Producer: Llamasoft
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £6.00
Language: Machine code
Author: The Hairy One

This program is certainly very different not only because of the instruction manual which contains such passages as 'Psychedelia was the realisation of that dream ... many evenings were spent freaking out to music and just DOING it' or 'Demos were given, minds were blown and a good time had by all'. Of course to the modern computer generation, the drugged dreams of the flower power, drop out hippy era probably seem as archaic as the Second World War.

'Psychedelia is a completely new way of enjoying your micro. If you love music, if you love graphics, if you are creative....' he even goes on to admit that Psychedelia is the high point of my designing career'. The hairy one certainly seems to have given it his all! The results can be spectacular, the opening screen gives a demonstration of what you might produce. Imagine, if you can, hundreds of tiny coloured squares dashing all over the screen, some run together, others collide, some move up while others move down or across this way and the other. Each square is one of a seven different colours, but it can change from one colour to the next while hurtling across the screen. Of course the you don't have to have coloured squares you can design shapes of your own by altering the pixels that make up a shape. Some of the easiest patterns to create would be star bursts or multi coloured spirals. The nearest visual analogy would be a highly coloured firework display, but of course Psychedelia is on a much smaller scale.

The purpose of the program is for you to design your own light displays and it provides some quite powerful routines to help you do just that. Initially the program is set up with some basic parameters for creating built in effects, these are activated via the cursor keys and keys Q-R - press different combinations of these keys and that should show you enough to make you curious.

The more advanced commands are divided into two parts, VARIABLES and OTHERS. In all there are nine variable commands. CURSOR SPEED simply alters the speed at which the squares move about the screen. PULSE WIDTH alters the speed with which burst of squares are sent across the screen. LINE WIDTH sets the width of pulse lines. The other commands perform much more complex tasks, far too complicated to describe here. When the user selects a variable to alter a little graduated bar appears at the bottom of the screen showing the value of the relevant variable. These values can be changed to suit your requirements, essentially finding the desired effects requires a great deal of trial and error but this is by far the most enjoyable method because one of the clever features of the package is the ability to alter the variable while the display is in full swing; better still by using the OTHER commands you are able to 'record' the patterns to memory as you alter the various parameters and eventually save the whole show to tape. About half an hour's worth of display can be saved for playback later, and that should be enough to blow anyone's mind!

Finally the writer offers some good advice, he admits that the package sounds complicated to use but suggests that '...the best way to learn is by experimentation, play with the values to see what happens just like you would tinker with a synthesiser... freak out with it... Blow minds with it, freak out your granny. Be creative.'

Uhm!

COMMENTS

Control keys: various inputs required - see manual
Joystick: cursor type and most makes

Because Psychedelia is not a game it is obviously a bit pointless subjecting it to the usual CRASH team, whose tender ages preclude them from knowing what 'freaking out granny' is all about! The package is great fun to play with and works very well indeed. The effects that can be created are simply fantastic, however, I would have thought at the price it would only appeal to those who really go in for this audiovisual experience. After all it is pretty expensive and the less imaginative among us may not be prepared to spend the time and extract all that this program has to offer.

Dave: Have you ever had the urge to fly aerobatics with the Red Arrows? You have? - then rush out and buy Psychedelia. It's not a flight simulator but the feeling of nausea that came over me while waggling the joystick with it, was like nothing on earth! What's more. Psychedelia isn't a game: it's really a sort of light synthesiser where you use the joystick (or keyboard) to produce patterns on screen. It offers the facility for presenting patterns so you can play them back with a single keypress, and your efforts can be recorded into memory or onto tape for later playback. Think of it - now you and your friends can bring on an attack of nausea and dizzyness at parties without so much as a drop of pop passing your lips.

It may be true that you are limited only by your imagination (or so it says here), but boredom (and an unwell feeling) set in long before I'd even got my imagination into gear.

It's worth a look - otherwise a ride on a Waltzer at the fun fair is cheaper and has much the same effect. 1/5 MISS

Ross: Not the sort of thing you expect from Jeff blast-it-if-it-moves Minter. I prefer watching pictures, not patterns erupting from my T.V. screen. 2/5 MISS

Roger: Turn on, tune in and drop out or, in my case, drop off to sleep. When old hippies aren't bogarting that joint, they're producing crap like this. 2/5 MISS

Publisher: Llamasoft
Price: £7.50
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair

Hey man, this is really far out. It's so far out I can't see the point of it.

The latest craze from Llamasoft is called Psychedelia. The author describes it as a computer toy.

You could hardly call Psychedelia a game. All it does is create random, pretty, patterns which you can program and save onto tape. Pressing keys on the keyboard will have one of three effects. You can either change the characters which make up the patterns, change their colours or the overall flow of the patterns.

If you want to produce your own patterns the program presents you with one cursor block on the screen. You can change the block into one of the pre-defined character shapes, set the visual synthesiser to record mode and press the keys to control the direction of the whirls, lines, circles and diamonds.

Llamasoft has launched the product into the wrong market. Instead of being on the shelves of high street shops it should be running advertising matter in their windows. The program does allow text to be run with the graphics, so the product would be ideal for visual advertising.

The light synthesiser is an interesting idea, probably generated because Jeff Minter of Llamasoft had run out of things to do with camels, goats and llamas. It is the sort of activity which could make you go blind - or mad. You would certainly be mad to buy it.