My latest letter to Acorn asked three things: firstly, how to set the Econet Station number on a Master 128, secondly if it was possible to generate black text on a white background in Mode 7 and thirdly, if I could configure the setting of *TV on a BBC Model B. My juvenile babblings must have confused Acorn who told me how to set *TV on the Master.

There is no way of configuring the TV setting on a Model B except to have a ROM which would issue a *TV command on every reset. Even then, the TV value would have to be programmed in the ROM as there would be no way to read off a stored value without some battery-backed RAM.

I always thought that it was a bit anomalous that there is no teletext control code to give black text. Once you change the background, all you can use is the existing colours. I was asking if black text could be generated on a white background. This is the meaning of "reversing the video polarity". In fact, I think this can be done on the B and Master by changing a PCB link although I have never tried it.