I’m planning to write a BASIC program to view SmartWriter documents. It would come in really handy since many program disks include their documentation in this format and it’s inconvenient to reboot into the word processor just to read them. At first glance this seemed like a pretty simple program to write however the BLOAD command refuses to load SmartWriter files (although they are cataloged as type “H” binary files) for some unknown reason. The OPEN command only works with text files so that won’t work either.

One solution I’m considering is modifying the BLOAD routine in memory so it will accept SmartWriter files and load them like any other binary file. This will take me in a bit over my head as I’m not comfortable in machine code or assembly language (yet) but it does turn this into a pretty interesting project. Stay tuned!