HEADER READER

by Nicholas Gill



So what's a 'header', then? Well, you know when you load a program it

goes sort of "Beeeeeeeee Blip! Beeeeeeeee Blipipipipipipipipipip ..."?

(Something like that anyway.) Well, the header is actually the bit

that goes "Beeeeeeeee Blip!", and this program from Nicholas Gill lets

you decode it. (I'm printing it even though he sent it on paper,

rather than tape, so I had to spend hours typing it in and my mood

worsened dramatically.) But why would you want to do that? The header

actually contains lots of 'interesting' pieces of information about

the chunk of code on the tape, like what it's meant to be and how long

it is. The Spectrum usually keeps all this to itself, but now you'll

be let in on the secret too. Very handy if you fancy yourself as a

hacker.



The program is entirely written in Basic (apart from a tiny little

machine code bit, but there's no hex to worry about), so all you've

got to do is type it in, save it by typing GOTO 9997 and then run it.

You'll be prompted to load in a header and, once you've done that, its

contents will be revealed.



I'll suspect you'll have problems typing it in in 128K mode, so select

48K mode first.