mlloyd@maths.tcd.ie (Michael Lloyd) (06/27/89)
Hi. First off, please note that I am not a comp.sys.apple reader, so please e-mail any response to me at mlloyd@maths.tcd.ie What I want to talk/ask about is a piece of software that I have developed over the last few years for my father, a Chemist. His research involves Photo-Electron Spectroscopy, and in computer controlled. Years ago, when I was still at school, he asked me to write some BASIC software for his Apple ][ to control the ampifiers and counters. The chemistry department has few competent programmers of its own, and none with enough time to write the program. As a result, I have worked on and off, in summer breaks and weekends, on a piece of experimental control software. It is exactly tailored to his requirements, and covers many areas. It allows many different parameters to be sent to the spectrometer, and can run very long (overnight) or very short (5 second) spectra. It can store, analyse and plot or print the results. It can perform numerical derivatives, and all kinds of other tricks, including collecting extra information on the spectrum and storing it aswell. It has always been done with the goal of facilitating his research, but after this many years of fiddling with it, we thought we might finally publish or distribute it. Another reason for publishing would be that the Chemistry department is turning more and more to IBM clones - in fact, I am currently working on a Pascal version of the same program. To my mind (note that I wrote it), it is a very efficient piece of code. We had bad problems with lack of space which had to be solved in many devious ways. Speed was also important. I could tell many a tale of programming the 6502 without an assembler - yes, looking up the codes in a 6502 manual, working out the addressing mode of the command, converting to hex and entering into the monitor ... Anyway, that is not the point. The point is that I do not know if any of my solutions to problems are of any interest to you folks. Common utilities may exist to get round every one of them. If not, let me know. I really have no idea if the thing is of interest to you or not. The other point is one about licensing. I will contact my local Apple people as soon as they get back from a conference, but in the meantime I wonder what anyone can say about publishing code that relies on official apple utilities? Presumably I have to come to some arrangement. The particular situation is that I wanted text below the hires screen, but I also wanted my large BASIC program in low RAM. So I converted to the second hires page and added on the HRCG utility. If that is no longer around, I should say that it allows you to write on the hires display in various fonts, upper and lower case. From there I developed all kinds of things, including a `pager` that chews up an extra hires-screen-worth of RAM just after page 2, and swaps pictures in and out of that so that I do not have to redraw the spectrum if the user wants to see a menu, then the picture again. This was one of the bits of 6502 code (surprise :-). Anyway, before I bore you all completely, I shall leave it at that. If you have ANY comments about interest in such a program as a utility, or as a collection of hints and tips, then get back to me. Also, if you know anything about licensing, let me know about that too. Many thanks for taking the time to read this. Mike. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Lloyd Phone: Dublin 772941, ext 2048 Department of Statistics [home Dublin 804790] Trinity College EMail: mlloyd@maths.tcd.ie Dublin, Ireland. ---------------------------------------------------------------------