Spectrum Computing

llewelyn wrote: ↑Tue Sep 03, 2019 2:01 pm ASH forget the rotating earth! Apparently its so slow that an observer on the moon would never notice and it also stays in the same place on the horizon. Mind you nobody says it has to be our moon or even our solar system! It would be a cool feature and add a bit of sparkle to the look of the thing.

Did you see the spinning globe demo in SpecBAS's demo folder?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EGDJybA_HE

But yeah, that would likely be overkill. Many games on the Speccy (such as Earthlight, Nodes of Yesod) had a static image of the earth in the background. All considerations of exposure aside, it looks good with stars in the background.

I know you were worried about the background being erased, but SpecBAS can help there too - the demo video I posted keeps the moon surface intact if you look closely... Have you ever considered instead of simply erasing the lander with empty space, you might erase the lander by restoring the background? If you read the source closely, you might see how it's done. And that's just one method, there are at least two others I can think of!

I have encountered a few problems trying to load DEMOS - following the instructions given in the 'Installing SpecBas' text file, I types in LOAD"" and got the file requester with / showing in the bar. So I typed in the route to my DEMOS files which is:-

C:\Users\dench\Downloads\SpecBAS\demos\demos

That wasn't acceptable. I tried a couple of other tricks mostly old DOS like CD\ but nothing worked.

However, more interesting discoveries, when I went to the demos folder manually and started to examine each one via Notepad expecting to get something I could copy and paste into SpecBas, some come up as rubbish!
EXAMPLE from Toys - Filename UNIVERSE - I have cut out most of it left just enough to show you:

ZXBASICÿÿÿÿ& K
1 "MU" Model Universeÿÿÿÿ ÿºÉN
4 (C) W.R.Masefield 1983ÿÿÿÿ ÿ°I4P
6 Enhanced by ZXDunny 2012ÿÿÿÿ ÿ4kl\L
( . î Àr@ 300ÿÿÿÿ Àr@ Ù ÿ‹$G‘“
2 A X † : u MODEL UNIVERSE: u ÿÿÿÿ :# MODEL UNIVERSE u 6 : 8 u ÿ{6'÷¬

It's not the only file that comes up like that, I got a couple more but figured better to ask you whats going on.

llewelyn wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2019 1:06 pm I have encountered a few problems trying to load DEMOS - following the instructions given in the 'Installing SpecBas' text file, I types in LOAD"" and got the file requester with / showing in the bar. So I typed in the route to my DEMOS files which is:-

C:\Users\dench\Downloads\SpecBAS\demos\demos

You've installed them in the wrong place. SpecBAS will look in:

C:\Users\dench\SpecBas\

which is the folder you can see right now in the file requester. You've popped your demos into your downloads folder. See below for a rational explanation for this.

However, more interesting discoveries, when I went to the demos folder manually and started to examine each one via Notepad expecting to get something I could copy and paste into SpecBas, some come up as rubbish!
EXAMPLE from Toys - Filename UNIVERSE - I have cut out most of it left just enough to show you:

It's not the only file that comes up like that, I got a couple more but figured better to ask you whats going on.

They're very very old demos from back when SpecBAS used a kind of binary file format for programs. It will load just fine, and if you re-save it then it will revert to text that you're familiar with. I should probably update them all at some point


Rational explanation time!

Back in the grim and murky days of Windows 95, applications could be installed anywhere and they could write their files anywhere they liked. Obviously from a security point of view, this is unacceptable. Starting with WinXP (albeit poorly) they started restricting where apps could write to.

Most programs are installed to c:\program files(x86)\ which is now a protected folder in Windows 10. Which means that SpecBAS, although it can see into that folder, cannot write to it without administrator permission. This causes all sorts of headaches, and now Microsoft offers a solution straight out of the Unix/Linux playbook - programs can only write to certain places inside the User's own folder. The can do what they like in there, with no fear of screwing up the whole Operating System if one goes nuts.

SpecBAS therefore creates a folder "specbas" in your user folder. In your case, this is

C:\Users\dench\

SpecBAS then calls that folder (C:\Users\dench\specbas) it's "root" or "/" folder and cannot "see" anywhere else on your drive but there. This prevents badly behaved SpecBAS programs from wiping your system should they so choose.

A great many people still believe that an application, such as SpecBAS, should keep all its files and folders inside its installation directory but that is no longer the case in Windows. So now you have two folders - C:\Users\dench\Downloads\SpecBAS\ where the SpecBAS_x64.exe is stored, and the other folder where SpecBAS does its work. It's not nice having to work in two folders per application, but them's the rules.