally, load "menus", DELETE -6000. Remove 6000 prefix, and save as
- "menu4".
-
- Now, you are ready to run the menus. Just boot the disk, and from the
- main menu, you can select options 3,4,5,6,7, or 8. At the sub-menu, you
- can select options 4,5,6, or 8. At the called menu, return to the main
- one by pressing ESC, as requested. (If you try to go further, or make
- other selections, you'll get a crash.) However, using these selections
- will give you an idea of how the menus run, and call up programs. Then
- just insert the names of the programs which you run, in whatever order you
- wish, and re-save the new menu, have menus call up other menus, etc., and
- you will have for yourself a custom Menu Driven Operating System.
-
- Once you begin to run from menus, you will wonder how you ever got along
- without them.
-
- Enjoy!
-
- Howie