Mark Meany, 12 Hinkler Road, Southampton, Hant's. SO2 6FT October 92 Hi Again, Confession time. I have been busy preparing for the end of this month. Why? Well, because I am taking over Amiganuts. Ray is having to pull out due to health reasons. When I say I'm taking over Amiganuts, that's not strictly true as my brother is in with me. We intend to share the workload between us. You will quickly discover the complete lack of source on this months disk. Do not be fooled! In order to fit everything on I had to resort to using LHarc and crunch whole directories. The draw back is that the individual files cannot be viewed. As a small compensation, I have included executables of most of the code so you can see what is going on. Apologies to Arcane Jill, did not include an executable of NumbersGame as it required too many libraries. Quick request for help. Does anyone have in their possession an unarc utility that allows the destination directory to be specified on the command line? I could really use a copy! Now I've got a complaint. Many people write to me asking for help with a program or to find bugs in their code. Normally I am quite willing to spend some time looking through the code and helping where I can. However, just recently I have received source code from three separate individuals that asks more than is reasonable. The code is sent without any comments, explanations of what is being attempted or, in two cases, what the nature of the bug is. Let me set the record straight! I'm not telepathic and have never claimed to be ( though I will not complain if someone wishes to bestow such powers upon me ). If you are having problems and think I may be able to help, then by all means write, but make sure I can look at your source and see what is going on. Back to this disk, wow! Thanks to Paul Kent and Paul Douglas there are a couple of games on here. Paul Kent has submitted the source to his Tank Attack game, now with built in map editor ( though it is a little quirky ). One observation here from my brother, how hard would it be to link two Amigas together for this game? Paul Douglas has supplied an executable only of an Invaders clone that he programmed, I like it ( I would, I grew up with Space Invader! ). Do not be fooled by the first level, as you progress the game gets harder ( Level 3 is a **** ). The disk even contains evidence that Steve Marshall enjoys a good HW bash now and then as he spreads some light on using the audio hardware, this puts my explanation right in it's place ( and I was proud of that to. Sob, sob. ). Dave Edwards has continued with his invaders clone ( and Paul Douglas has also made tracks along this lane ). I'm still having trouble with the keyboard Dave: 1. Pressing ESC key takes ages to be recognised when defining Player 1 from the keyboard. 2. Cannot fire continuosly at all now. Doesn't matter if I use keys or joystick. 3. Hold down the fire button while in the bottom quater of the screen ( where most aliens approach ), while facing left. Aliens approaching from the right move a fair distance into the 'lazer beam' before actually exploding. Before getting complaints along the lines of ' Why don't you read Daves notes before pointing out complaints ', I will. At present I am making remarks as would the first-few-times user who never bothered ( I know about the keyboard bug! ). Finally, onto another mind blowing submission from Arcane Jill ( EarthSoft ). Infact, it's Jills fault I had to resort to arc'ing some of the material on this disk, earth.library could not be missed off! It's great, the documentation is very extensive, as seems to be the norm with EarthSoft publications. There should be a warning supplied with this lot, 'do not attempt to read this at 1130 after a supping a few ales'. Also, thanks for the fix for updatecat Jill. As you are now aware I am a complete ARexx novice! Saying it was Jills fault that I resorted to lharc is unfair. Daves game comes with loads of minuscule raw data files ( I mean, 6 bytes, come on Dave :-), these soon gobble up disk space. What of my own feeble offerings. Well there is a short explanation on setting up multi-playfield displays and also a 'Boing' sort of program that could be turned into a simple game ( with loads of work mind you ). The reason I included this was to show the collision techniques explained last month in use. Take a look at the copper list macros I've used. These make life a lot easier. I have been working on a slightly larger project, you will find out about this soon, that required a suite of general purpose hardware routines. These are along the same line as Paul Kents include files. I have yet to update these to implement Steves audio trick and also have a powerpacker decrunch module to add as well. These files are located in the 'include/marks' directory, documentation and examples are provided. I have been looking at PC's a lot lately, the IBM type. Hence the odd obsession with C, it's more portable than assembler. As a result, I am trying out that demo emulator 'PC-Task'. It's miles better than Transformer ever was! Numerous PD/Shareware languages are available for the PC that are well supported, so seeing replies in the computer press along the lines of, 'at present COBOL is not supported on the Amiga, so you'll have to use the machines at college to do all your work.' are misleading. Cobol is supported on the PC, which the Amiga can emulate ( all be it a little slow ). I must admit to never having used COBOL, the Computer Science course I took was aimed primarily at C, with assembler thrown in for good measure. Had I opted for Computer Studies, I would be able to give a reasonable appraisal, but for the time being just accept that the Amiga can be used for COBOL programming ( albeit for a PC :-). If you are looking for a power-emulator, you'll have to go hardware. According to Amiga Shopper, a 386 board is about to hit the Amiga scene. At last a serious alternative to buying a real PC. It should even be able to run that most wonderful, awe inspiring revolution of the PC scene, Windows. What do you mean, I'm being sarcastic :-) Being honest, Windows is a good attempt at bringing a dated system into line with current thinking. When PC's arive with it on ROM the Amiga will most certainly become a thing of the past, especially with Commodores help ( would you treat the 'same size as a laptop' A600 as a serious computer, or a games machine which lies in the shadow of most consoles these days? ). Well the last paragraph went from COBOL to Nintendo, what can I come up with now? Ah yes, 24 bit colour add-ons! When these cards start supporting HAM mode kick your PC in it's nether regions, scrap your TV and be prepared for some of the most captivating computer graphics ever. Even the most avid 'Home And Away' fan will realise their mistake! What, you can't afford one! Well there's another fine mess you got me into .... What I'm trying to say is, ever feel like your being ripped off for owning an Amiga? You can buy a 386 PC, with an SVGA monitor, 100Mb hard drive, 4MB memory, 2 drives, SVGA accelerator, MS-DOS and Windows for 800. Some companies will even bundle software with this and throw in on-site warranties. Hmmmmm. My A500+ retails at 300, my 52 Meg GVP Hard Drive at 360, 3 Meg memory cost around 150 and my monitor 200. IBM PC = 800, Amiga = 1110. PC software is cheaper than Amiga software, can you find a PC C compiler for 200+? And now, the sixty four thousand bit question, when will I sell out? Um, um, err, well, ohhhh. Never! A 16 Mhz 386 PC running Windows cannot touch a basic Amiga. The top of the range PC running at 50 MHZ still cannot touch the Amiga 3000. Windows was written far too late in the PC's history, the Amiga grew up around Intuition! PC users are hell-bent on benchmarks, they even quarrel over the version of benchmark used to prove their machine is fastest! With the Amiga life is more clean-cut. A 40 Mhz Amiga is faster than a 30 Mhz Amiga! Mr. GVP, I am saving for your 40 Mhz accelerator at this very moment, please don't put the price up just yet! ( your humble worshiper, Mark. Lick, lick, does this get me a discount? ). And so ends this, the most depressing editorial yet for ACC. Don't be put off, remember Daves eternal words. 'Live fast, code hard and die in a beautiful way. ' Mark.