Scor­pio News

For Copyright reasons I cannot sell modified copies of GEMPEN, but I see no reason why I cannot ‘patch’ a serialized copy for a small fee to cover postage, copying and patching. If anyone is interested in this, or any of the other software modifications as described, or has a patch to MCOPY, I can be reached on ____ – ______.

Modifications Carried Out On Gempen Text Editor

I first attacked Gempen with a disassembler in 1984. Recently I have had several more goes, as a result of requests for certain other features from other users at my place of work, and due to my dissatisfaction with the way some commands still operated. There are problems about altering any program, and Gempen is no exception. Certain areas of the program have to remain compatible with various overlays.

In order to alter Gempen it was necessary to disassemble it at least to the state where reassembly would generate the same code. The next step was to determine as far as possible where the various routines were. The keyboard dispatch table was a great help here, as were the embedded text messages. The data supplied on the patch areas was also of great usefulness. As a result of many evenings work, I arrived at a source code, of which I could understand enough for my purposes.

By rewriting many of the error messages and prompts, writing out Nascom related routines, modifying the keyboard dispatch system, and re-arranging the code I was able to save a fair amount of space. As a result of the modifications my version of Gempen now provides these extra or altered features, but will not run on Nascom systems using the Nascom keyboard and screen, but it should work where a Nascom drives an IVC/SVC with attached keyboard.

A a result of my hacking, my version of GEMPEN now provides the following modified features.

Command Protection.

This has gone through two stages. In earlier versions, I added “Are you sure?” type protection to many commands, together with an SVC ‘Beep’, since I had lost text by typing things like ‘by’ when not in insert mode, and often hit the ‘e’ key and exited when not intending to. This added protection was still not entirely satisfactory though, since inadvertent keystrokes still led to distracting ‘Sure?’ queries. The frequent occurrence of the invitation to ‘W/w’ was also thought to be unnecessary, since this option is available at all times anyway. This query has been removed. In any case it did not make complete sense to protect the ‘W/w’ command with a query