232 Hale Road WIDNES Cheshire WA8 8QA Dear All, 6/2/93 Welcome to 1993! Well, perhaps I should reserve judgement on that un- til 1993 shows signs of being an improvement upon 1992, which should be only too easy given both my experiences and those of many of my associates! Yes, 1992 was a year to forget. About the only good thing that hap- pened to me outside the sheltered refuge of ACC was backing Party Politics in the Grand National (and let's face it, that was TOO obvious a coincidence to ignore!). Otherwise, it was one long round of rejections by potential employ- ers and seemingly never-receding debts, punctuated by the odd bout of really ghastly tonsilitis. Still, I could be writing this letter from a shell-hole in Bosnia-Herzegovina so perhaps things aren't that bad... Anyway, let's stop moaning and start doing something constructive. I shall begin by revealing...you guessed it, Defender Phase Five. It's now all but finished, the only missing bits being sound and loading/saving all time greatest high scores. It's fully playable, and there's a DOC file to accom- pany it explaining the latest additions and corrections. Also, I thought that it was about time I added something to the ever- growing DOC file list, so how about another fast polygon fill? I've upped the ante in the race yet again, and this time produced an almost fourfold speed increase-read the article for more! Right, some news. The A1200 is upon us, complete with 68020 processor and AAA chipset. Now's the time to dig out that 68020 DOC file I wrote! I had a chance to play with one in my local Dixons, and was pleased to find that it has the ability to contain a hard disc internally AS WELL AS the standard in- ternal floppy disc. It also boasts WorkBench 3.0 and the 3.0 ROM, although I am informed by Mark that there is a fair whack of software that won't work on an A1200 without some trickery! I'll let Mark explain this in more detail, as it was his news in the first place (that's right, Mark, I won't infringe your copyright!). However, what I managed to discover during my time in Dixons is this:it's a 2 meg machine, it has the same kind of expandability of the well- loved A500 (but I didn't get to see any trapdoor slot underneath and if there is one, I doubt it'll take A500 boards because the 68020 will want 32-bit RAM to operate at top speed) and it occupies two-thirds of the space of an A500, thanks to compact board design. I also discovered while examining the A1200 that the average Dixons sales rep is unbelievably ill-equipped to sell computers! I wanted to know if there was a hard disc fitted to their A1200 (since it had a hard disc light above the floppy disc light) and how much storage it had. When the sales rep said "two megabytes", I thought "oh, no, here we go again..." and after per- suading him to dig out the WorkBench disc and rebooting using it (the rep's computer knowledge ground to a halt after inserting a "ZOOL" disc into DF0:) I discovered that DH0: wasn't available on this machine. Best of all, when I brought up the CLI and started typing 'info' he began to panic just a teensy little bit and started muttering something about viruses...! Two valium and a lecture from yours truly later, I calmed him down (pillock...). Now one could forgive an acne-ridden 16-year-old with no GCSEs and a reading age of eight, having been given absolutely no incentive to absorb the slightest amount of learning by either teachers or parents and having had to rely upon the local ram-raiders for a role model, for being unable to answer a question of this sort. For a supposedly well-educated man of approximately 40 years of age bearing the title 'Senior Sales Manager' upon his badge, to be incapable of giving a meaningful answer to my query without me having to lecture HIM is unforgivable. And I seriously advise anyone buying one of the new Acorn machines (with a nicely complicated internal architecture, 32-bit RISC processor and weird assembly language) to come fully armed with infor- mation before buying from Dixons given how I ended up selling one on their behalf to a customer because the woman trying to sell it (boasting the title 'Assistant Sales Manager', no less!) knew about as much about the machine as I do about Japanese Shinto mythology. OK, another rant over with. I'm getting a bad reputation for this, so I think I'll move on. First of all, to those who didn't get Christmas cards & thought they should have, blame my incomplete address list. Second, to those who have supplied me with information on other processors, and thus helped me to add to my collection of instruction sets, a hearty thank you. Third, if an ACC correspondent happens to want some of these instruction sets, then I will happily share and enjoy my collection of DOC files. I can provide files both on Amiga disc AND on PC/Atari ST disc if wanted (the PC format will probably be the most popular). However, if you request PC format files, they'll have to be decompressed since I don't think Nico Francois has written a PC version of PowerPacker yet and ditto for the ST. So if any correspondents are curr- ently embarking upon a higher education course and need an instruction set, I just might be able to help! So far, the ones I CAN provide are: Intel 80x86 (Also on DOC DISCS) Acorn ARM SPARC Zilog Z8 Intel 8048 series Motorola 68000/68020 (of course!) These are the reasonably complete ones (the 68000 and 68020 sets are totally complete, the others a little less so). I'm waiting for a few others includ- ing the National Semiconductor 16032, a chip which is rather 68000-like and was supposed to appear in an add-on processor board for the old BBC Micro (I wonder if anyone else remembers this?). If anyone can help me with this I'll be grateful (to the point of supplying other desired instruction sets in re- turn). Anyone who wants the above files separately should send a disc plus a return jiffy bag as for the DOC DISCS, and mark the envelope with the inst- ruction set you want. When more instruction sets are completed, I'll add them on to the list and offer them for general distribution. Returning to Amigoid affairs, I recently obtained a demo disc from a software house (which shall remain nameless because I do NOT wish to follow the editor of the New Statesman through the portals of the Old Bailey). This was a demo of a game (again, which shall remain nameless), and before anyone asks, WAS obtained legitimately (the software house sent out the demo discs to ascertain the likely response to their product, and in any case the prog- ram wasn't the final version). Since this was supposed to be a commercial product, I was amazed to discover that it wouldn't work with expansion RAM! Just as well my trapdoor RAM card has a disable switch...so I decided to disable the trapdoor and re- boot. This time, the screen appeared with the proper image, and it was into the game. By now, some may be saying "Well, if it wasn't the final version why are you complaining?". I'm complaining because any software house worth its name should be capable of making their software work with FAST RAM expansions since it's well within the remit of many ACC subscribers, even some who would call themselves 'beginners', and this principle should extend to the demo. If you want to attract the punters, it's pretty pointless sending out a demo to do just this if it fills the screen with multicoloured garbage on half of the machines it's tried on and promptly persuades said punters to format the disc and use it for something else. Bang goes your reputation in one fell swoop. Having disabled the trapdoor RAM, and re-booted, success! One demo of a fairly weird game, alive and kicking. Well, almost. There is a common com- plaint among games writers (I know-I've had if affect my work too in the past and I'm not afraid to admit it), and it's this:they become so captivated by the process of writing the game and debugging what they've written, that they don't always stop and think about WHAT they're writing. As a result, if the game designer (who tends to be an entirely separate individual from the pro- grammer in the larger software houses) happens to have devised a ridiculous means of controlling the game, and nobody bothers to tell him this, then the programmer will end up working his butt off producing a program that will be panned by the critics once it enters the cruel world outside. This is exactly what seems to have happened to this demo product. As a result, I now have a free disc with someone else's company logo on it, but it now carries MY soft- ware (for private use only, I hasten to add) and I'm going to need consider- able persuading to entertain the company's other products. So if any software houses reads this, will you kindly take note? Or even better, hire me. I'm not that expensive, I'll settle for twelve grand a year (unless you're in London-then it's sixteen, sorry!) and I won't even be an insurance burden because I won't need a company car (spare inner tubes for the bike will do). I can write for Motorola, Intel, Zilog, NatSemi and Texas chips, I can work on both games and 'serious' projects including DTP, systems & OS support, GUIs, development tools & real-time, and I'm working on acquir- ing new skills including transputer assembler, TMS34020, comms (e.g., ISDN, packet switching) and DBMS (including SQL). Any takers? Right, it's time to wrap this up, so as you all know and love, Live fast, code hard & die in a beautiful way, Dave Edwards.