The Time Machine

[+Atarius Maximus]

I wrote this today as a fun little diversion from working on Drone Patrol.  I needed a little break from that.  It's a book cart and contains the entire text of H.G. Well's "The Time Machine".  The book is in the public domain, so there's no copyright issues here.  Press fire at any time to bring up the options menu to change the background and text colors, and push left and right on the joystick to turn the pages.

 

I know this is rather pointless as there are much easier ways to read this book, but why not?  It was fun to put it together.

 

 

 

TheTimeMachine_v1.02.a78

TheTimeMachine_v1.03.a78 TheTimeMachine_v1.03.bin

[gambler172]

Hi Steve

I like book carts 👍

[+Karl G]

Maybe you could use the SaveKey to save your place in the book?  🙂

[gambler172]

Or edit some small graphics at the bottom, like I did in my games....see Merlain or Journey of Snail

[+Atarius Maximus]

39 minutes ago, Karl G said:

Maybe you could use the SaveKey to save your place in the book?  🙂

I could definitely do that.  This was literally a one day project, and there's plenty of space for some extras like that (there's four completely unused banks of the 33 in the 528k ROM).  I toyed with the idea of adding a mini-game you need to complete in order to turn the page.   

[+Atarius Maximus]

41 minutes ago, gambler172 said:

Or edit some small graphics at the bottom, like I did in my games....see Merlain or Journey of Snail

As I just mentioned, this was a quick one day project and there are certainly enhancements that could be made like that.  I may revisit this and make some enhancements at some point in the future.  I'll take a look at Merlain & Journey of Snail.

[Jinks]

Chapter 1 on that page I see you have a period and then a sentence starts with a capital A and says.  And.  

The next sentence says forefingersas which is not a word.  Is that programming or just a typo? 

The mini game idea would be cool. 

 

 

[+Atarius Maximus]

15 minutes ago, Jinks said:

Chapter 1 on that page I see you have a period and then a sentence starts with a capital A and says.  And.  

The next sentence says forefingersas which is not a word.  Is that programming or just a typo? 

The mini game idea would be cool. 

 

 

The sentence that starts with "And" is actually correct, however there should be a dash in there: "forefinger-as".  I copied the book from Project Gutenburg, and the only issues I had with copying the text from the book for this project was the dash and the quote marks not being recognized as standard ASCII characters.  I had to replace the dash & quotes in multiple places in the book, so there's a chance there may be a few errors in there (as you found on page 1).   If there are, there shouldn't be very many.

 

Most of the code for this I generated automatically using Microsoft Excel, I'm attaching it here for anyone that's curious.  For the text, I formatted the text of the book in Microsoft Word first using a macro to create 32 character lines of text with a carriage return, then just copy/pasted the text from there into excel, which generated the page code. 

timemachine.xlsx

[+Atarius Maximus]

Here's a zip file that includes absolutely everything:

• 7800basic Source
• Excel Spreadsheet used to copy book text to 7800basic code
• Formatted word document with the book converted to 32 character lines
• Graphics files used for compiling the code (title graphic files, modified atascii font file and scoredigits file)
• a78 file for emulation and bin file for cuttle cart 2

I also updated the code and the a78 file in the first post to fix the "forefinger-as" text on the first page.

 

TheTimeMachine_v1.01.zip

[CapitanClassic]

I love Project Gutenberg, and The Time Machine was one of the first books I read off the site. The also have audio books for free that are read by humans. I happen to like the voice of the reader, Roy Trumbull, on this audio book, The Time Machine (as well as the Sherlock Holmes reader)

[CapitanClassic]

50 minutes ago, Atarius Maximus said:

The sentence that starts with "And" is actually correct, however there should be a dash in there: "forefinger-as".  I copied the book from Project Gutenburg, and the only issues I had with copying the text from the book for this project was the dash and the quote marks not being recognized as standard ASCII characters. 

That is because the “em dash” (Hex 0x2014) isn’t part of standard ASCII. They probably meant to use the hypen in the text, but used the wrong character.

I didn’t look at how you converted the ASCII characters to the atascii_timemachine font, but you could do a find & replace in excel of all em dash characters with some other actual ASCII character that doesn’t appear in the text, and then map that character in excel to the ‘-‘ hypen character in the A7800 font.

 

Quote marks have a similar issue in that many are outside the normal ASCII (in the +0x20xx range), and they likely didn’t use the newest HTML standard of writing “"” or using the left/right angle double quote marks.

[+Atarius Maximus]

13 minutes ago, CapitanClassic said:

That is because the “em dash” (Hex 0x2014) isn’t part of standard ASCII. They probably meant to use the hypen in the text, but used the wrong character.

I didn’t look at how you converted the ASCII characters to the atascii_timemachine font, but you could do a find & replace in excel of all em dash characters with some other actual ASCII character that doesn’t appear in the text, and then map that character in excel to the ‘-‘ hypen character in the A7800 font.

 

Quote marks have a similar issue in that many are outside the normal ASCII (in the +0x20xx range), and they likely didn’t use the newest HTML standard of writing “"” or using the left/right angle double quote marks.

Ah, makes sense.  The modified atascii font was modified to add some graphics to the menu screen and adjust the placement of the "/" and the digits.  I just used the standard dash to replace the unrecognized dash in the text, and used ` to replace the unrecognized single quotes.  When compiling, 7800basic would complain that the lines had more than 32 characters of text even though they didn't.  It was because of the unrecognized characters.   At first I started removing the dash then I just replaced it, so the first 10 pages or so are the ones that may be missing a dash or have two words run together, I just haven't taken the time to look.

[CapitanClassic]

56 minutes ago, Atarius Maximus said:

When compiling, 7800basic would complain that the lines had more than 32 characters of text even though they didn't.  It was because of the unrecognized characters. 

Likely caused because the unrecognized character was 2 bytes instead of 1. Excel's find and replace should work by just copying the em dash to your clipboard and doing a replace all, BTW the first page has tne same issue, " in this waymarking the points with a lean forefinger " with a hyphen missing between way-marking.

[+Atarius Maximus]

I fixed the "way-marking" mistake and updated the first post.  It's likely the first page is the only one with the missing dash error, as that's where I was initially testing the issue with going over 32 characters per line.