[22;23;24m[1;3v[2"z 232 Hale Road WIDNES Cheshire WA8 8QA Dear All, 10/11/92 First of all, I'm going to ask a favour. Yes, having supplied lots of lovely DOCS to you all, it's payback time! Does anyone out there have access to various instruction sets for other processors? I'm writing a complete stable of cross assemblers for the PD scene, and I need instruction sets to do this. Please be kind and send them to me! Bung the details into a plain ASCII disc file and send to me at the above address. Please remember that I need a COMPLETE description of the assembly language AND the binary opcodes to write an assembler! Top of my hit list are: Acorn ARM (I'm missing a few details) TMS 34020 (I have NOTHING on this) Inmos T800 (aka Transputer-yes I know it's weird but you'll make me SO happy) SPARC (I've got the assembler, I just need the opcodes) Intel 80486 (I've got the assembler, I just need the opcodes) Motorola MC68881/MC68882 (Opcodes only- I've got the rest) Motorola MC68851 PMMU (Opcodes only) DEC EV4 (Alpha Chip 64-bit RISC-I need EVERYTHING you've got on this) Motorola 88000 series (again the LOT) I'll be EVER so grateful if any readers can oblige! Oh, and I'd also like a few old 8-bit instruction sets for completeness (and nostalgia), namely: Fairchild F8 (What? Yes, it DOES exist) TMS9900 16-bit Right. Begging section over. Now to this issue's offerings. As you might expect, Defender has moved on to Phase Four. It now uses one graphics include file instead of thirty-odd, much to Mark's relief! Other changes to Defender are:TWO source code include files instead of one, namely the files: Defender1.i Defender2.i (nice logical choice of filenames here!) to go with the hardware include file that I use, plus several important new features covered more fully in the DOC file but which I'll cover briefly here. These are: 1) Aliens now have missiles and mines to use against you. Bombers lay trails of mines in the path of your ship, Landers, Mutants and Swarmers throw missiles at you. For a wealth of information on this, see the DOC file; 2) Landers now follow the terrain. Watch them climb hills and sink into craters in the landscape! 3) Some minor bugs are now gone (e.g., extreme right-hand section of landscape now matches the extreme left-hand section in behaviour where it didn't before-see earlier versions for what I mean!); 4) The dreaded Baiters make their appearance, and believe me, you don't want to rub these up the wrong way! See the DOC file for the full, terrible details of just how truly evil they are, plus how hard they are to combat once they join in the fun... Still on Defender, just in case I haven't documented it before (Mark will remind me if I have), there's the keyboard processor ROM bug which was dug up when Mark playtested an earlier version (I think this was Phase Two, before I allowed keyboard and joystick configuration). Pressing the keys: Left-SHIFT Left-ALT Left-AMIGA on some Amigas produces an 'autofire' effect on Defender Phase Two. This is NOT a cheat mode:this is a bug in the 6500/1 keyboard processor ROM operating system. The keyboard controller sometimes forgets to record a state change in the Left Amiga key from 'key down' to 'key up', and thus any software relying on this key thinks that the Left-Amiga key is being held down. It's more complicated still when Defender's keyboard handling is taken into account, since the VBL handler clears the 'fire lock' that I put in to stop autofiring, and the next loop says 'key down' and thus defeats the locking. This happens most frequently when several shift-type keys are pressed together, but seems ONLY to affect the Left-Amiga key. On the subject of bugs, if anyone discovers a really embarrassing bug in the program, please don't forget to let me know in your correspondence! I can't get rid of bugs I don't know about! My next offering is a little utility. When Mark complained about the thirty-odd include files (most of them tiny) for Defender, I decided to make a single large graphics include file. This was when the fun started. The CLI Copy command allows file concatenation (nice big word this!) but you cannot tell Copy in which order to perform the operation! If you tell Copy to create one file containing ALL of the contents of ALL of the files in a given source directory, for example, then Copy will use the Examine() and ExNext() DOS library calls (or its internal equivalents) to access each file in the directory in turn. The order in which these calls access successive files is largely beyond your control! So, to create the graphics include file, I ended up writing a utility to perform exactly this operation. MakeGraf allows you first to specify which file you will use as your destination file, and then allows you to specify IN ANY ORDER YOU WISH the source files whose contents you wish to copy into the single destination file. Furthermore, it performs this magic in a nice, userfriendly way using the reqtools.library file requester. And as if that wasn't enough, it provides a little bit of on-line help at the start to give you an idea of how to use it! Please find both source AND the DOC file for this included on this disc! Right. What's next? Oh yes. There's a change a-coming to the infamous DOC DISCS. Mark has added a nice front end (based upon the latest incarnation of the ACC menu, this latest incarnation being the best yet) and once he has had a good browse through the alternative banner logos that I've sent to him, future versions of the DOC DISCS will come with a nice menu browser. Also, as WorkBench 2.0 makes its appearance, and once Mark and I get to grips with it, lots of lovely WorkBench 2.0 DOCS will start appearing (as and when we write them!). As usual, send three blank discs and a stamped, self-addressed jiffy bag to myself at the above address. Mark MAY be able to handle requests for DOC DISCS now and again, but since he's taken over AmigaNuts his time will be eaten up like mad, so until Mark's takeover headaches are over, swamp me with mail for the time being! And now, for something completely different. I wish to bring to your attention the subject of pets. As an Amiga owner of some standing, I have as a result of many interesting hours discovered that one's choice of furry or feathered companions requires just as much thought as one's choice of, say, dot-matrix printer. In fact, I may soon be publishing a book on the subject entitled "FurWare Your Pet As An Amiga Peripheral". Now even though I possess a dust cover for my A500, and my monitor is fortunately bereft of perches, I feel it only fair to warn my readers that a budgerigar and an Amiga are not always compatible. In the case of my own pet, the major areas of incompatibility lie in its insatiable curiosity, manifested in a tendency to tap-dance all over my hands while typing. Any typing errors that slip through are largely attributable to this source. Those who are tempted to dispute the truth of the above are welcome to send me the cost of having reprints taken from the appropriate negatives of a roll of film I developed some time back. In the meantime, birds (and I admit this holds true for other pet-life too) suffer from one gigantic drawback when positioned above an Amiga keyboard their complete lack of toilet training. I hereby warn anyone with an inquisitive cage bird that failure to take the appropriate action should it approach the Amiga keyboard will result in the discovery that guano does NOT enhance said keyboard's performance. Now Budgie shit in particular begins life as a substance with a slimy consistency not unlike glazer's putty, but rapidly sets into a nodule with characteristics more commonly associated with reinforced concrete. Should you allow such a nodule to be deposited in the recess between your Amiga keys, you will live to regret it. Believe me, this substance poses more decontamination headaches than any of the selection of chemical warfare agents available to the superpowers during the Cold War. I am reliably informed that similar precautions are required in the case of boxer dogs and their overactive salivary glands, which can rapidly coat your Amiga (and you too, should you remain stationary for long enough to allow it to happen) in an inch-thick layer of ooze which creeps across all surfaces under its own steam and will even seek out the CIA chips on the motherboard if you let it, before setting into a film whose properties are akin to the synthetic rubber used in surgeon's gloves. In particular, keep your boxer dog away from the internal drive slot, as floppy disc drives do not appreciate being coated in mucus of any sort whatsoever. Cats have their own selection of horrors, from claw marks to freshly killed rodents of assorted species being dumped in your disc boxes, when they are not subjecting the mouse attached to your A500 to the same treatment they normally afford to the traditional variety. I do not anticipate any problems at all with tropical fish. Ah, well. Time to wrap this up. In the meantime, as always, Live fast, code hard & die in a beautiful way Dave Edwards.