Mark Meany, 12 Hinkler Road, Thornhill, Southampton, Hant's. SO2 6FT July 92 Hi again, Well this makes a pleasant change, the disk is ready ahead of time. Truth is I received a fair amount of material from people and there was no point just holding onto it. Many thanks this month to Paul Kent and Steve Marshall. Paul has sent in a collection of useful hardware routines along with examples of their use. Steve on the other hand has demonstrated use of the new v2.04 libraries, in particular the ASL File and Font requesters. I must also thank Steve for the ScribPatch program. Look at the result, this page is well presented and spell-checked and Platinum Scribble! now has a home once again. As well as source I also received a number of tools. PPLink is a good example, produced by EarthSoft. This is a linker that can handle powerpacked files ( object files and linker libraries ) and when used in conjunction with EarthMagic can be used to produce ' Pure ' code. See the documentation for EarthMagic for more details. I was also sent LH, a crunch/decrunch utility that is supplied with a stand-alone decruncher for use in assembly programs. The cruncher is apparently more efficient than PowerPacker. See Paul Kents code for examples of it's use. I suppose the talking point of the moment must be the demise of the A500 series. A big mistake on Commodores behalf. The successor to this wonderful machine is little more than a games console with a keyboard bolted on. Perhaps Nintendo had something to do with this ( re Article on Page of August 92 Amiga Shopper ) and the A600 is to be succeeded by a true games machine, no keyboard, no internal drive and no expansions. Just an Amiga trapped inside like a caged animal. This new Amiga is still fitted with the 68000 processor when Commodore should have taken the initiative and used one of the faster Montorola chips, keeping the Amiga in tune with the competition. To make matters worse, the 68000 is now surface mounted, along with all other components. This removes the possibility of buying a cheap ' plug in ' accelerator board, some piggy back boards were available for the A500 for around £50 that pushed the speed up to 14 Mhz. Maybe Commodore were taking steps to prevents a new wave of viri developed by a Danish cracking team. The team had developed a new Mega Chip Set ( MCS ) in the fashion of a Mega Demo. This new chip set broke all Commodores rules and hence run 1000% faster, but one of the crew had added a virus to the Blitter that came into play on every day exactly divisible by a prime number other that one. Because users will now have to go to extraordinary lengths to get this chip set fitted, Commodore reason that they have protected many owners. What will happen when Commodore release v2.04001, v2.04002 etc of their own chip set has yet to be given any consideration! If you have details on where one may obtain the MCS please contact me or seek other psychiatric help! I wonder how many people will now choose PC's as opposed to an A600. Anyway, back to happier things. Two weeks ago I became the proud owner of a GVP Series II hard drive. Fifty two meg storage ( now split into 30 Meg boot partition and 20 Meg source partition ) and two Meg of FAST ram. My Amiga has just come of age! If you have been thinking of taking the plunge and buying a hard drive, do it tomorrow and you will never look back. Any program you need can be called up in a fraction of a second, that elusive subroutine can be found in a jiffy and assembling programs which contain multiple includes is a pleasure to behold. The extra memory also enables you to have a number of programs multi-tasking. My machine now has 2 Meg CHIP memory and 2 Meg FAST memory. DPaint, Devpac, SID and PowerPacker all at the same time plus an open Shell if required. Bliss. So what of my game? Well, all was going fine until I realised how much memory it required. To make things worse, CHIP memory. I doubt that it will run on a machine with only 1/2 Meg CHIP memory. Still I have included it anyway and will be working on better collision routines in order to bring it within everyones reach. In an effort to save memory, I tried building the screen during each VBL. The result of this experiment is on this disk and as you will see, it is too slow. The game code would only have some 10 lines to run in! The Map Editor has also been speeded up slightly. The main problem was the BuildScreen subroutine that copied tiles into the SuperBitMap window using DrawImage(). This was way too slow. I tried to blit directly into the bitplanes of the window, but this does not work. Intuition and layers prevent any direct modifications to the bitplanes from being visible. Not giving up I scanned the graphics library and found ClipBlit(). This function works on RastPorts, so it is necessary to supply a dummy source RastPort structure. I have supplied a simple example of using this function. Unfortunately, there was not room to supply MapEd this month. I will try to fit it on the next issue. A request to people writing to me for disks. Please don't send me blank disks to copy onto! Blank disks are boring! Send some PD material on them for me to browse through at sometime, or some source or better still something for me to put on an issue of ACC:-) Lastly thanks to everyone sending me material. Live fast, code hard and all that! Mark.