ARCADE ANTICS by David McCandless Now it's my turn (and anyone who suggests I can't program, better watch their kneecaps!). Over the next few months I'll be printing some routines of my own that'll add that certain polished finish to your own arcade games. This month it's a simple bar display routine, that you can use to show the amount of fuel or ammo instead of tedious numbers. Method Stone me. To use this program is a physical manifestation of easiness (and no, I don't know what that means either!). Just type in the seventeen lines of hex, save the code, then POKE these variables: POKE 40131,length of bar (0-255) [That's wrong, as a value of zero causes the program to crash - although calling the routine just to display nothing would be a bit pointless anyway. JimG] POKE 40129,screen-256*INT (screen/256) POKE 40130,INT (screen/256) NB: Screen refers to the position of the bar on screen, it must be in the range 16384-22527. [That's also wrong. The last valid address is 20735, as that's the top byte of the right-hand character in the bottom row of the lower screen. The maximum "screen" value = 20735-INT ((len-1)/8). JimG] POKE 39991 to 39998 with the eight bytes of your pattern. It can be a UDG or anything. Then, once you've done that, just type RANDOMIZE USR 40000 to see your bar. Hex Dump This puts the Bar Display program in hex. Type it in and use SAVE "bar" CODE 40000,136 to plonk it on tape.