DATABANKER

by Tom Baker



Tom Baker hmmmmm, that's a familiar name. Doctor Who? Naaahhh. Fastape

routine printed in the October 1987 issue? Yeahhhh! I remember now,

Tom's routine was the best of the fast loaders we received. Well,

Tom's come up tops again with his incredibly (and at the same time,

very concise), valuable program to create data statements and lines of

your own code.



This program is of value to anyone who has a huge chunk of code in

memory and can't be bothered to put it into data statements. So here's

Tom's program to do all that for you. Wowsers!



Method

To get this working, simply type in the listing and save it with SAVE

"databanker" LINE 10 and you're all set, (goooooo!).



Banking

Right, to get you lot out there to learn how to work this bijou prog,

we shall go through an (imaginary) working example. Sitting

comfortably? Then I shall begin.



You have some code at 60000 which is 120 bytes long and you want to

put it into data statements. Do you:

a) Scream, shout and pull your hair out - you can't stand DATA?

b) Use Tom Baker's Data Banker program?

c) Go "yibble, yibble" - you've had enough of machine code?

The correct answer is, of course, 'b'. Now edit line 50 of the

program. It will look like this:



50 LET f=0: LET addr=0: LET len=60



Change the line so that it reads:



50 LET f=0: LET addr=60000: LET len=120



Easy innit (peeps)? Now RUN the routine and data lines will appear at

lines 9000 onwards in this format:



DATA "(*address), no. of bytes of line (max=40) data bytes separated

by spaces, checksum"



The program itself is in two sections. The first section (10- 220) is

the part which assembles the code into DATA, and the second part

(1000+) reads the data and makes sense of it. Geddit? Good, now no

complaints.



Basic Program

Here it is, quite short for what it does, and I'm quite surprised that

Tom used Basic instead of machine code, but there you are.