Issue 12, March 1985 - Hacking Away & QL Affairs
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A couple of months ago I |
described the annoying aspect
of Ultimate's loading
programs, in that they include
all the important bits in line
number zero; this meant you
had to duplicate the line to
make them work. Well, I had
loads of letters telling me that
POKE 23756,1 changes it into
line 1 (which I must admit I
did know). Trouble is, it
doesn't work if you've
invested in an Interface 1 unit.
Lucky (?) Interface 1 owners
should resort to: POKE (1+PEEK 23635+256'PEEK 23636),1 Which is slightly more long- winded! Like everyone else, I've had it up to here with Jet Set Willy. But it's U-turn time, and all because of a letter from Mike Smith. To get the mysterious object in the First Landing, he supplied probably the best JSW POKEs I've seen in a long time, namely POKE 56350,0: POKE 56358,0: POKE 56365,85. What these fiendishly simple POKEs do is add a platform so that you can go to the cross and get the object. Now, where was I? Oh yes, I've had it up to here with JSW POKEs. Another interesting letter provided an infinite lives POKE for Interstella's Defenda - POKE 35730,52. [see issue 18] This gives you 52 lives, but every time you get killed it gives you another life! Whoever wrote the letter described themselves as 'The Led Zeppelin and RML380Z Freak from Handsworth'. Well, we all know Led Zep, but who's heard of 'RML380Z' - they must be a Brummy band! On the international front, Bjarne Nielsen of Denmark sent in a 100-lives POKE for Moon Alert - POKE 42404,255. Nice to hear from you Bjarne ... and nice too to receive my first letter from a |
hacker of the fairer sex. Susan Bowman wrote in to ask for
general help on hacking. Well,
Susan, it's a bit difficult to give
you a lot of help in this
column, but I hope you've
read carefully the two YS
articles by Terry Bulfib on
codebusting ... there's a trick
or two in there that just might
be what you're looking for. In YS issue 9, I mentioned the 'Hi Chris' phenomena in Cavelon - all you have to do is hold down all the keys and the message 'Hi Chris' pops up on-screen. Hah, I'd only scratched the surface! If you wait until the man is stood in the maze and then type 'JSWILLY', you can also get the message ... then, if you want to press keys '1' to '6' you can start from any of the screens. This little gem was supplied by someone living in Cheshire who wished to be known only as 'Gremlin'. (It seems that complete lunacy is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for contributors to Hacking Away!) Of course, you could always take Sean Gorden's advice and just hold down keys 'D', 'F', 'R', 'T', 'I', 'K' and 'L' to get the message on-screen. Nigel Osborn wrote in with POKEs for PPS's Maze Death Race, to prevent it crashing with Interface 1 connected. The method he subscribes to is to POKE a zero into the following locations: 26689-90, 26730-1 and 26771-2. Paul Hargreaves described his first attempts at hacking into Horace Goes Skiing to find an 'infinite money' POKE. Needless to say, he was unsuccessful, but he did find a POKE that removes all the traffic from that very busy road - and that's POKE 29270,0. He also reveals the code words for Carnell's The Crypt, which are numbered one to six ... they are 'Carnell', 'Software', beats', 'all', 'the' and 'others'. Hmm, very modest! |
CONCURRENT QL AFFAIRS |
advertised - but they seem to
work and that's the important
thing! A 'prominent IBM lease- broker' (whatever that is) PCML will shortly be marketing a range of interesting add-ons, rejoicing in the name QL Plus. First off the stocks will be a Z80 second processor and disk interface, which will enable users to run 'proper' CP/M on their QL (and not the unpopular CP/M 68K favoured by Quest). Of course, this means that users will be able to use WordStar (instead of the slow and bug- ridden Quill) although the cost of the Z80 and disk interface, together with WordStar, will add up to more than the cost of the original QL! And, getting back to disks, CST has announced its own disk interface. Not only that, but the company's decided that the few square inches of unoccupied PC board will contain a couple of 64K RAMs providing a low-cost memory expansion option. Sounds good ... | |
| For all the news and views on the QL market, dispel the rumours with John Torofex. |
HARD LINESQuest still seem to be having difficulties getting its disk drives to work with the QL. The company had a QL with a disk drive attached at Compec last November, allegedly running CP/M 68K. However, as no-one was allowed to touch the QL, we've still to wait for the device itself to find out if the rumours were true that it was really running CP/M off the Microdrives, and the disk drive was just for show.Simplex Data, although advertising a rather strange- looking memory expansion unit (the board depicted consisted of a chopped-up QL PCB, stuck together with sticky tape), is now shipping units to customers. But the units bear no resemblance whatsoever to the ones | |
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AT SIXES AT SEVENSDissatisfied QLUB members who write to Sinclair Research complaining about their membership not being worth £35 are being informed that instead of a mere six issues of QLUB News, they'll now receive seven issues in their first year of membership. Sinclair Research will have to get its collective finger out as this means its next five issues will have to be cobbled together in the first six months of 1985. | ||
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