BBC Lottery Downloader

By Alban Hall

Originally published in EUG #33

Enclosed is a further cheque for £6. Hope this is OK.

Re: the Lottery Program suite. I have used WORDWISE+ for years so your request for a letter on disk in View doesn't particularly turn me on. Anyway, here goes!

Some time ago my granddaughters heard me say that a program could be written to download the Lottery results from Teletext. The demand then was "Do it!".

Having done so has simply meant that I was continually being called upon to do more and more, like printing out a range of results, showing consecutive appearances of numbers, occurence of number sequences, numbers appearing max or min times, adding a week's numbers manually and even picking six numbers randomly.

The suite of nearly 30,000 bytes is on DFS DS disks and runs entirely in Mode 7 because both girls have BBCs and memory is critical, so it will run on the BBC or Master but not the Electron.

Of course each program initially has its own problems but the whole suite is now linked with user-friendly menus and additional error checking code. Some of the alogrithms are my own entirely to solve situations that arose, which much is standard BASIC stuff.

The suite was near enough complete when a new Wednesday Lottery inserted further problems. I am quite certain that further demands on the suite will be made as long as I am prepared to have a go. However, it's now at the stage where others could perhaps find a use for it.

Quite obviously, I've spent considerable time on this suite and I would therefore not wish to simply give it away. I would therefore wish to arrange a small cash or WHY in excess of the cost of disk, copying and P&P. If anyone is interested, simply drop me a line or ring me. The current LOTTERY file will be up to date.

Alban Hall

Sorry about saying View. I used it generally like saying hoover the carpet or Electron a letter/Beeb a letter. What does that mean?

WORDWISE and any other word processor is fine. In fact, anything is fine so long as members send something.

Gus Donnachaidh, EUG #33