M.Meany 1 Cromwell Road, Southampton, Hants., SO1 2JH Welcome all to Club Disc 6, and what a selection of goodies we have this month. Firstly my thanks to that man of many marvels, Dave Edwards, as he has just supplied me with the most comprehensive and well set out collection of reference files, for the Amiga, that I have ever seen. Every, yes every, library function is detailed, such information as, what registers should hold what parameters prior to call, what the function does and any known bugs, it is all there. These will be featuring on the club disc over the next few months. To give you some idea of the work Dave has put into this, the files occupy over 250K AFTER being crunched by PowerPacker. Well, as if this is not enough, Dave has also sent his Hardware Reference Manual. Who needs Addison-Wesley ( who can afford Addison-Wesley ? ). Whooops, that did it, Dave's head has just expanded to such a size that his chair toppled backwards. No offence Dave. While on the hardware scene, Mike Cross is back. This months tutorial covers the blitter and as usual Mike has supplied some example code. There is also an explanation of that dreaded Guru's meditation number. To complement this I have included a utility called, would you believe it, Guru. If you enter this command at the CLI and follow it with the meditation number, Guru will tell you exactly why the system died. EG. 1>guru 8400000d . Note the number must be as it appears ( in hex ), leading 0's can be omitted ( thanks to J.W. Pacey for sending this one ). Mike has also suggested we start a 'let's fix someones code' section. Well I agree with Mike that this is better than people just asking for help, so if you have a problem with your binary, bugs infesting your source or ranting Guru's messing up your proggy, who you gonna call ? Well, err, ahhh, me?, Mike?. Well it's a start. Send your sick code to me ( or Mike if its hardware specific ) and we will do what we can! Each month one ( or more depending on space ) lucky person will have a chance to see their code fixed and working. Please bear in mind that the bigger the problem, the slower the solution. We will not be able to fix everything. Steve Marshall has supplied information on using the ARP filerequester and Intuition menu programming, also with example code. I strongly recommend to all you out there who are intending to write programs that load or save files that you study the ARP material. The ARP filerequester adds that professional look to your program, as well as making it user friendly. I am adopting Steve's aproach to menu programming as well, you will see how Steve follows each menu item defenition with the address of the subroutine that should be called, this makes life so much easier ( I went back and re-wrote the menu handler routine in the A68K Front End after seeing this ). You may have noticed that the presentation of the disc has improved ( ok,so its only a little improvment ). Credit for this goes to Ronnie James who sent the utils to me. Thanks Ronnie. Nipper, I am keeping to one disc for now. Sorry and all that, but I think one disc contains more than enough info for one months reading. Besides it's better to have one jam packed disc than two part full disc's ( it also gives me a chance to stock-pile material in case I run short later ). You were absolutely right, I forgot to mention on last months disc that the two modules you supplied were by Prof. Bass of Exile,anyone wanting more info read Simons letter. Now, on to the project. As a number of you were interested in working on a joint project, I started putting together a skeleton routine. I cannot remember having enjoyed working on a program this much. Well after much hard work, the skeleton routine was finaly finished, the swear box above my Amy burst and my daughter thinks I'm a raving looney ( no comments please ). All that is now required is to add a text editor and to write routines for the menu functions that I haven't caterd for yet. When the project is finished I intend to release it into the Public Domain. I have already put together a workdisc comprising of A68K, Blink, include files ( which I have written), instructions on use, converting Devpac source and example source code covering a number of topics ( which I have written ). If you want in let me know. For more information see the Project section on this disc. Mark, just a quick word on your loader program. If the files 1,2 or 3 are not on the disc your program closes down leaving an open con: window. This may not worry you since whenever you use it these files are probably there. However, as I like people pointing out problem areas in my code I assume the rest of the world is the same. Nipper, Ronnie and I.Sinclair ( sorry to seem so formal,but you are not the only Ian ). You three must get in touch with each other,write to me for more details. And now I'd like to ask all of you to spare a moments thought for Dave Edwards. At this very moment Dave is nursing several broken ribs after a close encounter with a Ford Capri ( too close if you ask Dave ). Despite all this he still managed to bring to you the reference files on this disc. Enough of the sentimental bullshit. As Dave would say: I make no apologies for my gramatical errors or spelling mistakes. I will consider the help of a secretary should you wish to recommend one. Required qualifications: Young, attractive and free ! Live fast, code hard and die in a beautiful way, Mark. IMPORTANT PS. Allthough purchasers of this disk are free to abuse the contents of the ACC disk,the actuall ACC disk itself is LICENCWARE to AMIGANUTS UNITED and it is NOT allowed to be distributed,(sold),by ANY other PD library! If you wish to re-distribute this series of ACC disks,then you may ONLY do so if you supply it FREE of any charges,to your pals/customers!