Many (many!) years ago, I hooked up (soldered!) a second tape recorder to a standard Commodore VIC20 tape recorder, so I could (ahem :-)) "backup" game cassettes. Curiously the "backed up" cassettes would only load correctly (and only from the Commodore recorder) when the second tape recorder was still attached (but not recording) and only then if the speaker was switched on and at high volume.

Now I remember why I usually avoid reading community posts at work... it can be a little embarrassing trying to explain why I suddenly burst out laughing :-D

My memory is a little hazy now, lol, but I think you're right. I do remember that most cartridges loaded at 8192 (autorunning from there), and I also had an 8Kb (!) memory extension board, with a slot which allowed another (e.g. game) cartridge to be loaded at the same time. The extra 8K of memory normally loaded at address 16384, but was jumper switchable to load at 8192. That was «cough» useful, because it enabled me to load a game cartridge, without the autorun feature activating! This in turn let me "peek" the ROM cartridge bytes and "poke" them to the RAM underneath (RAM loaded at 8192 was effectively "write only" when a ROM cartridge was also loaded at 8192 :-)) That in turn allowed me to «cough, cough» "backup" a friend's cartridge game "Cookie Monsters" (Commodore version of pacman :-)) I switched the RAM module back to load at 16384, inserted my dis/assembler cartridge, and hand edited every absolute address I could find until the game worked correctly. Took me a few days LOL, and after I'd done it I immediately lost interest in the game, but it was fun! I used a similar trick to add a few "missing" (well, undocumented) 6502 assembler mnemonics to the Commodore dis/assembler (after figuring out how the letters of each mnemonic e.g. LDA, STA etc. were used to create a lookup key for the instruction codes themselves. If I remember correctly, "LDA" was 160 / 0xA0 :-)) Which reminds me, a year before I started programming my VIC, I was typing in BASIC programs (from computer magazines) on Commodore PETs (40x24 green screen) at the local Further Education college! And my interest in assembly programming was piqued even then, when I saw one of the other (couple of years older) boys performing hex edits of a "Space Invaders" clone, altering the speed and number of rows of aliens :-) Then I grew up and became a C++ programmer LOL.

Commodore Basic on a VIC 20 (1980/1981), but after about 6 months I began mixing that with 6502 assembler (anybody remember "poke"? Those were the days, writing out 6502 assembler on paper, converting the opcodes into hex, typing them into "data" statements and looping over the lot, "poke"ing into memory :-))

A quick Google search for "crossword builder algorithm" brought up this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/943113/algorithm-to-generate-a-crossword[^] which you might find useful. John

If all you need to do is find files (not search for content) then you really need the "Everything" search tool from voidtools: http://www.voidtools.com/[^]. There's also a portable version, if you don't want to have to install the app. The app is insanely fast when indexing the entire disk (took a couple of minutes on my system, to index 548.809 objects), yet the index file is tiny (2.68Mb). Searches are also near instantaneous (just typed "xyz" into the search box and found 50 (!) files with "xyz" in the name - and the search finished practically at the instant I typed the last letter :-) I've been using Everything for nearly 2 years now, and can't imagine life without it! HTH, John

Gary Kirkham wrote:

If most everyone on the road is an idiot, but you...You might just be the problem. :-)

Unless you happen to live in Portugal, where most everyone else on the road is an idiot (and doubly so during holiday periods!) ... :-)

This site, www.thebookdepository.co.uk[^] is worth checking out for books, before looking at Amazon etc. :-) although the CSS book mentioned is currently out of stock. On the other hand since the site offers free worldwide delivery, most prices are cheaper than Amazon (sometimes significantly), and they even include a link to the equivalent Amazon page for most of their stock - useful when, as in this case, they don't have the book in stock but Amazon does - it's probably worth bookmarking for future reference! Just my €0.05 (was €0.02 but you know how it is with inflation ;-) John

I have the opposite problem - since the "Loading" progress bar was added I can't get into http://mail.google.com with Firefox (or Flock), but I can get in with IE7. In Firefox the browser just enters a loop, with the progress bar reaching about 75% and then jumping back to 0. Removing (all!) cookies and cleaning the cache didn't help. On the other hand I discovered that accessing GMail through secure http (https://mail.google.com) works with both Firefox and IE7, so...

Not exactly a competition site, 'though they do have monthly (or so) random draws giving away commercial software (and I was the lucky winner of UltraEdit 12 a few months back :-)) there is: http://www.donationcoder.com[^] ("for software connoisseurs" as they put it on their homepage :-D) The software they offer is "donationware". Free to use, but needs to be re-registered every few months, however a perpetual license for everything may be obtained if *any* donation is given. They also have a forum where people may request small tools or app(let)s to do some specific task. One (or more) of the many programmers regularly reading may then take up the challenge and produce a solution within a matter of days (or even hours!) subsequently making the tool available for anyone that wants it! For the latest newsletter (to get an idea of what the site is all about), follow this link: http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=12788.0[^] John