MUG128.DOC

The story begins with a friend of mine 
who owns an IBM with lots of memory and 
a hard disk drive and all the goodies.  
His nine-year-old son is interested in 
the IBM and when my friend recently got 
a $700 windfall, he decided it was time 
to buy a computer for his kid.  After 
talking to several people, he decided on 
a Commodore 128.

     He asked me to write a simple 
program that says "Hello there.  I'm 
you're new computer.  We'll have lots of 
fun together."  That sort of thing.  And 
he wanted it to be an AUTOEXEC file (or 
whatever the IBM term is), which means 
that it loads and runs when you turn on 
the computer.

     The program as he envisioned it 
would have used about five PRINT 
statements, which was too easy, so one 
night I sat down and wrote the graphics 
part: hi-res graphics and sprites, with 
a few sound effects.  Later, a musically 
inclined friend gave me a Scarlatti 
piece he had translated into PLAY 
statements and I merged the programs 
together.  It worked out pretty well.  I 
added a boot sector to make it auto-run 
on the 128.

     My IBM friend was amazed when he 
saw the program and said "The IBM 
couldn't do that, could it?"  Nope.  He 
asked if there was a SID chip board for 
the IBM.  I don't think so (smirk).  He 
thought the 128 was sort of a "toy" 
computer for kids, much less powerful 
than an IBM.

     Later, I realized that I could 
remove the "Hello, I'm your computer" 
lines and upload it to CompuServe, so I 
did.  If I'd known that I would 
eventually be uploading it, I would have 
put in some REMs that explain how it 
works.  Actually, it's a sort of messy 
and unstructured program, but I wrote it 
in an hour or two, the day before my 
friend bought the 128.

     If you have any comments about the 
MUG128.IMG program, come to the CBMART 
forum on CompuServe and leave a message 
for me.  I'd prefer a forum message over 
an Easyplex.

     Jake Lund, 76703,3051