Today I finished up on my final improvements and tweaks on my DVD cover and label printer program, for my C128. As I've been printing covers for my DVD keeper cases, as well as labels for the DVDs, I've made notes on what worked and wasn't quite working in my most recent BASIC programming effort.

The biggest change was the addition of printing a back cover for the DVD case, with more information regarding the movies on the DVDs inside. Basically, I just added the ability to print 25 lines of text to include what ever information I wanted to include on the DVD case. This could have been accomplished by using a ready-made word processor, but I thought it would me more convenient to just have everything in one program.

This portion of the program doesn't care what is printed and doesn't follow any special alignments or formats, apart from staying within a 35 character line width to stay within the boundaries of the DVD case. So, if I wanted to print an extra sheet as an insert for the DVD case, I could use it for that, as well.

Sticking with the convenience of having everything in a single program, I also put the disc label printer portion into this program. At first, I thought I'd have to re-type the lines of BASIC from the label program into the main program, but then I found this:

https://wpguru.co.uk/2014/07/how-to-merge-two-basic-programmes-on-your-commodore-c64-c128-and-plus4/

In the end, all I had to do was renumber the twenty or so lines of the label program, so they would append neatly to the end of the main program, then save it. Then to finish off, I followed the very simple steps mentioned on the website, to combine the two programs together. Easy!

Lastly, I added a simple menu to make it easy to choose the print job I want to do (front cover, back cover, or labels) and I added a few “flourishes” to the cover print routine. It isn't a very pretty program, but it does what it's supposed to do and makes it easy for me to print covers and labels for my DVDs. Above all else, it works!

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