Pete, I programmed a little bit on 2000F and may retain a little bit.... Pete Turnbull wrote: If it's a straight "LIST" of the program, then the format would be a standard format of the line number followed by two spaces; so I would bet that the @s are spurious and can be ignored. I'm not sure about this one, but this may have been a way to print control characters in a PRINT statement without using CHR$(). If so, what would a control-n do on a teletype? I thought it *might* be octal, but that would make it a form-feed, which wouldn't make much sense in the status sections because it would print <FF>TORPEDOES<FF> and then the status, which would waste a *lot* of paper.... Looking at the setup in TREK73, all the T* variables are initialized to be 1, 2, 4, 8 ... 512. If I remember rightly, ENTER lets you get the time the user takes to enter the input. It looks like it's probably "ENTER <time allowed>, <time taken>, <input>". The time is probably seconds, and what is returned is the time taken to respond, with a negative being returned if the user takes more than the allowed time. If you look at a lot of the input, there's a check after the ENTER gets the input of the form "IF T<0 then ...." this puts a time squeeze on the player to make it harder to spend time plotting angles, making decisions, etc. ENTER also accepts input without printing a "?" for a prompt. I don't think there was a way to stop INPUT from printing a "?" every time. This brings back memories. I never could get into this one, since I could never get the proper strategy figured out. I preferred the other TREK where you had to eliminate the Klingons in the galaxy.... Later, Frank

Hi Pete, At 2003-11-10 04:17 PM, Pete Turnbull wrote: HP 2000 BASIC placed printing characters inside double-quotes (") and used the apostrophe notation for non-printing characters. The apostrophe was followed by the decimal value of the character that belonged at that point in the string. Thus, any character in the extended ASCII character set could be expressed using the apostrophe notation ('0 through '255). Below is a brief table of some of the more common values I used to use. Apostrophe Replacement Notation Character '0 Nul '7 Bel (CTRL-G) '8 Backspace (CTRL-H) '9 Horizontal Tab (CTRL-I) '10 Line Feed (CTRL-J) '13 Carriage Return (CTRL-M) '14 Shift Out (CTRL-N) '15 Shift In (CTRL-O) '17 DC1 (CTRL-Q) Start Paper Tape Reader '19 DC3 (CTRL-S) Stop Paper Tape Reader '34 " (Double-Quote) The '14 was used to instruct an HP terminal (probably an HP2640, HP2645, or near the end of support for the HP2000 ACCESS, the HP2621 and HP2624) to switch to the alternate (usually line drawing) character set. The '15 was used to switch back to the normal character set. If you have access to an HP terminal (or HP terminal emulation like Reflection [many dollars] or QCTerm [free from www.aics-research.com]) connected to an HP 2000 then enter: 100 PRINT '14"Q;;;#;;;W"'15 110 PRINT '14": - :"'15 120 PRINT '14"!,,,/,,,"'34'15 130 PRINT '14": - :"'15 140 PRINT '14"A;;;$;;;S"'15 150 PRINT 160 PRINT '14" ZXC"'15 170 PRINT '14" ZXCCCC"'15 180 PRINT '14"ZXCCCCCCC"'15 RUN What do you see? Lines 100 through 140 display a box with a heavy exterior line and fine interior lines which divide the box into four quardrants. If you change lines 110 through 130 to: 110 PRINT '14": :"'15 120 PRINT '14"! ,/, "'34'15 130 PRINT '14": :"'15 you have a box with a fine cross-hair in the center. Lines 160 through 180 display a stair step. This was used for "guages" in later Star Trek and similar programs. Using a "Z" line drawing character gave a block about 1/3 the height of a display row. A "X" line drawing character gave a block about 2/3 the height of a display row, and a "C" gave a line drawing character the full height of a display row. Thus, if you see '14 and '15 in the program listing, the program display is most likely designed for display on an HP terminal. Again, if you don't have a "real" HP terminal, try using an emulation. A free emulation (QCTERM) is available from www.aics-research.com. A description of the ENTER statement has already been given, so I won't address that here. BTW, some day I'll get my set of HIB tapes back from the person who borrowed them (you know who you are! consider this nagging!) as there were many games and programs from HP 2000 ACCESS vers. 1812 on that tape set (which dates from Jan. 1984). I'd love to see them run again. John K.

Pete Turnbull &lt;pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com&gt; wrote: Noisy line, most likely. I don't think it has any significance. The leading single quote outside double quotes is how HP BASIC (2000 and 3000) represent a non-printable character in a string constant. So '14 is decimal 14 as a character, or control-N. On an HP 262x or 264x terminal this would be done to switch away from an alternate character set (which would be switched to by control-O or '15 and selected by an escape sequence '27"(" followed by "@" for the base set, "A" for the math set, and "B" for the line drawing set). I don't recall the details clearly, I'm thinking one is a limit in seconds on the time the user has to reply, and I'm thinking the other is used to return the time it took the user to enter the reply. -Frank McConnell

All the trek's are cool, of course... but if someone knew where the Trader game was, that would be very cool. I remember it being 2 basic programs, trader was the front-end, which chained to trades. Standard economic galactic trader game, starting at the Sol system. I probably still have the print out somewhere on thermal paper, but have never tried to port it. all on the HP2000F, of course.. Kelly

According to the 2000F reference manual the first variable (T2) is the time limit in seconds (1 -- 255) for the user to enter somthing, the second variable (T) is the actual amount of time to respond, and the third variable (X$) is where the user response is stored... If the user failed to respond in time, the second variable is set to -256. Bill There is a copy of the 2000F Reference Manual on Al Kossow's site at: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/2000TSB/2000F-rm-300.pdf That would have answers to your questions... Pete Turnbull wrote: