¢THE LOTTERY RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR¢by Bryan Zillwood¢¢¢"Oh no - Not another lottery number picker!" I hear you cry. Well let me assure you that this is no ordinary lottery program. Many of you will have heard of the special micro-chips in your 8-bits such as GTIA and Antic but how many people know about the Psychic chip which can be accessed at location 53770 (otherwise known as the random number generator)?¢¢Well I hate to disappoint you but this program does not really establish a direct link with Arthur, Lancelot & Merlin (the lottery machines) and does not guarantee winning millions; why would I be distributing it if it did? However, using this program may increase your chances marginally, let me explain how.¢¢When you go to fill in your lottery slip by crossing through the numbers you will rarely pick truly random numbers. You will probably space your selection out by perhaps having a number between 1 and 9, another number between 10 and 19, a couple of numbers between 20 and 29 and so on. A look at past lottery winning numbers will reveal that they don't always conveniently and evenly spread themselves out, but instead often form groups of numbers fairly close together (numerically speaking). Using a random number generator like this program will help you choose a proper random selection that should better match the real winning numbers.¢¢On to the program itself. I used Turbo BASIC (my favourite language) to write the code. There isn't really much to comment on except for the way I created the animated spinning coins. Some of you may recall another disk magazine compiled by Robert Stuart called Excel which has now ceased to exist. In the early issues there was a utility known as Colorfont for designing fonts to be used in graphics modes 12 and 13. I haven't used the actual utility in my program but the idea behind it has been incorporated. The character set has been redefined (designed on scraps of paper) with four characters going to make up each coin. The animation is then achieved by overprinting the existing coin by the next set of four chrarcters. Simple yet effective!¢¢I believe that it is traditional now for me to give my address and state that if this program helps someone win a fortune then I would be a willing recipient of any monetary form of thanks. But I'm not going to! What I ask is that if this program does help someone to win a large sum of money then they put some back into the Atari 8-bit community to keep it alive well into the 21st Century.¢¢That's all folks! Good luck and I hope you win. I can just see Mystic Meg's next prediction: "With the Disk having moved into the constellation of the Drive, lucky people will be the owners of Atari 8-bit computers" (of course we're lucky! - we own Atari 8-bits!).¢
