Basic Screen

[Channing Rupnick]

If you look at some generic CP/M programs, you'll find that was
common. Just print at least 24 blank lines and then start printing
new text from the bottom of the screen!I use Montezuma Micro CP/m on my Tandy Model IV which emulates an
ADM-3A terminal. Its clear screen command was a ^Z, so you could
write something like 10 CLS$=CHR$(26)
...
PRINT CLS$;
Note trailing semicolon so that you don't move off the top line!Jim Korman

I'm trying to put together a basic viewer of snow emergency route roads for my municipality to share publicly. I thought the Basic Instant App would be fine, because I don't need any functionality, and literally just want to show the map, but I wanted to have a splash screen to briefly explain what the user is looking at, and what some of the tools are. When I searched the Instant Apps by capability with "Splash Screen", the Basic one was still there, but I don't see any functionality for splash screen actually in the configuration.

Is there already splash screen functionality and I'm missing it, or is that functionality just not there for Basic Instant Apps? If it's not there at all, I feel like that's a misstep, and the ability to have a splash screen should be universal across all applications.

It would still be great to have a splashscreen/cover page available across all apps, including Basic. Since this still hasn't been addressed after over a year, is there a feature matrix available for the apps? Aside from this thread, I had to create the app, turn off express settings, and look through "About" to even verify that the Media app had a cover page option. Seems like a fair bit of work for a feature that used to be standard in web apps.

There are a lot more key commands available for each screen reader. The commands in this post are not intended to be a comprehensive tutorial, but they will help you navigate a website to get a sense of how things work. If possible organise some usability testing with screen reader users (and people with other types of disability) to get a real understanding of how people experience your website.

Hi. This is a great article. I wanted to add one correction regarding the table navigation commands for NVDA. NVDA uses the control and alt combinations with the arrow keys to navigate within tables. Thanks for writing this.

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I've heard mention many times of screen editing commands on the Apple // for fixing typos in BASIC programs (and patching code in the monitor?). I did not learn these growing up, never having the original manuals available in computer labs in school. What are the commands, and how do they work?

The Apple II has an input buffer separate from the screen, with a maximum capacity of 256 characters. Typing a printable character adds it to the buffer and the screen. The left-arrow button removes a character from the input buffer and moves the cursor left. The right arrow adds the character at the cursor position to the input buffer and moves the cursor right.

Hitting the escape key followed by I, J, K, or M will move the cursor up, left, right, or down, respectively, without affecting the input buffer. On the Apple //e, escape followed by arrow keys will do likewise. Press escape again to return to normal typing mode. If one wishes to modify a line of a program, one can use LIST to display it, then use Escape-I and J to move the cursor to the start of the line, hit escape to return to normal typing mode, and then use the right-arrow key to re-enter data from the screen into the input buffer. One can delete data by using escape-K to skip past it without moving it into the buffer, or in many cases one may simply space over it. Because LIST spaces things widely and AppleSoft generally ignores spaces, one can insert a few characters here and there by replacing spaces; larger inserts can be handled by using escape-J to move the cursor left after having imported some text, and then typing the characters to be inserted.

Once upon a time, I write a utility to continuously display the last 40 characters of the input buffer at the top of the screen; I wouldn't be surprised if some such thing exists within the Internet-connected universe.

Though supercat points out the built-in way of editing BASIC programs on the screen (well, machine language as well if you were doing it via the monitor and mini-assembler), there are better tools for this. Specifically, I was a big fan of GPLE from Beagle Bros. back in the day.

The main problem that you run into with the screen editing method is that the listing of a BASIC program has certain indentations and sometimes in inconvenient places (e.g. in a quoted string). Though you can ESC IJKM/arrows to avoid this, it is still a bit of a hassle. As well, there is no insert/delete functions in the middle of the line, which GPLE handles for you.

Another alternative is MD-BASIC from Morgan Davis. I never used it myself, but the idea is that you can write BASIC programs in an improved language from AppleSoft (e.g. labels instead of line numbers) and it will "compile" it down to tight AppleSoft.

I made my own. I printed out various pages from the PDF BRP rules on to sticky paper and stuck them to some card sheets. I put images from the book on the out-side so the players would have something to look at other than blank card.

On the GM's center screen I fiddled and fit Movement Rates, Sailing Speeds, Rowing Speeds, Average Sailing Speeds, Terrain and Weather Modifiers, Characteristic Rolls Summary, Inns Taverns and Eatery Pricelist, Special Success Summary, Melee Weapon Attack Fumble Results and Melee weapon Parry Fumble Results charts. Some of these are not in BRP but are from RQ III and SB5. A couple like the Characteristic Rolls Summary and Special Success Summary are simple summaries I wrote and chart-ified :thumb:. The characters in my campaign travel...a lot...hence the emphasis on travel charts.

On the right side I continued with the fumble charts and it sports Missile Weapon Attack Fumble Results, Natural Weapon Attack Fumble Results, expanded Arcane Effect and Fumble Results and a Combat Modifiers chart that summarizes modifiers to combat important to our game here.

In the center is a screen displaying the Episode number of the present campaign and the date of game play according to three of the most popular calendars in the milieu. I also made a water mark bearing the campaign name for game-correspondence and I included that in the background behind the episode number.

Player charts are a bit bigger than the GM's but not by much. I used MSword 2000, text boxes and tables. As it was a squeeze to get everything I wanted on the screen, I have to admit I wished there were four panels. I'm also not yet sure how I like the landscape orientation. To have another panel would have made room for a small campaign map on both sides of the screen, but I figure as we play, the screen will dynamically change, some things added and others discarded, as more and more of the engine becomes second nature. For that very reason I did not include a Resistance Chart as I and my players have memorized how the chart works and no longer need to consult one. One other thing I did was include the BRP page numbers where the chart information was located for quick look-up, particularly in the case of my summary charts.

I don't know whether you have noticed that this weekend I've uploaded a Word and PDF version of my BRP screen to the downloads section. I know it's not great, but it's OK and I'm planning to improve it as I continue working on my campaign.

The screen is basically tables copied from the PDF version of the book and pasted in a 3 A4 landscape Word document. They are inserts for the Savage Worlds customizable screen (or a homemade alternative like mine).

I made/edited a GM Screen for DC Heroes years ago, used comic book images for the outside cover and a copy of the real screens interior on the, well, interior. I used paste to stick the images/charts to a Star Frontiers GM Screen and then lamenated the screen at kinkos. Made perfect sense since my first copy of DC Heroes 2nd Edition was a photocopied copy of a friend of mine's copy, which was also bound a kinkos. I used the home made screen for years, and it still sits on the shelf behind me. I even used the screen when I got my own real copy of DC Heroes 2E and even when I got my own Blood of Heroes GM Screen in 2002. (Blood of Heroes was the continuation of DC Heroes 3E).

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