SmartBASIC - A Coleco Adam Forum

NJAdamuser wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 29, 2021 10:16 pm

Because there was a program in one of those magazines (turns out it was in the final issue of KPower) that was written for the Apple that did not have an Adam translation that has been on my "bucket list" for the Adam since I received my copy of the issue back in the day (I was a subscriber since those two were the only magazines I knew of, at that time, that had any Adam content), I have downloaded from Archive.org their entire collection that spans from just before Adam was included in the magazine until the end of Adam's run in the magazine because I could not remember which issue that "bucket list" program was in. I found it after going through all the issues I D/L'd but the thought occurred to me, would you be interested in my uploading the collection of these two magazines to the Adam Archive or since they are already on Archive.org don't bother?

Granted, both of these magazines didn't really have a lot of "must have" or "hard hitting" basic programs for the Adam (mostly fluff, admittedly), but they had a few pretty decent ones and almost every issue had at least one program for the Adam, I thought it might be worthwhile adding to the Adam Archive for the sake of posterity. I see that over on AA and on Joe Blenke's site(I may have misspelled his name) there are only those issues that have Adam computer reviews. The downside is that not all of the magazines are complete, the majority are, but there were a couple of issues that had missing pages. If I still have my collection somewhere, I may re-scan those issues, but it won't be anytime soon.

Just figured I offer what I do have,
Paul

NJAdamuser wrote: ↑

Thu May 13, 2021 7:33 pm

I am not sure what you mean.

The magazines are scanned in PDF format by someone else. As I said, I D/L'd from Archive.org and I was offering to upload them as PDF's.

If you are referring to the Basic Programs within the magazines, then no, I am not typing them in. Even back in the day, that was not the part of my childhood that I wanted to revisit. I have a few years old, full version, of Adobe Acrobat that allows you to copy and paste text within a PDF file with its built-in OCR. The couple of programs that I have copied from the magazine, I copied and pasted from the PDF into Windows' Notebook program, and saved them as a .txt file. I then corrected the mis-OCR'd characters ("$" gives a LOT of problems) and then run in SB and make further corrections that I missed the first round, rinse and repeat. It can be a lot of work depending on the size of the program, although still less work than typing in from scratch. Some of them, I suspect have already been "released" into the Adam community because I found some very similar programs in the ANN files (the couple of July 4th programs, specifically come to mind and a couple of others, although I have only gone through up to and through the year 2000, so far). But I am not planning on doing that for all of the Adam programs listed in Kpower and Family Computing. If someone really wants to have one of the programs that I do not copy over, they are more than welcome to go through the steps above. There's only about a dozen programs, at most I think, that I am interested in converting from the PDF's of Kpower/FC for use on the Adam.

I DO plan to share the programs I have and will eventually convert from the PDF magazines to .txt files, either here or at the AA (depending on where you prefer for me to share them), once I get them working/fixed up/modified. Some I can't run right now because they are written for using the joystick on the Adam, I am running them through the emulator on my laptop and I don't have a game controller to test them with. The one program that kind of started all this, is about 85-90% working. It was written for an Apple 2 and uses the keyboard for control, so I am able to play it. There's a couple of modifications left to make it work like the Apple version (thank goodness for the Applewin emulator so I can see how the program actually is supposed to run/work something I did not have back when I was 14/15 ), although I suspect there is one aspect that I will just not be able to get working (is there a way to inverse the text in the text window of HGR? I see it's a bug with SB 1.0 and have not seen a solution, yet).