Help Needed - The Type Fantastic

[PeterJ]

I will go through the files and take care of zx81 / zx80 entries.

/T

Thanks [mention]kolbeck[/mention]. I will do the Spectrum ones.

[TMD2003]

Smeg! I must gave been carried away as I clean forgot to put up my last batch of type-ins here. Jim G is looking at the thread on t'other forum to keep up to speed with what he needs to add to his listings, so I can trim the post here down a bit.

It came to my attention when I was midway through the 1984 Sinclair User listings that some of those not hosted on The Type Fantastic were hosted on WOS, and probably also here as well, if you're keeping track. There was no use duplicating someone else's effort, so I've packaged everything together - files hosted on WOS have been downloaded and renamed according to Jim's TTFn naming protocol. There were also four QL listings that had completely escaped his attention, and weren't indexed on the SU Spectrum/QL page, even though they were part of Program Printout, and other QL listings which were elsewhere in the magazine were indexed. As it stands, once these are added, the TTFN archive for SInclair User will be complete to the end of the 1985 magazines.

Sinclair User, issue 34, January 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- QooL Graphics (QL) - text and .mdv
- Touch Line Plan 32 - text and .tap
- Easy Draw - text only
- Slime - text only
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 35, February 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Morse Code - text and .tap (containing a de-modified version of the .z80 snapshot held on WOS for 24 years)
- Rosaline a.k.a. Love Is... - text and .tap
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 36, March 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- QL Characters - text and .mdv
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 37, April 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Inferno (QL) - text and .mdv - this is an excellent type-in and everyone should try it
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 38, May 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Gossamer (QL) - text and .mdv
- DoReMi a.k.a. The Sound of Music (QL) - text and .mdv
- Gunfight - text only
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 39, June 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Countdown a.k.a. Brainbox (QL) - text and .mdv
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 40, July 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Scribe (QL) - text and .mdv
- Vignere Cipher - text only
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 41, August 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Tower of Brahma a.k.a. Slipped Discs (QL) - text and .mdv, UNLISTED ON TYPE FANTASTIC
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 42, September 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- The Snake, a.k.a. Stuffed Mushrooms (QL) - text and .mdv, UNLISTED ON TYPE FANTASTIC
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 43, October 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Function Fit (QL) - text and .mdv
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 44, November 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Connect 4 (QL) - text and .mdv, UNLISTED ON TYPE FANTASTIC and unfortunately a bit bugged, though probably not enough for a strikethrough
- Bombs Away (QL) - text and .mdv, UNLISTED ON TYPE FANTASTIC
- Blaster - text only
- also corrected the filenames of the .tap and .z80 files, which referenced issue 42 in September 1985.
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 45, December 1985
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Kingfisher - text only
- QL Screen Dump - text and .mdv
Complete archive of all indexed programs, including those on WOS:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip


The final contribution for now is the QL Graphics Toolkit from the 1986 Sinclair User Annual. I spent some of yesterday evening and all this morning typing it in, and the rest of the day scouring the enormous listing wondering why one of its features steadfastly refused to stop failing.

http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip

I have checked the listing for consistency with what I typed three times, and there are no mistakes. The on-screen editor is at fault, whether it's used to edit segments or frame. It will work as intended, right up until the point that space is pressed to fix a point in place, whereupon it will fail with "At line 6440 error in expression". The line works fine during the loop, it's only when space is pressed to break out of the loop that it becomes a problem as something has filled the variables with * characters. I can find absolutely no reason why this should be the case and I am utterly stumped as to what has caused the problem. I've checked the letters pages for the first four issues of 1986 to see if there were any corrections, but there weren't, and I've tried it with the JM and JS ROMs to see if there was some kind of bug in one of them, but it made no difference.
Maybe this listing wasn't quite the finished version, and anyone who sent a microdrive cartridge to Talent Software received a corrected version? We will probably never know.

What this program does do is everything else it's supposed to, i.e. it will draw fractals on screen as intended, and it is possible to edit the frames and segments with data points. In my notes with the text file, I've included the points on how to turn frame 10 into a five-pointed star.

Give it a go, and if there are any experienced QL users, have a crack at repairing the program. It might be simple to fix, it might not. I have reached my current talent wall with the long black box.


There is one more listing, of sorts, for the 1986 SU Annual that I might not be able to tackle, that's indexed on TTFn. It's for the QL and, though I've been told the QL doesn't need line numbers, I don't know how that works. It's a routine to expand QL-Archive with some more user-friendly features - but do I have to load QL-Archive first and then type the lines into that program? If I just try to type them into SuperBASIC with no line number, surely the QL will interpret those as direct commands.

Anyway, that's why I didn't say the listings for 1985 were complete, because there's that one missing. It should, I would hope, all be downhill from here as Program Printout was deported to Siberia during 1986, there are only a handful of listings left, and none of them are for the QL - unless I find an unindexed one marauding in the rest of the magazine.

[TMD2003]

Is anyone having a working business lunch? Does anyone have access to Dr. Emmett Brown's time machine to have that working business lunch 35 years ago? If so, great news! I've just made your favourite database program far easier to use.

http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip

I worked out what I was supposed to be doing with QL Archive, and I've typed in the four Archive-procedure-listings, making corrections where there were some catastrophic line-feed and spacing errors. As I don't know how to design an opening database screen I can't make the "repcall" file needed to make this series of listings work as they should, but after the error corrections I've been through all four listings with a fine-toothed comb, designed for removing fleas from dogs.

And that means...

http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User's Type Fantastic listings are officially complete to the end of 1985!

Also, the QL listings for Sinclair User are all done!

It's been a strangely rewarding experience, connecting with one of the machines from the Sinclair empire that had eluded me for 36 years. Maybe I'll have a crack with the Z88 now? Then again, I know there are still plenty of QL listings I could type in from Popular Computing Weekly (or was it Your Computer?), but I think that can wait a while!

Do grab yourselves a copy of QLAY for DOS, use the settings I've recommended and play Inferno. As magazine type-ins go that move the QL ahead of the ZX81 graphically (and I suppose Sinclair Research didn't consider UDGs to be a priority on the QL), a winner is this one.

[TMD2003]

This is it, people, the end of the line for Sinclair User's program listings. There wasn't a lot left for me to do.

February, March, May, August, September and October 1986 were already complete, as were all the listings from February to June 1987, which was the last issue with a type-in listing. April 1987 did not contain one.

In June and July 1986, the only program was the two-part Adventure Builder, absent from TTFn but hosted on WOS since December 2011, typed by Richard Bos, who is a thoroughly diamond geezer, and has earned a year's supply of corned beef sandwiches. I wasn't looking forward to tackling this one (even if the final product may one day be useful). It is hosted here, as is its commercially-released update.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=26603

The January 1987 issue contains a single program - Crisis at Christmas - hosted on TTFn as a Z80 snapshot. WOS hosts this as a tape, where is it otherwise known as "The White Door". The download here is from the WOS mirror on archive.org.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 96&id=7179


Here's what I did for this final update.

Sinclair User, issue 46, January 1986
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... turer!.txt
I have added:
- Adventurer! - text only (TZX is on WOS) - and that's all that was needed!
"Washing Line" , text and tape, was sourced from WOS.
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 49, April 1986
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... thDuel.txt
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... opSlap.txt
I have added:
- Death Duel - text only
- Slop-Slap (a.k.a. Halls of Slime, Crypts of Slime or Slap-Slop - take your pick) - text only
Both tapes were sourced from WOS and have been there some time.
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 56, November 1986
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Mouse AI - text only (.tzx was on WOS with no text)
- Axe Hero - text and .tap, would you believe! Even WOS didn't have this one.
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip

Sinclair User, issue 57, December 1986
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... il2020.zip
I have added:
- Morse (a.k.a. SOS Distress) - text only (.tzx was on WOS with no text)
- Font Designer (a.k.a. Back To Font) - text only (as above)
- Tree Builder - text only (as above)
Complete archive of all indexed programs:
http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... mplete.zip


THE TYPE FANTASTIC ARCHIVES FOR SINCLAIR USER - ZX80, ZX81, SPECTRUM AND QL - ARE COMPLETE.

And by that I mean, all the indexed programs - which, now that I've filled in a few gaps where some QL listings went astray - are now typed in and archived, either on TTFn, here (via my webspace) or on WOS and ZXDB - probably more than one of each, but TTFn should have them all (one day, when Jim's up to it).

I've also updated the archives where I found some mistakes, or where I'd used the magazine title rather than the programmer's title. These have all been corrected, and they are:
September 1982;
January, November, December 1984;
February, May, June 1985.

I might go back and hunt for some more programs from outside Program Printout and the Starter Pack in the early issues (up to, say, the end of 1984) in case there's anything else that's worth it - but for now, I think I need to have a break.

OVER TO YOU LOT.

I've added up everything I've done. I've accounted for some early entries having multiple programs, e.g. "Six Of The Best" in ZX Computing, but I've treated a machine code loader and its corresponding final program as a single contribution as one cannot exist without the other. And looking at that, once Jim is finally able to update the Type Fantastic, I should be credited for 97 text files (some of which already had the programs typed in, mainly these late Sinclair Users) and 93 program files (.Ps, .TAPs, a .TZX or two and some .MDVs for the QL). With that, I will go rocketing up to fourth place in the Hall Of Good Eggs... and the next two places immediately above are within sight. But I don't intend to have it all my own way and I'm not sure my fingers will take much more punishment for a while. Paul Farrow is way off into the distance at the top, I'm not going to chase his record, it'd be like bowling in the County Championship Second Division and having designs on taking more Test wickets than Muttiah Muralitharan.

So, who's going to take up the gauntlet for a while?

Sinclair Programs won't complete itself, and that's the next one that needs to be finished.



EDIT:
I was unaware of Sync Magazine. "The magazine for the Sinclair ZX80 user" with more listings for the yoghurt pot than I've ever seen in my life. There are 78 in the available issues, most of which are pre-ZX81... and one has been typed in. That, I think, may be my next project: complete the Type Fantastic's ZX80 listings.

In May, maybe?

[djnzx48]

If I do another issue of Sinclair Programs next, I think it'll be the October 1984 issue (if it isn't in progress already). I already have 'The Fight' complete, from when I typed it in ten years ago.

[8BitAG]

The January 1987 issue contains a single program - Crisis at Christmas - hosted on TTFn as a Z80 snapshot. WOS hosts this as a tape, where is it otherwise known as "The White Door". The download here is from the WOS mirror on archive.org.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 96&id=7179

The Sinclair User-published Crisis at Christmas and the Tartan-published White Door/Crisis at Christmas aren't *exactly* the same game, though.

The version held as a snapshot on the Type Fantastic site (and the version we hold in the Spectrum archives) is the later (slightly reworked) Tartan version.

The original Sinclair User version hasn't been typed in and could really do with being preserved, and listed separately in the ZXDB. At the moment the entry we have for Crisis at Christmas is incorrect; with the wrong game files.

[TMD2003]

Right, consider it... soon to be done, unless anyone else beats me to it. I have, probably, five days' worth of programming to get on with.

I suggest: load The White Door into FUSE, LLIST it and then check the text output against the listing in Sinclair User. If the changes are minimal, it probably won't take all that long. It's what I did with the Morse Code program that's held as a very heavily modified Z80 snapshot on WOS. There were so many mods to that (it had more than doubled in length) that it took me a while...

[8BitAG]

Right, consider it... soon to be done, unless anyone else beats me to it. I have, probably, five days' worth of programming to get on with.

It was more of a case of me wanting to flag up the fact that it wasn't already done, rather than wanting to give anyone an immediate job to do... it looks a bit of a nightmare to type in!

I suggest: load The White Door into FUSE, LLIST it and then check the text output against the listing in Sinclair User. If the changes are minimal, it probably won't take all that long. It's what I did with the Morse Code program that's held as a very heavily modified Z80 snapshot on WOS. There were so many mods to that (it had more than doubled in length) that it took me a while...

I'm not sure there will be much short-cutting that can be done, sadly. From what I remember of using Tom's Adventure Builder to write games, back in the day, the listings would be used to generate the final adventure files... so a published game was very different to the listings that generated those published games. Most of Crisis at Christmas is presented as data to be input into the main program, rather than in the BASIC listings themselves.

[TMD2003]

Nothing that one evening, a two litre bottle of Shasta, and an all-Rush mixtape can't fix. When that evening will be, on the other hand...

I'll prioritise it over the ZX80 listings from Sync (the earliest of all the Sinclair magazines?) which were going to be my next project.

[TMD2003]

D'oh!

I've looked again at the listing of Crisis At Christmas from the WOS archives, and as it stands I wouldn't get the machine code correct. The problem is the JPEG compression of the scan, which blurs the dot matrix printed text enough that I cannot read the listings with 100% condfidence, and on a listing this huge, I'd like to know the project can be finished before I start it.

I know Sinclair User wasn't the most popular of the Spectrum magazines at this stage of its existence, but does anyone here have the January 1987 issue and a scanner that could deliver me pages 79, 80, 81, 84 and 85 in as high a resolution as is feasible, and in a format such as PNG that won't have these compression issues?

Deliver me those pages, and I will deliver a typed version of the YUGE listing in return.

[saucysarah]

Mort redid all his old scans to 600dpi

https://archive.org/download/SinclairUser067
https://ia801608.us.archive.org/view_ar ... rHi058.zip

Good luck!

[TMD2003]

Top banana! Extra-saucy corned beef sandwiches all round.

Now, can I do it in a day?

*cracks knuckles*
*greases fingers*

[TMD2003]

"Dear Santa,
I have been a very good boy this year, and I have also been struck down with a terrible illness that's kept me in hospital for months on end, and I can't update my Type Fantastic website as much as I'd like. Please could you fix it for me... oh, wait, no, we can't say that any more... how about... for Christmas this year I would like a complete version of all the Sinclair User listings on the site to be typed in. I would have said it was done, but there's this one listing the size of Lake Michigan that actually hasn't been done, because it's been masquerading as something else. I think you know what I'm getting at here, right?
Cheers in advance,
Jim Grimwood, age 48 and a bit"

"Dear Jim,
You're right, you have been very patient with this terrible affliction and I'll get one of my elves onto it right away. Wait... the elves are on strike? Who let them form a union? It'll be a lump of coal and a visit from Monty Mole for that Arthur Scargill, I'll tell you. Let's see, what have I got. A dwarf? Who only eats bread and cheese and meat and potatoes instead of all those lovely elf-salads? Oh well, you'll do, I suppose. Can't get the staff these days, I'll take anyone if I have to. Now, what experience do you have in Sinclair computers, Mr Dwarf?"

----------------------------------------------

That's Doctor Dwarf to you, Mr Claus, and if you must know, I have 36 years and four months' experience with Sinclair computers, a vast quantity of tea, and the sound of a bunch of Canadians with flapping heads, one of whom sounds like a mouse, and who write libertarian rants into their lyrics. And if I run out of their tuneful tunes, some bunch of Cockneys with a lobotomised corpse for a mascot will fill in the gap. I also have an entire day, a completely legible version of the listing to be typed, and a supply of enthusiasm that has yet to be exhausted.

Christmas may be eight months and a lot of Corona-chan-related hurdles away, but it's time for some festive fun. Let's rock!

[TMD2003]

And here it is...

http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/ ... ay2020.zip

...and, after two days of typing in an enormous listing followed by 12,960 data values (yes, you heard me: TWELVE THOUSAND, NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY), the result is... a game that loads, you get to choose between "Ron" or "Nancy" (rather than "Husband" or "Wife" as it is in The White Room), gives a "Just a moment..." prompt...

...black screen...
...pause...
© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd

AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!

Look at the listing, if you dare. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, machine code that's been translated into BASIC, rather than the other way round, and it's impenetrable. For the most part it's POKE this, PEEK that, IF PEEK this = that (or this = PEEK that) then POKE the other. Just shunting numbers around in addresses, with only the very occasional PRINT in the intro, and some marauding RANDOMIZE USRs which always look like trouble to me.

I actually went out in search of a dot matrix printer font, so I could print out the listing in FUSE to get it in text form, insert all the spaces after each THEN (for some reason, SU's printer put a double space after THEN and there are loads and loads of them), then paste that into a series of text boxes in GIMP - with some other adjustments - so I could see, clearly, whether or not my text input was correct. I'd been through the entire listing slowly, methodically, checking each line as it was entered and crossing it off when it was correct. The TAP files contain the evidence that the listing is perfect... as in, I have typed exactly what was on the five pages, and my typing is 100% error free.

The listing, as I had feared, is not. Program Printout was an afterthought by this point, and throughout the 1986 issues (which I've had to look through to find untyped listings), Program Printout usually had some kind of vaguely apologetic but mostly sarcastic "HEY ONE DAY WE MIGHT GET OUR LISTINGS RIGHT AND ONE OF THEM MIGHT WORK HURR HURR DERP DE DERP". This time, they couldn't even get the headings right - "Listing 2" is the header of code loader, which is referred to as "Listing 3" in the "how to save this series of listings" text just below, and it quite clearly says "5 REM listing 3" in the first line! And then, the massive BASIC "Listing 3" should actually have been Listing 2. The quality control was shocking.

I am quite immensely pissed off right now. But I imagine it's nothing compared to the explosion of rage from Spectrum users in December 1986 who typed this in on a real Spectrum and had to use tapes to do so, possibly even with a rubber-key model which would cause RSI from over-use of the SYMBOL SHIFT key... well, both shift keys, really, with that endless stream of PEEKs, PEEKs and even more PEEKs... only to find, after all the immense effort, that this was a program that would crash after less than a minute.

This is not a problem I can solve myself - my knowledge of machine code has never gone further than the definition of UDGs so it is far beyond my capability to find out what's wrong with this program and fix it.

But maybe, just maybe, someone will take up that challenge.

Maybe it'll even be done some time within the next 23 years. Who knows, miracles may happen!

Meanwhile, I have run out of corned beef, and bread, and flour to make the bread with, and there's barely a squirt of HP sauce left in the bottle either.

[8BitAG]

...and, after two days of typing in an enormous listing followed by 12,960 data values (yes, you heard me: TWELVE THOUSAND, NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY), the result is... a game that loads, you get to choose between "Ron" or "Nancy" (rather than "Husband" or "Wife" as it is in The White Room), gives a "Just a moment..." prompt...

...black screen...
...pause...
© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd

AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!

Urgh.

I did have a look to see if there were any corrections printed in later issues (I couldn't spot any)...

...the only reference I did find didn't really help... but did reveal somewhere else felt the whole process of typing it in would be too painful...

(from Sinclair User 60)

[TMD2003]

Urgh.

I did have a look to see if there were any corrections printed in later issues (I couldn't spot any)...

...the only reference I did find didn't really help... but did reveal somewhere else felt the whole process of typing it in would be too painful...

(from Sinclair User 60)

"Crisis" - the Dutchman over on t'other forum who first suggested over there that we should be typing in programs (and he's done a few himself) tried using a regular OCR on some magazine listings, and they came out... even more mangled than the low-res JPEG that they started as, so I junked that idea. I'd assume that the font that the OCR mentioned in that letter needs is OCRA, which is legible, but isn't exactly ideal for printing out Spectrum listings.

I thought it might work with the hi-res Sinclair User scans, but I only had this last one to go, and didn't bother. At least I could read it clearly, even in the bits where the dot matrix printer hadn't printed the numbers too well and the OCR would certainly have missed. I also don't relish the prospect of checking the OCR's output against the original listing, even using the method I just tried.

Two days up in smoke, but it could have been worse. My work, futile though it was, is at least saved on my hard drive and on UK2's servers.

"Mum, you just unplugged the Spectrum right as I was about to save the listing!"
"It's all right, I plugged it back in again..."

[djnzx48]

The problem occurs in lines 9958 onwards. Those variables are supposed to set up the addresses of various machine code routines, but for some reason the memory containing the addresses is initialised to zero. As a result, attempting to call the routines will cause a crash.

[djnzx48]

In the printout, listing 3 (or what the magazine claims to be listing 2) contains line 30, which skips over 368 bytes of data starting at address 64062. I loaded up 'The White Door', exported those bytes, and re-imported them into the magazine version of 'Crisis At Christmas'. After doing this the adventure is now fully completable (although there are still a few 'Variable not found' errors).

[TMD2003]

One thing's for sure - the long, long, long list of values in Listing 4 fits exactly into the code loader given, with that missing block of 368 bytes.

Looks like SU - and not for the first time - published a listing that was still in its beta-testing phase, and those bytes were intended to be filled in later. IMAGINE MY SHOCK.

[8BitAG]

Looks like SU - and not for the first time - published a listing that was still in its beta-testing phase, and those bytes were intended to be filled in later. IMAGINE MY SHOCK.

Knowing Tom, I really doubt that he would've ever given Sinclair User anything that would be considered a beta. It would've been finished, tested, and working. He was a scientist. Any mistakes made will be Sinclair User's.

[TMD2003]

It's what I'd have thought - I'd expect anyone who was going to submit anything that size to any magazine, not just SU, to have it checked and working 100%.

Might he have sent a tape with the correct version on one side and this listing on the other, and SU used the wrong side?

The sort-of-parallel I can see here is with Iron Maiden's "Dance Of Death" - known for its url=https://www.metal-archives.com/images/2 ... 3.jpg?1925]utterly catastrophic artwork[/url] - a twisted neck here, a misplaced arm there, and it was a work in progress. Dave Patchett, who was the artist, said so when he sent it to the band as a mock-up of what he thought the cover could look like, knowing that now that he was using CGI, it could be easily changed when he was given feedback for the final version. It never came. "That's perfect!" said 'Arry Bomber 'Arris, and nobody could convince him that this wasn't the finished version. Dave was so utterly mortified that he asked for his name to be removed from the album credits. Those of us familiar with his pre-CGI work know it's him, and it's obvious when you look at Cathedral's album covers from the 1990s - Forest of Equilibrium, The Ethereal Mirros, The Carnival Bizarre, Supernatural Birth Machine, Caravan Beyond Redemption, they're all from the same bizarre-medieval-fantasy stable. You could say, Dave Patchett would never knowingly submit an unfinished piece of artwork to the band that commissioned him, but he had no control over what they finally used.

[PeterJ]

I'm working through the differences between the Type Fantastic and ZXDB and found another nice looking title from the January 1985 issue of Sinclair Programs (Page 60). These titles should start getting into ZXDB soon, as well as all the titles that have recently been typed in.

COLLECT-A-KEY

[PeterJ]

Another nice looking one from the same issue (with nice graphics and use of colour for the time). Danger Dynamite (Not yet in ZXDB). Written by Christopher Roper (Aged 10!).

[Marvin]

Hello

To alleviate boredom, I've been doing a few old type-ins from magazine scans found online. I've concentrated on programs which are not listed as having been done on Type Fantastic. Here is a list of what I've done so far:

Calendar (Popular Computing Weekly Vol 2 No 36 - 8-14 September 1983)
Conway's Colony (Personal_Computing_Today_Aug_1982)
Grid of design (YourComputer_1982_09)
Instant colour (Popular Computing Weekly Vol 2 No 32 - 11-17 August 1983)
Rem Patterns (Popular Computing Weekly Vol 2 No 32 - 11-17 August 1983)
Spectraphone (CVG_047_Sep_1985)
Spectrum Banners (Popular Computing Weekly Vol 2 No 34 - 25-31 August 1983)
Spectrum Hue and Cry (YourComputer_1982_07)
Speeding Ahead (Home_Computer_Advanced_Course_01)

All fairly simple stuff I'm Afraid! Would you like copies of these?

[PeterJ]

Hi [mention]Marvin[/mention],

Thank you for doing these. Yes please, just upload them to Google drive or similar and post a link here. If you can include the magazine, issue, page number and program name that would help. Thanks