COUNTING CATS (48K Spectrum)
SU8407w028067CountingCats.tap
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COUNTING CATS, for the 48K Spectrum, by Carl Gray of Leeds is an educational program for very small children. The program displays a number of cats for the child to count; you can set the upper limit to anything between 1 and 60.


NOTE: this uses a UDG T so will cause the SPECTRUM keyword to appear on 128K models. Not that this would have been a problem in 1984. Far more troublesome was this new model of dot matrix printer which has liberally scattered the listing with spacing errors, which I have attempted to correct - plus, I think that line 9000 should have contained some inverse spaces to generate Towser the big cat, who is invisible!
Also, if this was intended to go up to 60 cats, there should probably have been more lines (say, from 630-690) to print 5 columns of 10 cats - if the computer chooses a number above 50 it will just print them all in one column and ask "scroll?". This is because the game will just move straight onto line 320 having not been told to do anything else by the IF statements. The game will work fine if the number of cats is limited to 50.
Get one wrong and the INPUT statement scrolls the screen up by one line, shaving off the top line of cats, so a small child is unlikely ever to get it right! And then, get it right and it'll be counted as "right first time" anyway because the score is always incremented every time the answer is given correctly, no matter how many tries it took.
I remain to be convinced that it won't run on a 16K model, as well!
This is a bit of a stuck-in-alpha-testing program, but it's unlikely that any of its intended audience would know, or care...


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Text and program typed by Jim Waterman, April 2020.
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