CHAOS EDITOR for Sinclair Spectrum

by Ian Gledhill

from Your Sinclair, September 1991



There are no fancy names for Ian Gledhill's masterpiece - it's a plain

and simple editor for Chaos, the groovy game which, as regular viewers

will remember, was given away with YS57. Crumbs, that's a year ago

today! It'll let you alter everything from the graphics to all the

numbers and things, and lots more besides.



The first thing to do is type it all in. No problems there - it's all

in Basic, but if you do come a cropper then try switching to 48K Basic

as 128K Basic can get a bit tied up in itself sometimes. When you've

finished, save the program by typing SAVE "CHAOSED" LINE 2.



Then it's time to try it out. Reload the program with LOAD "" as

usual and, when it's finished, slip in your copy of Chaos. This'll

then load in and you'll be ready to roll. A list of five options will

pop up, the capital letter in each corresponding to the letter you've

got to type to activate each choice. They're as follows ...



Change Text

All through Chaos there are lots of text messages, which you may like

to alter to give the game that personal touch. Type in the message you

want to change, and then, once the computer's found it (if it exists),

the text you want to change it to. Not much use really, but at least

it's there if you need it.



View

This one lets you hunt through the Spectrum to find Chaos's graphics.

Type in the address you want to start searching from (the one the

program suggests is probably sensible) and graphics will be displayed

one by one (or just a load of mess if you've picked the wrong area of

memory). Press Z to exit.



Change Name

Here's where you can alter any of the characters' names. Just type in

the old name and the new one.



Change Statistics

Type in the name of a character and a massive list of numbers will

appear on the screen. These are its statistics, which you can now

change at will by typing in the new ratings when prompted. Having done

so you can then save your modified version of the game (although you

might want to change a few other things first).



Edit

This is about the most complicated option. It's where you can change

the graphics about (having located them with the View option). Move

the cursor around the grid using the keys it tells you to, and press

all the other keys it tells you to to make it do various other things.

(Sorry, but they're all pretty self-explanatory.)



Once you've tweaked everything to your heart's content, and saved it

with the Change Statistics option, you'll probably be wanting to know

how to play it, won't you? Well, just load the first block of Chaos as

usual (the Basic loader) and once that's gone in swap the tapes over

so that your version of the code loads in instead of the original.



Writing Chaos 2 this way is obviously going to be a pretty laborious

process, but stick with it, eh?