Mark Meany,
							12 Hinkler Road,
							Thornhill,
							Southampton,
							Hant's,
							United Kingdom.

							March '92.

 Welcome!

 Tonight I had promised myself a break, no Amiga. Wrong!

 I had to put my appreciation of all contributors to this months disc down
on magnetic fields. Thanks!

 I am often refered to as the 'editor' of the ACC disks and this is great.
It gives me a sense of purpose that's difficult to explain. I don't see
myself as an editor. I just put together other peoples ideas and
experiences. I don't interfere and I don't let my own prejudices, or sexual
persuasion ( just for you Dave! ), get in the way of what goes on a disk.

 So what has been happening? Well, Amiga Shopper ( Paul Overra ) gave Devpac3
the thumbs-up. I was most supprised. I am still experiencing crashes on
occasions, normally when deleting lines/blocks.

 Last month Paul Kent raised the issue of whether 'backing-up' disks for 
personal use was legal. This month Dave Edwards has replied and Mike Cross
has also given his opinion on 'illegal' users. I must admit I have just
finished reading an article on a disk magazine sent to me by Mike Cross.
The article was written by a member of a large european swapping group who
had decided to go 'legal'. He explains how he first wiped all his disks
containing 'pirate' copies of commercial programs, then realised half his
collection of so called PD utility disks contained 'pirate' programs so he
wiped these. His next consideration was the material he was sending to his
other 'legal' contacts, these disks contained files from the standard
Commodore Workbench which are of course copyrighted and you cannot spread
them without permission. Gets tricky doesn't it!

 What about my position then? Must be careful here! I feel that software
houses could do a lot to reduce 'piracy' by reducing their prices. I would
dearly love to purchase Lattice C++, but with a price tag of well over £250
pounds there is no way I could do this. My wife would divorce me for a
start. I tend to stick to Public Domain software as it's in my price range.
There are some programs I had to buy, such as Devpac and DPaint.
Programming without these would be next to impossible, though there are
similar PD packages around that would serve the purpose.

 If I was a newcommer to assembly language programming, I doubt if I'd fork
out seventy pounds for Devpac3. It's not worth the risk.

 Having said all that, I can't condone piracy either. It's against the law!
This is the bottom line. And if you are wondering, I don't have an illegal
copy of C++ so please don't write and ask for it, I'll be offended.

 I wonder why Hong Kong has not yet been imprisoned for selling illegal
copies of complete computer systems, commercial programs, audio cassettes,
CD's, wrist watches ..... and diabolical plastic toys that fall out of
Christmas crackers every year.

 Mike, you had the opportunity to meet with Treebeard last year. You could
have asked him his name then. But seriously, if you look hard, he has put
his name on a previous disk.

 Anyone looking closely at the menu source, I apologise. It's a real mess!
I threw it together in desperation after all the complaints about my
previous effort ( all justified!!! ).

 Question. Why do some people write source in UPPER CASE? I find this very
hard to read and keep getting flashbacks to ZX80 days ( turn monitor to
black and white and keep hitting ON/OFF button for better effect ). The use
of case insensitive symbols is a real killer!

 Computer users are never satisfied and for this reason the computer industry
will forever thrive! When I owned a ZX80, tape loading was a nightmare. You
were always afraid to turn the power off after 'saving' a program in case
there was an error. Not just that, but a 1K program took five minutes to
save/load. The ZX81 was not much better! The ZX Spectrum had a verify
feature, but this doubled load/save time. You could honestly make a cup of
tea waiting for a 48K program to save, and drink it while it was verified!

 Then there was the MicroDrive! Spectrum owners throught the country burst
into tears of joy at their arrival ( not just because they'd been waiting
for six months either ). Load/Save times were down to about 15 seconds for
a 48K program.

 Spectrum owners who upgraded to Amigas were doing backward flips for days.
An internal drive that could load 300k programs in the same time!

 Today I read an article on hard disk drives. A leading model was critisised
because it never used DMA to transfer data to/from the computer and so
slowed the processor. This man never owned a ZX80!

 While I'm reminissing, I had a software sampler for my Spectrum. A program
that 'listened' to a tape that was playing and 'recorded' it into ram. This
came free ( though it had to be typed in ) with a magazine and the result,
considering the age of the machine, was acceptable. When will Amiga Format
be taping a Sampler to the front of one their editions? This is not a dig
at Amiga Format, I admire the mag for the amount of commercial programs it
puts onto it's cover disk and buy it every month!

 Well that's about it from me for this month. Live fast and all that .....

						Mark.