ISOLATION JOKES - by G Camp, 2021

Short programme to load/display jokes to help through these social isolation times. A little laughter helps, and just putting joke file together has helped with my sanity. Currently there are 948 jokes included.

I originally wrote this programme for some friends in England who were going through some tough times with months of isolation due to the Covid problem. It was originally written for an Amstrad 64k computer and the only thing left of that program are the jokes. Of course the CMM2 has a different Basic, much more memory and different screen resolutions and colour depth. Hence the programme has been re-writtn from scratch. It is a simple programme and you won't find any fancy graphic effects or sounds. Should be easily converted for different screen resolutions but all current jokes fit nicely on a 800x600 screen.

Files:
jokes.bas - the main programme file.
jokes_all.dat - data file containing all the jokes with embedded control/format characters.
j_addr.inc - data file in basic format containing load adress offsets for each joke.
okes.bmp - loading screen.

The last two files are written by "convert.bas" after some control characters, etc are stripped from the original jokes file - "joke_all.txt"

The joke order is randomised each time the program is run so jokes won't be repeated in any session.

Press [SPACE] for next joke (or next part of a joke), [Q] to quite or [0-9] to change colour scheme.

All jokes are kid safe, ie sexual jokes have not been included. Some jokes may offend some groups as some humour is based on stereotypes - appologies for offending anyone.

Format of joke_all.txt file....

Many, many jokes can be added or deleted to make your own joke files. I've used Notepad++ for editing and have used characters above ascii 127 to indicate formatting so that all the usual characters can be include in a joke.

Each joke starts with character 127 - €
If the next character is 169 - © then the joke is a Q/A joke. Note: the "Q: " and "A: " are added by the programme and do not need to be part of the joke in this file.
A character 174 - ® indicates where the "A: " part of a Q/A joke should be.
A character 188 - ¼ prints a single line feed.
A character 189 - ½ prints a double line feed.
A character 182 - ¶ indicates the end of a joke.
eg....
€I hate Russian dolls. They're so full of themselves!¶
€©What did the duck says when she brought some lipstick?®Put it on my bill!¶
€The bartender says, ....¼"We don't serve time travellers here."½ ...... A time traveller walks into a bar.¶

The converter programme strips any uneeded characters - eg €, or line feeds and tabs, and calculates the offset address for each joke and adds that to the .inc file. Note: the .inc file with have an extra comma after the last offset is added to the file - this needs to be deleted or an eror will occur when the ile is loaded (I was to lazy to do this as part of the programme!!).

