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General Category => NC100, NC200, PCW, PDA600 - the rest of the Family! => Topic started by: JohnElliott on 17:32, 08 August 25

Title: "Computing with the Amstrad PCW" checksum utility
Post by: JohnElliott on 17:32, 08 August 25
I've been trying to transcribe the BASIC listing checksum tool shown in the January 1988 issue of "Computing with the Amstrad PCW". In theory this ought to be straightforward: Type it in as an ASCII file, run it on itself, and check that the checksums calculated match the ones printed beside the listing. It's not so satisfactory as the PCW Plus one, because it calculates for groups of four lines at a time.

My best shot at the listing is attached, but I'm getting different checksums for lines 50-80 and 130-160. Can anyone see if I've miskeyed something, or spot some other reason why it's coming out different?

(It doesn't help that as far as I can see, the font they used for listings isn't quite fixed-pitch; most characters are the same width but I think some, like the ", are narrower, so you can't check if lines have the right number of characters by how the characters align with adjacent lines)

Mallard-80  BASIC with Jetsam   Version 1.48
(c) Copyright 1984  Locomotive Software Ltd
All rights reserved

33082 free bytes



Printer (Y or N)? n
Enter file name? checksum.asc
Lines 10 to 40                23040
Lines 50 to 80                22576
Lines 90 to 120               16942
Lines 130 to 160              17265
Lines 170 to 200              19159
Lines 210 to 240              19002
Lines 250 to 280              09799
Lines 290 to 320              21770

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