{fb1000000compression, especially when we were using our own format sprites. I was able to decrease the size of sprites further by not compressing a sprite's header. You see, LZW compression works by finding patterns, and tagging them; unfortunately the header can waste valuable tags. This resulted in better compression than ArcFS! The (BASIC) compression routine read in directories full of sprites, and compiled a huge graphics file, which can be found as the "Graphics" file in the "!Spectrum3" directory. Decompression was added straight to the source code. The sprite was not plotted at this point.
I now incorporated my two source code files together, and used OS{_Heap to sort out my code's memory and 'bad address offset' problems. Sprite plotting was easy. I made sure the menu options all worked. The backtrack function kept crashing, but I sent a copy to Russ anyway. Soon after this, I had to increase the textual copy kept in memory to 128 byte blocks instead of 64 bytes because some lines became too long.
Just after Christmas, I got a feedback letter from Mike. He had found some bugs, and had a number of suggestions. One of these was to load the graphics from disc as they were needed, instead of having them in memory. I tried this, and found that very little extra time was taken. Spectrum issue three could now run on one megabyte machines; wahey! Some printers were still responding badly to our development printing program, especially laser printers.
I got the final copy of Ian's source code and blended it with mine. The total size was over 120Kb, which is f-ing big by even game standards. Lots of minor bug fixes/visits to Ian's house later, we had it! All that was left to do was to write articles! :-)
Basically, we have listened to what features you thought were good about Spectrum issue two, and made them better, and scraped what you thought was pointless. We wish to thank Acorn for their text editor, !Edit, used in the creation of all the machine code. If you've just read all of that, you must be well bored, so here's another comic quip from our man Des.
{sdes
Well, now you know how they do it. I'd just like to thank you for reading, and we hope that we can cover some more items in just the same bland and non-technical way next time.
Des
{sdiv
{fh2C000C0Sad but true
{fb1000000
An amazing new column spawned by long distance telephone calls between Lovell and Russ.
1) The head office of NEC Business Systems in Sweden is situated in the town of Archimedesvägen.
2) Should Sounds Riscy wish to release Spectrum in Spain, we would need to do a complete re-write, or as the locals say, risc-rive.
3) The Acorn Credit Card.
4) When asked about future plans for the company, a spokesman for Doggysoft replied: "It's easy peasy with Cheesey Peas, please!".
{scre
5) Over half of all telephone calls in North America in 1992 were made by computers (that is modems and faxes).
6) There was a code in Spectrum2 to allow people to put comments into an article. Sadly it was never used (thanks guys!).
7) The column is such a sad, knocked up at the last minute, affair that there isn't a number seven.
8) When re-using Jiffy™ bags, ensure not to rip the stamps you remove, as that constitutes defacement of the Queen.
9) The source code for TBA Software's "FTT" ("Formula Two Thousand") is only 5K long, and 3K of that is for the intro bit! (This game takes full advantage of their 120 odd K TAG-engine code, but 5K though!).
10) Russ tells me that the Tandy 1995 diary is a good buy at 50p. It contains such useful information as a list of the largest towns in the world, and clothes conversion charts, as well as the full list of Tandy shops in Britain. I personally do not endorse Tandy in any way (neither do I - Russ).
