IBM Feedback

Here are some comments offered by a reader of COMPUTE!'s PC & PCjr magazine (now incorporated into COMPUTE!) on two "Feedback" answers published in the September 1984 issue.

With respect to the letter from John Bugianesi pertaining to a graphics dump to the Gemini 10X printer: Your suggestion to LPRINT CHR$ (27) "A" CHR$ (6) does set the proper linefeed for a graphics dump, but the GRAPHICS utility resets the linefeed to an incorrect value for the Gemini.

Also, it is possible to enter graphics characters from the PCjr keyboard. First, press the Fn key, then press N. This puts the keyboard into numeric mode. The cursor keys, when pressed, type out numbers. Now, hold down the ALT key and type in the ASCII value of the desired graphics character. When you let go of ALT, the character appears. To get out of numeric mode, press Fn-N again.

N. Thomas Lischer

Thanks for clarifying the problem with dumping graphics to the Gemini 10X printer.

Your second suggestion, however, still doesn't solve the problem of entering all the graphics characters from the PCjr keyboard. Even though ALT can be used to enter any ASCII value, there are still many graphics characters that can be displayed on the screen, but not typed from the keyboard. For example, when you press CTRL-A, a happy face character appears. CTRL-A returns CHR$ (1), the value of the happy face. The solid face, CHR$ (2), theoretically could be entered with CTRL-B, but this value causes BASIC to move the cursor, not print the character. Some graphics characters cannot be reached even with CHR$, let alone from the keyboard. The only way to access some characters in BASIC is to POKE them directly into screen memory.