Program: The Artist
Producer: SofTechnics - Softek
Price: £12.95

Even after 3 Spectrum seasons graphic utilities are still sprouting up fast from the fertile software vegetable patch. Every home-grower is vying for the biggest and juiciest product and this cannot be easy with existing 'veg' such as Leonardo. Softek have taken the challenge and have created 'the most powerful and flexible graphics program for the Spectrum' yet. Powerful words no doubt, but if this is true, SofTechnics, which is a division of Softek International Ltd, has given The Edge the edge over its competition in the creation of interesting graphics for its excellent games software. By releasing it to the general public, the powerful tool, which is aptly named The Artist is going to provide anybody with the same firing, I beg your pardon, drawing power...

After displaying the intriguing loading screen (Thank God the human hand has got the upper hand), which incidentally I was told was put to screen within a couple of hours with the help of - you guessed it - The Artist, the program displays a not very unfamiliar main 'work screen' with a row of command options at the bottom. In actual fact, there are 3 main command menus serially accessible by pressing the symbol shift key. Cursor movement is manual with the use of the Q and S keys for up/down and R and T keys for left/right movement and their combinations for any diagonal movement. A joystick may be used with the addition of a Kempston interface. The speed of the cursor movement is governed by the length of time the keys are held down. This facilitates fine detail work, with the initial slow speed, and obviates the need to pre-select speeds. The major pen/brush controls are C for setting pixels, X for deleting them and Z for setting the attributes.

The main menu features such interesting options as Brush, Brush pattern, Text, View, Move, Cls, Storage and Chr and these can be explored in turn...

Brush selects the brush in action, which can vary in thickness from 1 to 8, can be a quill providing variable brush width or can be an airbrush, which in combination with the eight airbrush widths can be used to spray the screen for shading and blending.

Brush pattern selects one of the ten patterns available with which the screen may be painted. Here again, the brush size may be varied for best results. The cursor changes size and shape to indicate the current choice.

Text is the typewriter mode which provides a text-writing related menu on selection. This includes options such as inverted or normal and 'Over' text together with the more mundane functions Capslock and Extended. An interesting feature is the selection of the inbuilt small character set, which provides at the touch of a button a 64 column text display. There is also the choice of selecting up to 8 different character sets, which can be defined using the inbuilt Character Graphics Generator. These can be viewed in text mode for easy recognition.

View eliminates the function menu at the bottom of the screen and gives a full view of the entire screen area for full screen designs. Pressing any other key will bring back the main menu.

Move is an alternative to the View function in that it displays the lower three menu-hidden lines by scrolling the entire screen up three lines. This allows work to be done on the lower lines, which are normally hidden by the menu.

CLS clears the screen, but only after confirmation has been given - thus reducing the risk of any artistic suicide attempts.

Storage deals with the saving and loading of data and pictures and to this purpose a new menu appears. Here will be found the Copy function, which copies the current screen to the ZX-printer. Save and load functions are provided for tape, wafadrive and microdrive systems with the option of storing or retrieving character sets, screens and user graphics. To control the wafadrive/microdrive operation, there is a CAT/Catalogue) and an Erase facility and for the wafadrive specifically a Flip Default Drive, which switches between A and B drives. The second 'Main Menu' deals with the graphics generation and includes several innovative features.

Line deals with line drawing, and three different techniques may be used which all require a main cursor and a reference cursor. Plot-Point mode retains a fixed reference cursor and when the main cursor is moved, all lines will originate from this fixed point. Plot-Move slaves the reference cursor to the main cursor and if the main cursor is moved, the reference cursor will move in parallel. The lines drawn will therefore always be in parallel. The most commonly used mode will be the Plot-Trace mode, which automatically repositions the reference cursor to the last main cursor position when a Line command is executed. This mode is used for outline drawings. The reference cursor can be repositioned at all times by setting the main cursor to the required position and pressing Space.

Circle is a straightforward circle generator. The reference cursor is used to set the circle's centre and the main cursor defines the radius by indicating a point on the circumference. This is a far more useful method than the normal Spectrum circle function, where the radius must be given as a parameter.

Box draws boxes or frames indicated by the diagonal position of the two cursors.

Arc draws arcs provisionally between the two cursor positions, and six keys with progressive action may be used to curve the arc in both directions. When the right curvature is achieved, the arc may be accepted by pressing the P key.

Fill is an extremely fast fill function with the added advantage of filling not only in black but in any pattern, which can either be one of the 10 inbuilt patterns or any self-created pattern. These can be selected in the pattern choice mode.

Over and Invert affect the four drawing commands and are self-explanatory.

Pattern provides a chequer pattern of bright and normal character squares for determining where the attribute boundaries are.

Enlarge blows up the area of the screen currently being worked on and indicated by the main cursor. All draw commands are available in this mode and the display area moves automatically across the entire screen area.

Undo lastly provides help should anything have gone wrong during the events of the creation. U undoes a command and O will protect all commands up to this point from being undone. O for Okay actually acts as a pointer to the Artist as to how far back the Undo command should be effective. The Undo command is extremely effective as it can undo one command after another, in fact a whole string of commands up to the last okayed entry. This provides an easy experimenting facility with different shading, colouring, shapes etc. Automatic okays occur whenever a fill is done, or after entering the text mode and when leaving the Overlay mode. Undo can also undo itself, so if the work has accidentally been undone, it can be retrieved with an Undo command.

Overlay provides the most ingenious feature to the screen artist. This mode allows any area of the existing screen picture to be lifted, transformed with the use of various functions, moved and refitted into the screen picture in different ways. The execution is straightforward. After selecting the Overlay mode, the boundaries of the picture segment to be lifted can be drawn with the use of the Plot-Trace mode. Ensuring that the main cursor is positioned within this closed shape, the 0 key will fill in the shape with black. By pressing the overlay key (3) again, the overlapping section will be but out and lifted out of the screen. At this stage there is the choice of removing the picture, ie. cutting it out, or of only making a transportable copy of it without destroying the original area. The transportable copy may now be manipulated with various functions such as Invert, Mirroring (left/right or up/down) or scaling (up or down in ten different increments). When positioning the copy, it can be viewed in its new place provisionally before committing to the screen and the chequer pattern may be energised for the correct positioning in relation to attribute boundaries. Dropping the copy into the screen can be done using XOR (blending), Or (superimposing) or EXCLUSIV (destroying the existing picture information) logic. Several copies of the shape may be dropped onto the screen.

The possibilities are enormous with the Overlay mode, and several functions found in other graphic packages can be reproduced quite easily. Ellipses for example can quite easily be drawn in overlay mode with the use of the scaling option. Shading of existing drawings can be accomplished with the overlay method. In fact the user's imagination will probably set the limit to the applications.

The last main menu deals with the colouring of drawings and Provides access to the colour, brightness and flash attributes of the screen. Colouring technique is equivalent to the Spectrum Basic options. Entering the menu however will immediately display a window with the two cursors defining the size and position. The colour changes will be confined to the window area. Paper, Ink, Bright and Flash can be selected and executed within this frame. The border colour can also be chosen, but as it is not part of the screen will have to be set later in the user's program.

Going back to the first main menu, the selection of CHR leads into the Character and User Defined Graphics Creation sector. Up to seven character sets may be redefined. The screen displays a grid of nine large character squares and each of these is split up into 64 bit squares. On the left of the screen is displayed the menu function and above it the original sized block of nine characters that can be worked on (the USR square). Above this there are a further 4 such squares alternately coloured green and cyan. Creating and storing characters is quite easy. After having drawn the new characters on the enlarged grid using the available drawing functions, the character set mode is selected. The selected set number is displayed in the top left corner and the USR box with the new characters remains on display. The characters in the selected set are displayed and arranged in columns and rows numbered for easy reference.

The different sets may be selected by pressing the 'C key and entering the set number. Saving is accomplished by pressing key 'S' and entering start line and start column with a further indication of the quantity of characters to be stored. Loading is performed similarity. Set 0 is the original Spectrum character set and although no new characters may be saved in it, the existing characters may be loaded into the USR block. The program even allows characters to be grabbed from the main screen into the USR block by pressing key 'K'. A green 9 character square will appear and this can be moved around over the area of interest and grabbed with key 'X'. This feature allows the creation of characters larger than 3 x 3 with the help of the enlarge feature on the main screen. Once stored (in groups of 9 character squares) they may be recalled onto the main screen.

The creation of the new USR characters is accomplished using the same keys for cursor movement and pixel setting as with the main screen. An addition is the 'Z' key which will clear entire rows within a given character cell. Three mirror options are provided (mirroring single character cell, mirroring the leftmost six characters and mirroring all 9 characters), similarly three Turn facilities are provided, which will turn each character (or block of four or block of nine) around its axis by 90 degrees, and an Invert command.

Apart from the usual CLS (Clear grid) and Undo command, there is a powerful move option, which moves the entire contents of the grid, pixel by pixel, in any direction. The four coloured 9 character blocks provide a facility to store and animate related sprite graphics. Print and Load Block provides the transfer between the USR block and these four. Animate Four will animate the sprite by printing in rapid succession the four blocks in the USR square. There is even the possibility of animating six successive characters with Animate Six using the entire character set.

SofTechnics provide a Screen Compressor with the package which can be loaded separately from side 2 of the tape. The program allows several screens to be stored or thirds or two-thirds of screens, giving each a number and then allowing pictures to be recalled upon selection of their number. The program has a menu which provides the choice of loading a screen, viewing it, deleting the last screen or saving the finished block of screens. The compressed block of graphics can be loaded into the required memory area and recalled with a short BASIC program. The compression technique is based on a complex pattern search and detect system and the effectiveness depends on the complexity of the given screen. Typically, it will compress a screen to between a third and half of its normal size. The compression of screen-thirds provides the possibility of writing simple but effective graphic adventures in Basic.

The Artist proves to be a very effective graphics package, which excels in the simple user interface and in the completeness of all its functions. The overlay scheme replaces a million and one special functions and only extensive use will display its full potential. Best liked features are the extended brush and pattern functions, the overlay technique, the practical circle function and the extremely fast fill routine. Added to that there is the versatile character generator with inbuilt sprite animator and the very useful screen compressor. The manual is both comprehensive and informative, and if anything seems to be omitted following the main program on side 1 there are several screen samples on the tape which should serve as an indication as to what can be achieved with The Artist. Finally, SofTechnics offer a service of producing colour printer dumps from an inkjet printer for the benefit of colour-printless Artist users.

PAINTING BY NUMBERS

Forget the pens and paintbrushes - how about painting with pixels? Penny Page has taken a peek at four new graphics packages and Peter Shaw completes the picture.

First off, the sixty-four thousand pixel question - why do you want to draw pretty pictures on the screen? Of course, there's always the art for art's sake answer. After all, why do artists draw pictures anyway? The average artist can fork out quite large portions of his pocket-money on pens and paintbrushes, but at least you won't have to keep replacing your software. But if you're not that arty-farty how does the idea of making money grab you? Thought so. Well , I know of people who have sold their computer masterpieces to software houses who've used them as tide screens for games. You don't have to be a poor artist! But the best reason of all is that drawing with your Speccy can be real fun. And if you don't rate yourself as much of an artist, you'll still be able to knock up some professional looking graphics with your Speccy's help. Beats staring at a blank sheet of paper any day!

ART WORK

Every art form has its limitations and computer art's no exception. Your Speccy hasn't got an infinite number of pixels to draw with and your colour palette's pretty small. You can always mix a hue on screen with the aid of a grid pattern and clever use of colours but this only highlights the problem of the low-resolution attribute grid. All sounds a bit grim, doesn't it? But don't despair, 'cos a quick butchers at Pete's piccies will show you what's possible.

All of the packages Peter picked to produce his piccies (OK, you can untwist your tongues now! Ed.) are new to the market, though Paintplus has arisen from the ashes of P'n'P's previous package, Paintbox. All the software we looked at offers improvements on previous graphics programs but none of them has got it completely right yet. They're either too complicated or they miss out on one important feature or another. Take for an example, the idea of adding colour. A painter would usually draw a rough sketch on the canvas first and then slap on the colour afterwards. But with three of these packages you've got to choose your colours and put them on without any previous drawing. Only The Artist has got it right.

DRAWING THE LINE

One of the major problems about creating pictures on the Speccy is the distance between the screen where the pic appears and the keyboard that creates it. This is pretty unusual - just think, if you're painting, the brushes are at least in direct contact with the canvas and a sculptor chisels and chips at his chunk of rock. Of course, a light pen seems the obvious way round but none of these packages has that facility. And have you ever tried to draw with one of them on the Spectrum - they wouldn't have persuaded Picasso to pack in his painting!

All the programs include a User-Defined Graphics editor and positioner - very useful if you want to store away complex pictures in twenty-one graphics symbols but I find this option a bit of a waste of space. Still, that's only me and if I was asked to pin down the best program on its UDG handling alone, I'd plump for The Artist.

Well, now for the moment you've all been waiting for - which one of the four packages would I go for on overall picture creating ability. As you probably expected I'm going to hedge my bets. My choice lies somewhere between The Artist, PaintPlus and Lightmagic in that order. Leonardo just didn't come into the running. But before you make up your mind, have a look at what Peter made of the packages and see which one would most suit your artistic temperament.

The Artist is a pretty amazing package. Its features are powerful and easy to use. Plans are already underway to produce a mouse and/or a trackerball to work with the program. There's even talk of add-on programs that'll run in conjunction with The Artist like a 'Letraset' overlay database that'll allow the user to pick out icons and graphics for use in their own pictures.

Picture Completion Time 3/4 hour. Rating 5/5

Publisher: Softek
Price: £12.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston

Graphic design will never be the same with the arrival of The Artist, a Picasso of utilities.

Its comprehensive and exceptionally powerful design capabilities provide all you need to produce full colour high resolution screen pictures.

The package is rigidly structured using three main, and a number of subsidiary, menus.

When first loaded two cursors, a dot and a cross, are shown on the screen. Using the keyboard, or joystick, the dot cursor can be moved around in relation to the cross. If the CAPS SHIFT key is pressed the cross moves to a position over the dot which can then be moved around again. The cross, therefore, acts as a static reference point for any drawing that the dot cursor may do.

The dot cursor represents the brush and its size and drawing texture can be altered using Brush and Brush Pattern options respectively. Text can also be produced by the cursor from eight different fonts.

The second major menu provides basic drawing commands and operations. Unlike other packages on the market, it does all your work for you.

Lines, boxes, arcs, circles and ellipses can be produced with the minimum of fuss using the cross cursor as the first reference point and the dot as the second. Shapes can be filled with a Spectrum designed texture or one created using UDGs.

The shapes must, however, be made up using a complete border. There must be no holes in it or the fill texture will leak out.

Overlay is one of the most powerful, and unique, features of The Artist. It has four functions. The first allows the user to trace a section of a picture, cut it out of that section and transport it to another part of the display. Parts of the picture can also be scaled up and down on the x or y axes.

The author has also included an advanced UDG generator and animator. It uses the eight character sets available through the utility.

Images can also be mirrored and rotated. Once a sequence of frames has been created it can be animated in a four or six step sequence.

The generator is easy to use and it took me just 10 minutes to produce a four frame animation of a walking figure.

Full screen pictures can take up a lot of RAM memory so the author has included a routine which will hack down the amount of RAM required. The Compressor is a separate routine on the tape. All you have to do is load your picture into it. The program will then optimise storage needs.

The Compressor works at its best and most visibly with complex pictures using colour to the full. It is an intelligent utility and, of course, affects only the memory requirement and not the picture on the screen.

The power of the line generation and pixel commands, coupled with the cut and paste facilities, and not forgetting the UDG generator, makes The Artist one of the most powerful graphics aids.

Spectrum 48K
Price: £12.95

This program arrived in a sort of unfinished state. The manual consisted of five typed pages, so it's probably unfair to criticize the packaging.

The concept is a good one, and is obviously aimed at the games designer with its animated figures you can call up instantly.

The program has an interesting OVERLAY facility giving CUT, COPY and ABORT to your picture. This, plus scaling and mirror use, makes this an attractive proposition from the start.

Spectrum
Softek
Graphics Utility
£12.95

Sell your Macintosh. That's what ex-Volvo assembly line worker turned full-time programmer Bo Jangeborg suggests people will be able to do once they've loaded his new program into a Spectrum.

There are even plans afoot to market this program with a mouse for the Spectrum. But at the moment you have to get by with five fingers to move the cursor. When the program has loaded you are confronted with an empty screen and two flashing cursors, one square, one cross-shaped.

You can get straight into some sort of Mac type painting by selecting a paint-brush and a brush pattern. At the base of the screen you have a choice of eight special commands - apart from brush and brush pattern these include a text option, a view command which shows you the whole screen without the commands, a move option which enables you to raise the screen so you can work on the base of the picture but still see the commands, a clear-screen option, a storage and a character creation option.

The reason you need five fingers is that apart from the directional controls of the brush you need to keep your thumb on the C key which sets the pixels on the screen.

HBy pressing the symbol shift key you can move between two sets of other commands, pixel setting commands and colour setting commands. The pixel command section has some very powerful commands. You can enlarge sections of the screen. You have instantaneous box and circle commands.

This section also has an overlay command which is comparable to placing a plastic sheet on top of a picture and copying it.

The colour commands open up a window around the cursor and the cross. Inside it ink, paper brightness and dash can be set separately.

Recently released in competition with 'Leonardo' is Softek's 'The Artist'. Carol Brooksbank tried it out for ZX.

Softek
£12.95

My artistic talents put me firmly in the 'If-You-Lend-Me-a-Ruler-I-Can-Draw-a-Straight-Line' School of Art, but even I could produce a creditable screen after only a short acquaintance with this superb program. Anyone with real ability could produce spectacular work with it, as the examples on the tape show, and the graphics handling alone makes it worth the £12.95 Softek ask for it.

On LOADing, you are faced with a blank screen, two cursors, and a menu at the bottom of the screen. There are two other menus, and you can flip between them at will. One cursor is the reference cursor, which marks the centre of circles, the start of a line, etc, and the other is the operative one, which you move with the cursor keys. My only quarrel with the program is that three are Q, R, S and T. The handbook says that this is because they make it possible to use fingers to move the cursor and thumbs to change from 'ink' to 'rubber'. That's a nice theory, but most of us are brainwashed into thinking that you use arrow keys for moving things around, and I have lost count of the number of unwanted circles and squares I have produced by trying to move the cursor with keys 5 - 8. The program makes it easy to rub such things out, but it is irritating. The cursor moves very slowly when held down for short periods, making precise work possible, but if you hold the keys down continuously it speeds up, giving very rapid movement about the screen. There are three cursor modes. One leaves the reference cursor where it is until you move it, the second moves it up to the current position after each line is drawn, and the third makes the cursors follow each other around, so that you can draw parallel lines, or circles and squares of the same size. You can also draw 'freehand', using the operative cursor as a brush.

There are eight brush sizes, from one pixel to one character square, and also an oblique one, which is rather like writing with an italic pen. In addition, you have an 'air brush' mode for adding stippled shading. The brush can paint with the ink colour, or with one of several shading patterns. The same shading patterns are available for filling shapes, and you can also design your own patterns for this.

The fill operation is faultless. I gave it all manner of unlikely shapes to fill with all sorts of shading patterns, and it was perfect every time. You must make sure that the shape you wish to fill is completely enclosed, though. Even a one pixel break in the perimeter will let the shading bleed into the adjoining area. Fortunately, the program shows you the area to be filled before anything permanent is done, so you can trace and seal any gap. The enlarge mode is very useful here, if you are trying to find a one pixel gap.

You can at any point enlarge the drawing to allow you to work with precision on fine details. The window onto the screen moves about as you move the cursor, and you can switch between enlarged and normal size freely. At any time, you can overlay a chequer pattern which shows you the boundaries of the attribute squares, and you can set the attributes one square at a time as you work, or over a larger area if you wish. If you need to work on the bottom two lines of the screen, normally hidden by the menu, you can move the screen up.

There is a cut and paste mode, which allows you to move sections of your work about, copy a section to another part of the screen, or enlarge or reduce portions in either or both directions. If you are producing a symmetrical design, you need only draw half, because the cut and paste mode can produce a mirror copy.

At any point in your work, you can store the current state of the screen in memory, and if you then make a mistake you can return to the stored state. I found it useful to supplement this with the occasional tape saving, however, as the stored memory is automatically updated after cut and paste or fill.

Finally, there is a text mode with a choice of typefaces, including Gothic, and a very good small type face which is clearly readable even in a screen dump.

The program's UDG handling is superb. There are eight sets of graphics defined in the program, and you can redefine seven of them, the eighth being the Sinclair character set. You have to be careful which you redefine, because all the shading patterns and type faces are held in the graphics sets. The program itself makes use of the small type face, and if you redefine that the menus start to look a bit odd.

The graphic defining grid allows you to define a figure which covers up to nine character squares, and which can then be manipulated. You define on an enlarged grid, but there is a normal size box alongside, so that you can judge the finished effect. You can save the finished figure in memory and print it to the screen. You can also pick up figures already on the screen if you wish to modify them. This means that you can, if you wish, define figures even larger than nine squares. You draw them on the screen as part of your overall design, and then pick them up from the screen in blocks of nine squares and store them in the graphics memory and/or on tape, microdrive or wafa.

If you are intending to animate a graphic you can define up to four related figures, and the program will show you the animation effect, by printing them rapidly one after the other in the box beside the grid.

The graphics mode can also be used to define your own shading patterns or character sets, and the program comes with a set of-useful characters, including an aeroplane, helicopter, and tank, and a man with a gun who can be animated so that he runs along shooting.

All the character sets and your screens can be saved on tape. The program is microdrive compatible, and claims to be Wafadrive compatible, though I found that you had to tinker with the Basic a bit before you could save and load freely to Wafadrive. There is a compressor program on the tape, allowing you to compress all, or part, of your screens, store and recall them by number when required. Screen dumps to ZX printers are provided for, and I found that a very minor alteration to the Basic allowed me to produce screen dumps with my Epson printer and Kempston interface. The range of shading available in the program makes it particularly useful for producing small line-drawing illustrations on the printer.

The publishers invite you to register with them as an owner of 'The Artist', so that you will be entitled to discounted copies of future enhanced versions, and they offer a printing service. Send them a tape of your screen and they will provide colour printouts at prices ranging from 75p for a one-off 3" wide to £2 for 8" wide. Multiple copies are a bit cheaper.

I would recommend 'The Artist' to anyone who wants to produce artwork with the Spectrum, amateur or professional. However, good (or bad) you are as an artist, this program will help you to produce very elaborate screens better and more quickly than you thought possible. It is not often that you come across a program which so splendidly lives up to the claims the publishers make for it.

USER-DEFINED POSSIBILITIES

John Gilbert says: Why not stop playing games and do something useful instead?

The definition of a utility in computer parlance has widened in the past year. In the early days of the industry it meant a program which aided the machine code programmer to accomplish a task. Now it can have five meanings.

The first category takes in the graphics and sound toolkits. Those expand the Basic command set, adding instructions which create shapes, fill them in, and save pictures to tape or microdrive. The sound generators sometimes included within those packages can make music or even create a voice for your computer.

Machine code utilities include assemblers, disassemblers and monitors, all of which are designed to help you write your own machine code routines. If you are not up to that sort of exercise you may like to acquire a new operating system or high level language such as Pascal, Forth or C.

General utilities which will teach you the highway code, help you with car maintenance or show you how to diet efficiently are also available.

Graphics packages have the most visible effect on a Spectrum or QL, and they have proved popular this year even with people who would not normally program a computer. Light Magic, from New Generation, started the interest in all things graphical during 1985. It carried on where Melbourne Draw, from Melbourne House, and Paintbox, from Print 'n' Plotter, left off.

The program is totally menu driven and can be operated either under keyboard or joystick control. There are five modes of display. The first is pen mode in which, you can draw on the screen using an electronic nib.

Circle and Fill mode will allow you to produce circles and arcs which can then be filled in with colour. Brush mode is similar to Pen mode but you can use 10 types of brush.

The block mode operates in parts, or blocks, of the screen. It allows you to rotate and mirror blocks on pictures, saving time if you need to draw an object which is symmetrical.

Finally, the Text mode enables you to write on the screen. User-defined graphics can also be produced as a UDG generator is included in the package.

If Light Magic does not impress you then The Artist, from Softechnics surely will. It is one of the most powerful packages on the market.

The Artist can be used to take one section of a picture and reproduce it on another part of the screen, where it can be enlarged or reduced. The package will also allow you to produce UDGs and a animator utility is included within the program. Not satisfied with that the author has also included a simple routine which will take a screen display and reduce the number of RAM bytes required to store it.

Art Studio, from OCP outperforms The Artist in almost every way. It has superior speed to the Softechnics package and the pull down menus are easy to use. It can be used with disc, tape or microdrive and contains a printer driver which handles most Spectrum compatible printers. It should be of use to professional artists and designers as well as to the home user.

A similar package came onto the market for the QL. GraphiQL marked the entry of quality software house Talent onto the QL scene. Not only can the package produce every conceivable type of line, circle, are and angle, but it can also be used to define textures, using form and colour. Those can then be used with Fill routines.

The program allows you to enlarge shapes on the screen. That facility enables you to ensure that Fill texture does not leak out of a shape which has a hole in its border.

QL Art, from Eidersoft, has the same sort of facilities as GraphiQL but does not have the same professional edge to it. Unlike the Talent package it is fully menu driven. One of the faults with GraphiQL is that you must rely on the instruction manual or special help option for information about user commands.

Illustrator, from Gilsoft, is the long awaited adventure graphics designer for the Spectrum. It is no ordinary package as it produces graphic screens which can be put into adventures designed by Gilsoft's adventure design program The Quill. Although the routine can only produce static screen pictures it brightens up the adventures written by its sister program and gives adventure programmers more scope for invention.

White Lightning, from Ocean, is one of the most exciting advances in graphics design packages for the Spectrum that I have seen in the last year. Its aim is to allow you to produce high standard arcade game graphics and, in order to do that, you must use its special Forth-type language. The package combines a sprite generator with a screen layout designer. It is great fun to use and its limitations are only in the mind of the beholder.

A similar package has been produced for the QL, although Super Sprite Generator, from Digital Integration, will produce and animate only sprites and not full screen game backdrops.

The program adds extensions to SuperBasic and is run in two parts. The first is the generator and the second the animation routine. It is an excellent package which has been used by professional programmers to produce arcade games. Night Nurse from Shadow Games is one example of its use.

Only one good example of a sound toolkit came onto the market last year. Varitalk produces speech through the Spectrum Beep unit. Its performance can be enhanced using a loudspeaker or by putting the sound through a tape recorded output channel.

A large number of phonetic sounds are included in the package. Those can be accessed by using a code made up of the first letter of the type of sound required and the number of that sound from a list which has been provided on the cassette inlay. There are no parameters within the program to allow you to set emotion or inflection into the speech. You cannot even get the package to ask a question properly.

Machine code utilities may only appeal to assembly language programmers but that audience has grown larger during the past year, especially within the ranks of those who own a QL.

No less than four QL assemblers arrived on the market during 1985. The most powerful was from Metacomco. The QL Assembler Development Kit comprises a full screen editor, together with a three-pass compiler.

The editor can input ASCII code files and so can be used with code Basic programs and even word processor files. Once your assembly code listing has been entered you must save it to microdrive, or disc, and then load it into the assembler program. The package takes approximately two minutes - and three code overlays - to convert the code file into a machine code format.

Also included with the assembler is a library of QDOS calls. Those can be named within you programs. A linker was put into the second version of the assembler package at which time Metacomco dropped the price.

Computer One was also quick to produce an assembler for the QL. The difference between it and the Metacomco program is that it can be loaded into the machine complete with the source editor. You can, therefore, write your assembly program and then convert it to machine code without having to load any overlays from microdrive.

The Sinclair Research assembler is similar to that from Metacomco, but it is not as powerful. Incidentally, the full screen editor in the package was written for Metacomco. GST, the company which wrote the Sinclair assembler, just does not seem to have the knack of producing editors.

Adder Publishing was not as quick to produce an assembler package as Metacomco and Computer One but it did release one after the launch of its classic QL Advanced User Guide.

The program was similar in structure to the other products on the market but adheres closely to the notation in the User Guide Book.

It was some time before anyone realised that what the QL market was missing was a debugging tool such as a monitor or disassembler. That was soon put right, however, as four companies put monitors onto the market almost simultaneously.

The first program came from Digita1 Integration. QL Super Monitor is an economical package, put out in a cassette format box. It performs its task well and allows to view and alter code in a hexadecimal format.

Computer One was again quick on the scene with a monitor which followed, and was compatible with, its assembler package.

Not to be outdone Hi-Soft also decided that it should bring out a token QL product and opted for Andrew Pennel's QL MON. Unlike the Computer One program it is not automatically invoked when the machine is powered-up. Pennel's monitor is a QDOS job and can be called simply by typing a new SuperBasic command, MON. As it is easy to break out of the package back into SuperBasic the monitor can reside in RAM, be called at any time, and not disrupt any of the other tasks being performed by the QL.

The same technique is used in Tony Tebby's QL Monitor which is produced by Sinclair Research. The package has all the usual debugging facilities, a one line disassembler, and routines which displays the values of the registers or a block of memory in hexadecimal.

Another good feature of the package is that you can set it to run on any channel or in any window. That means that you could set up several versions of the program within the machine, each of which work on different sections of code.

You may prefer, however, not to get tangled up in the web of machine code. That does not mean, however, that you have to stick to SuperBasic, or to buying packages off the shelf. You can still experiment with QDOS and machine code by buying one of the toolkits or SuperBasic extension packages which have just become available.

The most famous toolkit, of course, was written by Tony Tebby and can be obtained for the QL from Sinclair Research. It provides a whole spectrum of new SuperBasic commands and run-alone programs which show the power of the QL multi-tasking operating system.

The main body of QL Toolkit comprises SuperBasic extensions which control jobs, allocate or clear memory, and display the status of the system.

A series of separate programs, some in SuperBasic, some machine code, are also included in the package. They provide a user-defined graphics generator, an exceptionally fast back-up utility, and a multi-tasked digital clock which can be run while the package is in operation.

One task which the toolkit will not do is to check microdrives for errors or repair files which have become corrupt. Those sort of occurrences may be well known to you. They are unfortunate but fairly regular and if you do not have a back-up copy of a file you will usually be in trouble.

The Cartridge Doctor, from Talent, does away with many of the problems posed by the microdrives. It checks every sector on a cartridge to see it any errors have occurred and informs you if files have been corrupted.

Once you know about an error you can set up the Cartridge Doctor to deal with it. The most usual way is to read the file in and display it in ASCII format. A cursor is then provided by the program and you can rewrite any parts of the file which have been damaged. You can even repair the headers of files if necessary.

Machine code is a low level language because you cannot understand it but the computer finds it easy to understand. A high level language, such as Basic, is easy to understand from your point of view - as a user - but needs some translation before the computer can understand it. There are several types of high level language for both the Spectrum and QL.

Although Sinclair Basic, for the Spectrum, is highly respected it does have some faults and one software house, Betasoft has brought out a new version of structured Basic. Many of the additions provided by Beta Basic can also be found on machines such as the BBC Microcomputer, Amstrad and QL. They include WHEN and WHILE loops, a real time clock, new graphics commands and instructions to make Interface 1 and microdrives easier to use.

The Betasoft version of Basic is one of the best on the market for any machine. It has undergone several transformations during its relatively short three-year life span.

Pascal is another popular language and can often be found in schools. Indeed it is on the curriculum of some O and A level examination boards.

The first company onto the market with a full version of the language was Hi-Soft. Although it does not have an ISO standard of certification, which most full versions of the language have, it does run many times faster than Sinclair Basic and includes Logo turtle graphics.

The big Pascal launch of the year, however, was for the QL, from Metacomco. The QL Pascal Development Kit did receive ISO standard certification - an award which is to Pascal what a BSA certificate is to car safety seats.

The Metacomco package provides a full version of the language with extensions for QL graphics and sound. The source code is taken from a full screen editor and compiled into true 68000 code.

It was the first QL product to receive a Sinclair User Classic and, indeed, it was the first utility to receive that award for software excellence.

Computer One brought out a version of Pascal which while not up to the standard of the compiler from Metacomco comes a very close second. The first version of the package compiles the source into P-code which, although faster than SuperBasic, requires the Pascal operating system to be in memory. Computer One later amended the program so that code could either be translated into P-code or compiled to form a job which would run without the operating system being present.

The compiler is more user friendly than the Metacomco package - all sections of the screen editor and compiler can be accessed through a menu based program - but the QL Pascal Development Kit wins hands down in the features race.

Metacomco and Computer One both brought out versions of the popular artificial intelligence list processing language LISP. The Computer One program is less expensive than the one from Metacomco. Both versions can deal with the QL graphics commands and both are interpreted.

The medium level language C also proved popular with QL software houses during 1985. The first company to bring out a version was GST, which is famous for the 68K/OS alternative QL operating system. Unfortunately the product is a version of public domain RATC, a scaled down version of the original with additions to allow the use of QL graphics and QDOS traps. It is, of course, a compiler but the source must first be typed into a screen editor, run through a compiler which produces assembly language source, and put through an assembler to produce 68008 code. It is an unnecessarily complex operation and the code could be compiled in one go if GST had produced a machine code compiler.

GST also ranks among the companies which brought out QL operating systems in 1985. Its 68K/OS was originally intended to be the QL operating system. The package consists of as ROM board, slotted into the expansion slot at the side of the QL, and several microdrive cartridges.

As operating systems are usually judged on the amount of software available for them 68K/OS is a dismal failure. So far GST has only produced an assembler and word processor for its baby. One wonders what would have happened if Sir Clive had decided to use the GST operating system.

The C/PM-68K operating system from disc drive manufacturer Quest Automation did little better than the GST product. A few business packages are available for it but, despite the fact that it uses discs or microdrives, few software houses have taken up the challenge to produce anything of note for it.

A large variety of DIY utilities came onto the market in 1985. They teach everything from garden design to touch typing and computer athletics.

Sinclair Research wins our first Most Useless Utility Award for 1985 with QL Gardener. While it is obvious to see the benefits of a plant dictionary and garden design package for those who like gardening, and own a QL, with the dearth of QL software the company must be green behind the ears to bring out such a product. Where are all the fantastic business and educational programs which will show off the true power of the 16-bit - or is it 32-bit - machine?

Our second MUU of 1985 award goes to Car Cure, a program which aims to diagnose the problems which you may encounter with your car. All you have to do is type in the symptoms of your vehicle's illness and the program will come up with an answer to your problems - maybe. Most of the time it just recommends that you contact a qualified mechanic immediately.

Another car-orientated program which is marginally more useful than Car Cure is Highway Code. Through a series of multi-choice questions it will teach you about the signs and situations which you may encounter on the road. The graphics are simple, but effective, and the program has been checked by a qualified driving instructor.

If you want to stay fit then Microfitness from VO2 is for you. It will take you through a series of carefully graded exercises culminating in - I hope for your sake - physical fitness. When it was reviewed early in 1985 our own Clare Edgeley found out how unfit she was!

Finally, touch typing programs for beginners came from QL software houses during the past year. Two were produced, one from Computer One and the other four months later, from Sinclair Research. Touch 'n' Go from Sinclair Research provides more in the way of graded exercises and a more complex results table.

The utility market is the area in which the QL has done best. There are many languages available for it and a host of machine code utilities which allow the use of the power of the 68008 processor and QDOS.

It is a pity that the same cannot be said of the Spectrum. Very few utilities were produced for the machine and most software houses have moved to other machines. That is unfortunate as the Spectrum still has a lot of power within it which lies untapped because people like you cannot get at it.

A graphics design package which can only be compared with Art Studio, from OCP. Using a number-scaled menu at the bottom of the screen, you can draw all types of shapes using the point, line, circle and are commands. Shapes can be filled using a large number of different paint brushes, and blocks of user-defined texture can be used to fill parts of the screen.

Cut out and paste up facilities are available, which allow you to take a part of the screen display and put it into another position. A user-defined graphics routine is also included and animates any sequence of characters.

The Artist provides complete control over the Spectrum screen, something which other packages have been unable to do.