Neil Johnston

A brief explantation of all my source follows:

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TextMaster V1.10

    This is the fully functional version of TextMaster, and has
significantly improved since last months version. The most obvious
'cosmetic' differences are that TextMaster has now spawned a nice little
error message handling system which informs you of what's gone wrong, and
the addition of another function which enables you to produce a text file
in a series of DC.B statements, perfect for inclusion as a scrolltext or
whatever! As well as these changes there have been a fair few bug fixes and
I think I can safely say this program is free from any major bugs, although
I nearly sent you a version which didn't centre the text unless you were
putting DC.B statements in! It's a good job I decided to give it another
quick test, isn't it?

    See docfile for more info 

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TechMenu V1.00

    I'm quite pleased with this program, and it represents a fair bit of
work on my part! Basically it's a menu program, similar in layout to Niço
Francois' Selector, but instead of using the mouse pointer, you move a bar
gadget through the list using the mouse. It's extremely simple to enter
commands into the program and you can specify different fonts for both the
headline, main text, and scroller text. Believe or not, this is the first
hardware program I've seen which uses the ARP libarary! The only reason I
used it was because I couldn't get DOS to behave at all, and was forced to
use ARP, just to get the execute command, but use of ARP means it supports
proper argument passing to the programs it runs. I have a modified version
which can be installed by a bootblock and uses a small file in the startup
sequence to execute the command, similar to the many bootblock menus
available now, but it's not really worth sending it into the disk as it is
more or less the same as this program, but it just saves the selection into
memory location $0, which is then executed by another program. If you do
use this program then you'd be foolish if you didn't crunch it first as it
knocks about 90% off the file's size! (Mainly due to use of large 40K pic.)

    Note: The fonts used by this program are 'borrowed' from the example
ones which came with Metallions' PowerFonts8 program. Use this program to
design new ones if you really want to!

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Sine-Sprite (1 & 2)

    Well this is my first little excursion into the world of Amiga Sprites,
and basically these programs just roll sprites around a screen, according
to a list of coordinates supplied. Not much else to say about them, just
assemble and see!

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Doc-Protect

    Hmm, this program is of questionable usefulness, but it does present a
solution to a little 'problem'  -  How many times have you got one of
those utility compact disks to find the compiler has decided you'd be
better off without the docs? Well this little program presents one possible
solution. Basically this program will accept the name of an ASCII text file
(or any other file you like) as an argument, and will then give you a 32
bit number which I've called a DP-Value for lack of a better name. Then
whenever you code your program where you want to make sure the docfile is
present on the disk before running, you load the file up under whatever
name you selected, e.g. 'SomeProg.doc' Then call the main 'number-finding'
routine and it will return a number. If the number is different from the
one produced when you first ran the doc file through this program, then the
doc has been altered in some way! You can then take appropriate action.
Either prevent the program working, or stick a requester up saying the docfile
is missing/altered and ask the user to write to you for some reason or other!

    I suppose you could just check if the file 'Mydoc.doc' is present on
the disk, but what if the compiler of the disk decided to stick a blank
file on there with that name?

    To be totally honest, in my opinion this program is pretty useless, but
could be incorporated if you want to make sure your doc files are
distributed with the code, without actually incorporating them in the
program itself. 

    Note: If you do decide to use this program for any reason (!) then
please remember to load the doc file through the powerpacker lib, because
if you don't then you're preventing people from crunching the text file! --
Also remember you could use this program to also protect other data (like
GFX files) to ensure nobody's 'altered' your files!

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