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- LOTTO --- a random name drawing utility
- by Michael Groshart
- Amiga Users of the Heartland
- Omaha, Nebraska.
-
- LOTTO is designed to replace your user group's old shoebox full of
- membership numbers and names while it adds some pizzaz to the process of
- drawing for doorprizes at club meetings. After a particularly cumbersome
- incident involving the aforementioned shoebox, AUoH President Jim Piunti,
- half jokingly, mentioned that it'd be nice to have a program to do this.
- In a few days, Mike Groshart came to the rescue with LOTTO.
-
- I've uploaded it here with the caveat that LOTTO is VERY SPECIALIZED
- in its behavior. It places on the screen a giant three-digit "LED" display,
- and when activated by pressing the space bar, provides some mighty exciting
- visual and aural stimulation. While it waits for the operator to stop the
- display, it fetches a random membership number and corresponding name dir-
- ectly from our SuperBase database file (HERE'S where it gets specialized).
- When the operator halts the fireworks with another press of the space bar,
- the selected member's number is displayed and his name scrolled across the
- bottom of the screen. LOTTO also sends that information back to the start-
- ing CLI in case you want to keep a record of all names/numbers drawn for
- some strange purpose (like publishing a "crying towel" column in your news-
- letter).
-
- Now understand that unless your group, by some astronomically slim
- chance, has set up your SuperBase file exactly the same as we have ours,
- you're going to have to diddle with this program to get it to read yours.
- Source is included to allow you to do just that. Heck, you might even wanna
- install a nifty "front end" routine to allow it to be easily customized to
- fit anybody's database routines. If so, be sure to send us a copy (that's
- the only "shareware" fee requested). A sample of our membership database
- ".sbf" file is included just to confuse you. The downside of having to
- customize this software before you use it is more than offset by the fact
- that you WON'T have to create a special report every month just for your
- drawing; simply feed LOTTO the raw database and it'll yank what it needs!
-
-