Skate Training I: Transitionanigans
A helpful Spectrum Next program (for an audience of one, probably...)
v1.0 - 5 February 2024		
v2.0 - 16-17 February 2024	

Hands up everyone in the Spectrum world who also enjoys roller skating on a regular basis.

Just in case there's anyone other than me with my hand up, this is something I wrote to aid my practice sessions on the lounge floor. (I paid for the floor, and I'll do what I want with it.) Firmly believing that transitions were far beyond my ability from knowing what they were in August 2012 to actually getting one done in November 2023, I'm now getting them done regularly, albeit slowly. But I have a problem - I'm not ambidextrous, as very few people are, and so I have a "good" side and a "bad" side. This translates to being able to turn anticlockwise a lot easier than clockwise.

Usually, if I'm practicing transitions, I'll decide before setting off which way round I'll turn, and do do having already placed myself for it (or been caught in two minds and made a mess of it). I figured it would be a lot more beneficial if there was someone shouting "left" or "right" at me after I'd already started moving, and does so at random.

That is where the Next comes in. It was a simple one-day job to write a program to do exactly that, and will also track how I'm getting on. Most of this was written on a Spectrum emulator, and then converted for the Next with procedures and integer variables, and with .playwav to play some low-bitrate voice samples taken from a text-to-speech program, rather than have to rely on something like the awful Currah Microspeech.

Every session I get through with this program means I'll have attempted 200 transitions, and if anyone had told me in August 2023 (i.e. when I started taking skating *very* seriously) that this was even possible, I'd have laughed at the idea.

Who's laughing now, eh?

Evidence of the program in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVaVpI_A-8

The screenshots provided are from an actual training session on 19 February 2004. By and large, it went well.
