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Loadstar 235
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t.phil
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2022-08-26
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T H E D R . P H I L T E S T
Program and Docs
by Dave Moorman
This test was sent to me by one of
my esteemed email "goodie" suppliers.
Of course, I took it immediately, and
was blown away by it's accuracy.
This HAD to become a LOADSTAR
quiz. I thought of putting it in Quiz
Meister, but the calculation of the
resulting personality profile was a
tad beyond that excellent program.
This only goes to show that even
though the "wheel" has been invented
and good application programs do exist
for most every need, one should be
ready and able to whip together a
mostly-BASIC program to do exactly
what is wanted.
PHIL depends on Mr.Mouse 3.0 for
its good looks and easy design. The
test, as received on the internet, was
converted to Edstar format and marked
up so the computer could easily read
the various lines as needed.
Now this is where Mr.Mouse is so
dramatically useful: I have edited
dozens of programs that read external
data into the body of the program by
opening the file and INPUT#8,A$(X). I
have no problem with this if a few
small pieces of data are needed. But
when a lot of text is being used --
get out Mr.Mouse!
With Mr.Mouse, you can bload the
entire Edstar file into any available
chunk of memory -- even under ROM --
then "rack" it with a Mr.Mouse
command. This goes through the file in
memory and appends string pointers for
each line of text. Once racked, the
program can call each line by its
index number.
With this feature alone, Mr.Mouse
3.0 pays for its 4K or 5K overhead!
You have created a string array of any
size -- without using BASIC string
memory and in a fraction of the time
required by INPUT#ing each line into
the program.
For this quiz, I marked the
sections using single characters on
lines immediately after the desired
text. These characters can be trapped
by an IF-THEN to stop the process. For
the Personality Reports, I put a "*"
on the line before each paragraph,
then scanned the text for the marks
and created an index array pointing to
the next line.
The Menu command of Mr.Mouse does
most of the rest -- turning a printed
list of options into an easy-to-use
menu with just one command. In a
matter of a couple of hours, PHIL was
ready to go! The last tweak was to
turn on the mouse arrow.
To save space, I then Linked and
Packed the whole thing using LINKER
and PACKER, by Mr.Mouse creator Lee
Novak. The beauty of his programs is
that not only does the program take
less space, but Lee's DISSOLVER can
unpack the compilation into the
orginal files -- extremely useful when
one needs to fix something.
Programming is just a matter of
lining up commands in the right order
to accomplish whatever you want. With
Mr.Mouse 3.0 (or more extensive 2.1),
you have the commands to do most of
the work.
DMM