ACC Steve Marshall Mark Meany 1 Alice Way 12 Hinkler Road Unstone Green November/December 1992 Southampton Sheffield Hants S18 5DN SO2 6FT Hi again, This is the rather late November issue of ACC! As you are probably aware, I have now taken over Amiganuts and have less time than ever to myself. As a result I have even less time to devote to ACC. All is not lost! Steve Marshall has agreed to take a lot of the work off my hands and for this I am more than grateful. This means that from now on material for submission can now be sent to Steve or myself, his address is now posted at the top of this file and in the menu. I'm not pulling out all together, so you can still write to me with questions or whatever. If I'm too pushed, I will pass your letters onto Steve. Over the last few months I have devoted a fair amount of time to hardware bashing. I see that this even won me a spot in an Amiga Format review. Thanks guys. Well, since I'm onto a good thing I'm dropping it and rushing straight back to the system this month. I have been using reqtools.library for a while now in C and decided to enlighten any interested assembly programmers. I have also plopped in a few routines that can be used for reading text from a file one line at a time and drawing simple graphics in a window using only a data set. More hardware head banging soon I promise .... ********************************************************************* REMINDER If you submit material to ACC and it gets used, the issue containing it will be mailed to you on completion. Please send your submission on disk as an ASCII text file or executable ( in the case of utility programs etc. ). Your letters are wanted! ACC depends on reader contribution and since I'm now running Amiganuts I know how many of you there are :-) Please send in a short letter, ASCII file on disk, it will get published. Enclose an SAE if you would like your disk returned. Need help? No promises, but send in your code. If we can, we will help and reply as quickly as possible. Speaking in general, code that is well commented stands a better chance of reply. If you can identify the problem or section of code causing grief then all the better. Again enclose an SAE if you want your disk back. NEVER send us the only copy of your source. We know your not stupid, but mistakes happen. Please state that your code cannot be used on a future ACC disk if this is the case. Failure to do so may result in us using your code assuming that sending was permission to publish. If you are developing a program and want constructive criticism, that which makes you cringe, we will gladly oblige. We will also test the program on a number of Amigas ( 1.2, 1.3, 2.04 and 3.0 at present ) under various configurations. No strings, we do this to promote the Amiga. ********************************************************************* A quick note to Dave Edwards regarding reqtools.library, I seem to have pipped you at the post and already supplied the reqtools.library docs for assembly language programmers, still your docs will no doubt be more comprehensive :-) Lastly, I have permanently stubbed your attempt to get me searching disks for your include files by installing them on my hard drive! No more will I have to rummage through Posso boxes looking for the relevant files, ha. Oh yeah, while I remember, the DeleteExtIO() subroutine located in exec_support.i was bugged. The value read from the MN_LENGTH field was a long word and we all know it should be a word. I have corrected this error and included the file on this disk for everyone elses benefit :) Also, I used these routines to create a IOEXTSER structure which was used for synchronous IO by passing it to SendIO. It was necessary for the code to AbortIO() and WaitIO() prior to finishing, so I removed the dubious Wait() from the DeleteExtIO routine as well. Also, more bugs in Defender! Shoot all but last alien, run into this one. The alien explodes and the game freezes. Also, I seem to get auto-thrust on my Amiga. This happens at irregular intervals and I cannot intentionaly duplicate it. Have noted $5B3 displayed on freezes if this helps:) Rick ( aka TreeBeard ), thanks for the decrunchdir utility. Unfortunately it has arrived 28 issues too late as I am now distributing ACC on 2 disks. Martin McKenzie, if you look at the game code I used a couple of issues back, you will see that I indeed used a separate collision map generated as the background was built from blocks. The routines were generic as screen size and depth was specified by equates at the start of the file. Is anyone interested in distribution figures? I know that Ray was always a little reserved on this subject, but I'm willing to post details if required. If you wish to know, then let me know ( wish that I could permanently paste that phrase into the ClipBoard, it would save me hours of typing :-). On the same note, we would like to hear from ALL readers. If you are reading ACC, please let us know. Just send a note stating what county/country you live in. We don't care how you came by the disk, we simply wish to boost the egos of all involved ( if this is possible ). I have an A12OO. Joy, glee and horrendous exsemplyfold ( or whatever ). All this bosh about incompatible software in the press is rubbish. The only code that fails to run is poorly programmed games. I have noticed a few glitches when using sprites at the hardware level and it is imperative that all bitplane control registers are correctly initialised, apart from that there are few differences. Except speed :) 68020! Yum, yum. My major criticism is the lack of side expansion port. I invested in a GVP hard drive not so long ago, the ones with a SCSI controller. This drive is of no use to the A1200 what so ever. Oh well! This means that the humble 500+ is still my main work station. I hope to remedy this soon and work entirely on the latest addition to the Amiga family. Anyone care to comment on an article in a recent magazine that suggested the A1200 was no more than a rushed, pre-Christmas effort that will be superseded in the new year by a more powerful machine? Just a couple of notes: 1. arp.library can be located in ACC29_A:Libs, I had to remove it from ACC29_B:ArcaneJill/EarthLibrary/libs ! 2. Reqtools.lzh can be found on ACC29_B: 3. LhArc can be found in ACC29_A:c 4. To unarc the reqtools archive, use something akin to: copy acc29_B:reqtools.lzh to ram: cd ram: << place blank, formatted disk into df1: >> lharc -r -m x reqtools.lzh df1: * No more time for waffle, I'm off to do some Crimbo shopping for the kids. ( talking of which, have you seen the price of Tiny Tears these days .. ) Live fast, code hard and enjoy yourselves. I will, Mark.