Producer: Quicksilva/Software Studios
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £14.95
Language: Machine code
Author: John Hollis

If you're tired of actually playing games perhaps you might like to have a go at designing one yourself? Of course a lot of Spectrum owners are not programming geniuses, so Quicksilva have now brought out a package which at least offers control over the various features of some standard arcade games. In a way it's the computer equivalent of the chemistry kit.

Games Designer comes packed in a neat betamax-sized video cassette box, and contains a detailed booklet on the program. On loading the program the first thing you are offered is a main menu with a list of eight options: Play Game, Select New Game, Alter Sprites, Configuration, Movement, Attack Waves, Load from Tape, Save to Tape.

At any time, pressing ENTER returns you to the main menu. Selecting Play Game allows you to play whichever is the 'current' of the eight different games included in the program. Control keys may be altered to suit the users own preferred layout. The second option, Select New Game, lets you choose between any of the other seven games. The eight titles are: Attack of the Mutant Hamburgers, Cyborg, Reflecttron, Turbo-Spider, Tanks a Lot, Halloween, Splat and Qbix.

Having played these as they exist, you may fancy redesigning them. Option three allows the sprites to be altered and a menu tells you what can be done. This includes the shapes of the aliens, ships or laser bases, missiles and bombs, shields and explosion sequences. Their colours can be changed as well. Having selected the sprite type to be altered a sprite editor fills the screen, showing all the pixels that make up the sprite. These can then be manipulated from the keyboard without difficulty.

Configuration, the fourth option, allows you to alter the way the game takes place. You can change the game format, control keys and joystick options; the background and foreground colours may be altered; special effects can be changed; and there are four classes of sound effect which can be played with, missile sounds, bomb sounds, ship explosions and alien explosions. Selecting one of these keys brings the sound editor into play, a visual display of faders controlling the overall frequency or pitch of the sound, the speed at which pitch increases; or decreases; length of sound.

Option five is Movement. This controls the patterns and pattern movement of aliens/ objects/ships etc. Again an editor is used with visual display so that you can create almost any pattern or movement you like.

Option six allows you to alter the attack waves of the aliens, including the animation, points awarded for each destroyed, pattern under which they start a game, numbers of aliens in each attack wave, whether or not they drop bombs, and also what pattern of attack wave follows the 'current' one.

The last two options allow you to save your redesigned game or reload it.

Obviously this is a very complex program, which allows great flexibility and offers enjoyment on two levels, both playing and designing. The instruction booklet is well designed, very clear, and includes a technical appendix which may be of interest, as well as various tables to aid games design. They have also been thoughtful enough to provide blank pages at the end for the player's own notes.

Any combination of control keys or joysticks may be accommodated as desired.

COMMENTS

Keyboard positions: up to you!
Joystick options: up to you!
Keyboard play: positive
Use of colour: up to you!
Graphics: excellent and then up to you!
Sound: up to you!
Skill levels: up to you!
Lives: up to you!

Since the ratings hardly apply to this program we asked the reviewers to give an overall percentage. It was 92%

Excellent packaging and instructions. The eight pre-programmed games are quite simple but the graphics are of good quality, and anything can be redesigned. The variations and experiments are endless.

I was disappointed by the actual games pre-programmed, which were all very simple. But then, half the fun is redesigning everything, and it's possible to make some very bloody-minded and hard to play games from this little package.

The graphics are excellent, and I'm not talking about the game graphics but those on the various menus. The little 'fader' type visuals are wonderful.

The program is user-friendly so you don't have to be an expert in machine code programming. Even at £15 Games Designer represents good value for money.

THE GENERATION GAME

Games creators aren't new exactly but they're still the best and quickest way for even the duffest programmer to knock out some ace arcade action. And talking of duffers, we've asked Tony Samuels to create a couple of classics while Peter Shaw looked over his shoulder and took notes.

What's all this then? An in-depth review of two programs that have been around long enough to qualify as golden oldies? That's true but it's really only now that everyone's caught up with what the programs were originally trying to do. New computers like the Macintosh have shown that you don't have to be a machine code whizz to use a computer to the full and this attitude is filtering through to the Spectrum. Look at The program we reviewed a couple of issues ago - simple to use but producing some spectacular visual results. Well, these two games creators really set the trend and it's worth taking a look at how they've stood the test of time and whether they'll help you transfer all your brilliant ideas into code.

So, what do they have to offer? Well, that's easily answered - they both allow you to create machine code style games without having to learn a programming language first. But let's not pretend, the games you write won't be as good as the ones you could write in machine code. But they will be quicker to bash out and they'll be a whole lot better than anything you could knock up in Basic - and a whole lot simpler too.

If this sounds like just what you've been looking for, the big question is will you be able to create the sort of games you've always dreamed of writing? Well, life isn't all a bed of ROM chips and it's unlikely that you'll get precisely what you're after.

Of the two programs, Games Designer is the less flexible as it only allows you to create shoot 'em ups. But on the plus side, you can produce games more quickly and easily with this package. With HURG you can also have a go at platform and pacman type games but its animation and sprite handling trip it up when it comes to final presentation.

The most appealing aspect of both programs - is that they're menu-driven. This is what sets them apart from other games designers like White Lightning.

Brilliant as that program undoubtedly is, you still have to become proficient at a programming language - Forth in this case - and that can require the skills of a brain surgeon. No, with Games Designer and HURG the menus guide you as you create your sprites, move them and animate them. The program then puts this information into a game buffer that's looked at by the executive routines when your game's running.

One area where White Lightning, say, scores heavily over these two, is its ability to save a game off independently of the main program. This could be done by having an editor in the low part of memory that would affect the game database in the top of memory. Then the sprite routines and so on would come somewhere in the middle and look at info in the database. This way it would be a doddle to save off the middle to top parts of memory as a stand alone game with a short bit of code to tie it all together.

As often happens in a comparative review like this, my choice falls somewhere between the two programs. If only the smoothness and slickness of Games Designer could be combined with the flexibility of HURG. As you can only plump for one, you must decide what sort of games you're after. If it's just shoot 'em ups then go for Quicksilva's but if you're willing to sacrifice a certain amount of smoothness in favour of a wider range of games, go for HURG. One word of advice if you're veering towards Games Designer - it might be worth your while looking out for the version that Marks and Spencer brought out at the end of last year.

Finally, let's do a bit of dreaming - what would the perfect games creator package look like? Well , it's going to have to incorporate all the wham-bam-pow features of the new software. Alien 8-type 3 D graphics would obviously be a plus as would a larger range of game formats to choose from. Also a graphics editor such as the one on The Artist would be a big help - even better if it were completely icon-driven. It's going to take a lot of work to come up with something with all those features, so it'll be interesting to see if any software house takes up the challenge. Of course, if you've written a program like that or you reckon you could, we'd love to talk to you at YS. Now there's something to think about!

There's no way of disguising that Games Designer's pretty limited in what it can achieve - the four types of games you can bash out are all rather old hat. But the way it does it is excellent. The animation of the sprites is superbly smooth and there are tons of useful options for you to play around with. All in all, a lot of fun if you accept the limitations.

Overall rating: 8/10. Completion time: 2.5 hours.

Producer: Quicksilva, 48K
£14.95
Author: John Hollis

Packed into a neat Betamax video case, Games Designer offers eight arcade game variations, all of which may be redesigned in most aspects to suit the players' taste. Less of a game than a utility practice mode. You can change between any of the games using the main menu, then alter the design of the sprites such as aliens, missiles, laser bases, ships etc., you can redesign the game format, foreground and background colours, sound effects, patterns of movement, attack waves, and you can then save or reload your redesigned game. The graphics are very good, especially the design of the editors. Games Designer is accompanied by an excellent booklet which tells you how the program may be used. Perhaps the only drawback is that the games already programmed are of a very basic type. Does not require any working knowledge of machine code, although this could be a good way of learning the rudiments. Recommended, overall CRASH rating 89% M/C.

SPRITES PUT LIFE INTO THE GAMES OF YOUR COICE

John Gilbert looks at some of the new designer packages on the market.

Creation and programming of games on the Spectrum has always been left to the imagination of those who had the nerve to enter the world of machine code and had the creative talent to produce such products as Manic Miner and The Corridors of Genon.

That elite club has been broken by some software companies which have produced packages to allow even a beginner to produce competent arcade and adventure games. Those packages contain machine code routines which can be manipulated to produce the sound and vision necessary for games play.

The first company to produce such a utility package for the creation of arcade games was Quicksilva, with Games Designer in 1983.

The user can create up to eight games in the package, each with varying formats and characters. For instance, you could create a mixture of all the classic arcade games using Space Invaders Defender and even Pacman. Those characters are limited only to what the imagination of the users can produce.

Quicksilva produced eight example games in the package to show what kind of effects can be obtained. They include mutant hamburgers, flying tanks and jet-propelled spiders. All of those characters are created using a sprite technique.

Sprites are graphics characters, like user-defined graphics on the Spectrum, which are four times the size of one character square. A sprite can be anything which moves in those pre-defined squares and the sprite editor in Games Designer will allow you to set up several of those characters. Most of them have already been used to create aliens for the example games but you can alter them for your own programs. There are also two spare sprites which have not been used for design and you can use them if you wish to start building from scratch.

When you have selected the 'alter sprite' option from the main menu, the computer will display a 12 x 12 grid on the screen with the current shape of the sprite displayed in it. Using the cursor keys you can alter the places in which ink is inserted and omit pieces of the design you do not want.

There are various types of sprite characters you can use and they include aliens spaceships and explosion sequences. When you have finished altering one of the sprites you can change the colour of the object if necessary by using the 'alter attributes' option on the sprite editor page.

Aliens and explosions can be animated by using several sprites which show progressively the course of the action - like stop-frame photography. When each of the sprites is switched on to the screen in sequence, the characters taking part in the game seem to move. You can change the colour of each individual sprite so that it is possible to make an animated figure, or explosion, flash after each movement.

The movement of the sprites round the screen can be achieved by using another main menu option. For movement you must form a pattern of numbers which represent the movement of an individual sprite into an attack wave. Sprites can be made to dive-bomb, swoop on the player-figure, or even to loop the loop. It is possible to change the concept of a game by changing only a few numbers in the movement patter-n.

Another important feature of the package, listed on the main menu, is the 'configuration' option. It will allow you to change one game into another and one of its functions is to create the format of the game you are designing.

The format will decide whether the game has the movement patterns of Galaxians, invaders, defenders or asteroids and whether your laser base or spaceship moves vertically or horizontally across the screen.

To add to the excitement you can also introduce special effects on to the screen. They include stars if you want your game in space, shields for the defence of spaceships, and a factor which will determine whether the aliens appeal individually or in groups.

The other features in Games Designer include a sound generator with which laser zaps can be created. A high score table, like the one Quicksilva uses in its other games, is also included at the end of each of the games created.

When the package is used initially it is novel in concept and many entertaining games can be created using it. Unfortunately there are some snags with the package. You can load and save new games which you have created but they can be used only when the creator program is running. You will also find that after you have created several games they will all seem similar in movement and content. All you can create is one type of game - zap the objects or be zapped.

Apart from that small criticism the series of routines provided in Games Designer should provide a great deal of entertainment and its use is limited only by the creator's ingenuity.

Melbourne House, publisher of The Hobbit, announced a similar product at the same time as Quicksilva. The package, the HURG, reached the market later than Games Designer. Its purpose is the same and with it you should be able to create some imaginative arcade games.

The HURG is slightly different from Games Designer as it asks the user questions for the construction of the player shapes which are to be manipulated on the screen.

The package also provides subroutines for creating graphics and sound explosion effects. Like Games Designer, the software created using it can be played only with the HURG control program. That makes the two packages alike, the only major difference in concept and design being that Melbourne House has only three example programs in its package as opposed to the Quicksilva eight.

If you do not like arcade games, or become disenchanted with them, you might like to try writing adventure games in machine code without the trouble of writing the code. The Quill, from Gilsoft, will set up a database for your own textual adventure and all you have to do is enter the text and directions of the locations through which you want the player to move. You can then enter the items which can be found in the adventure scenario and the locations into which they should be situated.

Provided with the program is an excellent manual which takes the user through the setting-up procedure of a simple adventure scenario, as well as showing the meaning of all the options on the main menu.

The adventures need not consist only of picking up objects or moving around locations. The machine code routines in The Quill will allow complex adventure actions, including switching torches on and off and providing specific actions for players to perform, such as eating apples, shaking leaves from a tree, or wearing a hat.

Once you have finished setting up the options you want to enter into your adventure you can test it by using the demonstration mode. You can go through the locations and test all the traps without destroying the main database creator.

If there is something which is incorrect in the scenarios you can change them by using the database editor. When finally you are pleased with the adventure you have created you can SAVE it to tape. Unlike the two arcade games designers, the adventures you create using The Quill can be run independently from the control and creator program. Gilsoft will permit users to market games which have been created using it so long as its name is displayed prominently on all labelling.

It has also gone to the lengths of describing The Quill program and how it produces an adventure game. That means you have complete control over what you produce and an interesting insight into a program which should keep adventure players happy for a long time.

Unlike the arcade games designers there are virtually no limits to what type of adventure scenario you produce. Program generators provide an excellent opportunity for users of the Spectrum to produce games and not to rely so much on professional manufacturers. It must be said, however, that the arcade and adventure games which you produce will provide few surprises when you play them. The packages available allow you to write games for other people to play. There is nothing more uninteresting than playing your own adventure games.

The generators will provide a good deal of fun but are more likely to be used as utilities and not as a replacement for professional software.

Professional manufacturers will still provide the quality and originality in software. No package, even if it is brilliant in the production of games using the sausage machine technique, will provide an answer to properly machine-coded and original games.

Quicksilva Ltd. Palmerston Park House, 13 Palmerston Road, Southampton, Hampshire SO1 1LL.

Melbourne House, 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London SE10.

Gilsoft, 30 Hawthorn Road, Barry, South Glamorgan

THE SAME GAME - ONLY THE ALIENS ARE DIFFERENT

Most young 48K Spectrum owners dream of being able to write a prize-winning machine-code arcade game. The dream can be a reality with Games Designer for the 48K Spectrum from Quicksilva Software Studios.

The package will enable you to build various game elements into the game of your choice. You can design large animated characters, called sprites, and make them into spaceships, witches, demons, or even mutant hamburgers.

Once you have designed the characters you can decide their movements with the attack wave designer. With the aid of this tool you can make the game as difficult or as easy as necessary. Explosions, zaps and even spaceship engines can be manufactured using the sound generator. It can be programmed to take effect when an alien or laser base is hit.

To manipulate games you need no programming experience. The disadvantage is that the games you create will not run independently of the Designer program. You have to load the main program and select the game load option to play back the program you have created.

Although you can create a variety of games, with aliens appearing from the sides, top and bottom of the screen, the types of game will seem finally to be all the same. In effect all you are doing is zapping aliens and there is no change to the format.

To become used to the package you might like to try one of the eight games included on the new game menu.

They include Attack of the Mutant Hamburgers, Hallowe'en and Reflectatron. Most of them will provide a certain amount of fun but many of them just emphasise the point that they are the same games but with different aliens, moving in different attack waves.

If you want to program games with no programming knowledge, Games Designer is for you.

It can be obtained from Quicksilva Ltd, Palmerston Park House, 13 Palmerston Road, Southampton, Hampshire SO1 1LL. It costs £14.95.

Once upon a time if you wanted to write a good game then you needed to be a good programmer. But not any more. Programs are appearing which allow you to create games without knowing anything about the computer. Robert Schifreen tested the two latest offerings.

If you've always fancied yourself as a designer of video games but don't think you are skilled enough to program your own games, then this new software innovation might interest you.

Called The Games Designer, this program allows you to design your own video games - even if you know nothing at all about programming! The games are all in machine code and, says the maker, will be as good, if not better than most of the commercial software currently available for the machine.

If all this sounds too good to be true, then you should realise that there are some limitations to the system. Firstly, you cannot design your own unique game from scratch. You are only allowed variations on the theme of Invaders, Asteroids, Scramble and Berserk.

Once the tape has loaded, you are presented with a menu of options. At this point, there are 8 separate games stored in the system and you can select any one of them. The games are not stand-alone programs but are banks of data which need the actual designer program to run. A game can be saved and loaded once written.

You can either alter one of the 8 demo games supplied, or create your own. The only limitation here is that it can only be one of the 4 main types mentioned above.

The first option in the menu is to play a game. This plays the current game and uses the cursor keys for movement. The zero key is used to fire. To change the current game to another of the eight, you choose option two.

Taking option 3 puts you in to the sprite editor.

Sprites are 12 pixels square as opposed to the normal 8 available in Basic. These are the characters which will appear in your game including all the aliens, ships, missiles and the like. If you want animation, like a space invader which constantly blinks, you can define two different sprites and the program will constantly flick between the two during play..

The menu option which has the most dramatic effect on a game is the configuration section.

Selecting this option takes you to yet another menu which allows various characteristics of the game to be set.

Most important is the game format which is a number between 1 and 4 corresponding the four types game. Adding 4 to any of these values makes the game joystick compatible. You can also set the background and foreground colours here.

There is also a special effects section which does wonderful things like scattering random stars over the playing area. You can also specify whether aliens appear singly or in groups. You can provide a shield for the laser base if you wish.

Next come the sound effects. Entering this option lets you alter the sounds by means of 4 sliding controls displayed on the screen.

There is a reasonable simulation of a definable envelope command here, and the sounds available are quite good.

There are 4 different options, with different noises producable for missile sound, bomb sound and explosions of ship and alien.

The attack wave command allows control of movement on the screen. Here you can set up your attack waves, and specify which sprites will be used to form them.

The actual movement is controlled by another menu option. There are a number of different movement paths which you can define and then link them to each other creating long chains.

Whilst setting up the attack waves, you are also given control over such matters as how many points will be awarded for destroying certain aliens and also the maximum number of aliens in an attack wave.

Once you have created your masterpiece you can save it to cassette. The system used differs from The Quill in that the cassette is not a self contained game. It is simply a data file which needs to be loaded along with the designer itself.

Although this package is sold as a games designer, there is a limit to the originality of the games which can be produced. You are always limited to variations on a theme, although it should be said that these variations can be quite divorced from the original.

However, you can produce smooth, fast machine code games with little effort - and you get 8 demo games as well. Games Designer comes from Quicksilva at £14.95 and runs on a 48k Spectrum.

Reviewer: Robert Schifreen

48K Spectrum
£14.94
Quicksilva
55 Haviland Road
Ferndown Industrial Estate
Wimbourne
Dorest

Producing fast-action games without the need to learn machine-code programming - Simon Beesley reviews a crop of games designers including the newly-released Hurtg.

There are few more dismal experiences than playing a version of Space Invaders written in Basic. The invading aliens dawdle across the screen while your missiles take an age to reach them. The fact is that Basic is usually too slow for writing adequate arcade games. For best effects you need the speed and flexibility of machine code. But for most of us learning machine code is a daunting task.

As an alternative there are now a number of programs which offer a more painless way of writing arcade quality games. These are either extensions to Basic or full-blown games designers.

Melbourne Houses's Hurg is such a program. Hurg, incidentally, stands for High-Level, User-Friendly, Real Time, Games Designer. The terms High-Level and User-Friendly refer to the fact that by using Hurg you can design a game without writing a line of code - the entire system is menu driven. It offers, in fact, an extensive hierarchy of menus and sub-menus which between them cater for almost every aspect of designing a game.

DEFINE EIGHT OBJECTS

Not only, for example, can you define up to eight different objects but you can also animate each in a different way and determine how it is to move. Movement can be described in considerable detail. You could instruct an object to mimic the movement of another object or give a weighting to movement in certain directions. Alternatively you could define eight paths and link four of them together.

The animation facility is extremely impressive. Each object can be given up to eight animation sequences. It can either be allotted two different shapes for each direction or be made to pass through an entire eight shape cycle in every direction. Once you have defined its shapes you can set the speed at which animation occurs as well as the speed with which the object moves across the screen. Two Shape Generator is one of the most enjoyable features of Hurg. In effect it lets you construct the frames for a cartoon. As soon as you have defined at least two different shapes you can see tour cartoon character in motion.

There are a host of other options such as a regeneration menu, a collision table, and a games variation menu. To take just one of these, the games variation menu allows you to alter the pattern of a game after a specified event. Thus you could instruct the ghosts in a PacMan-type game to move away from the player when a power pill has been eaten.

Although there is no facility for designing a background you can load in a predefined screen. This means that an assortment of different games can be designed. Two of the demonstration games included with Hurg show its range. Manic Koala is a creditable Manic Miner type game - with only one screen - while Ms Hortense is a Pac-Man variation.

Designing a complete game with Hurg is quite a complicated business. The program's facilities are so extensive that they need much fuller explanations than are given in the manual. More examples are needed. The manual gives an example of how to write a simple game but this is rather sketchy. When I came to design an Invaders type game I was unable to make my missile leave its silo. Doubtless I had made an elementary mistake but detailed step by step instruction would have been handy.

Quicksilva's Games Designer is easier to use bin more limited in its scope. Essentially it is an instant shoot em up kit. Seven game formats are open to you - Invaders, Asteroids, Scramble and so on - but these are really a matter of fixing the directions the aliens come from and how your character moves. The program does not allow you to design a game at the same level of detail as Hurg. So you are confined to producing variations on the same shoot-em-up theme: aliens approach and you blast them out of the skies.

Again it is menu driven. There are eight options on the main menu; Play Game, Select New Game. Alter Sprites, Configuration, Movement, Attack Waves, Load from Tape, and Save to Tape. Selecting any one takes you to you to another section. The sprite option, for example, takes you to a character definer where you can define either your own player and missiles or the enemy characters and their missiles.

Included in the configuration sub-menu is quite a sophisticated sound editor - a feature lacking in Hurg. By moving a slide up and down on five scales you can create he sound of your choice for explosions or missiles. Given the range of different sounds that can be produced this is particularly simple to use as well as being fun to play with.

Although you can give the aliens a limited degree of animation and set their flight path you cannot animate your own character. This feature does not begin to compare with Hurg's extensive facilities for defining animation and movement. Only one set of aliens can appear on the screen at any one time and all move in the same way.

Nor is it possible to define the background. The background option reduces to a choice of colours and the decision to include stars or not.

But for all its limitations Games Designer is a highly effective package. The eight are predefined games which are included with it show that you can certainly design games of commercial quality. If shoot-em-ups are your taste then this program will allow you to indulge yourself to the full.

Games Designer programs, however, have their frustrations. They restrict you to a set course menu. With Hurg, for example, it is possible to design a Pac-Man game but you could not instruct the ghosts to move intelligently. As the blurb for Interactive Software's puts it, such programs cannot satisfy those who enjoy the challenge of true programming.

Scope is a computer graphics language. It has 31 command words which are tagged onto Basic Rem statements. They cannot, however, be intermingled with Basic. Once you have written a Scope routine it needs to be compiled into object code in another area of memory. The idea is that once compiled your graphics routine can be called from Basic.

ENTIRE GAME IN SCOPE

You could also write an entire game in Scope: although with only 31 commands on hand this would be a daunting task. Scope does not allow floating point variables so the sine and cosine functions cannot be used. Nor are there commands for multiplication and division. User-defined graphics need to be set up in Basic.

At first glance Scope's syntax seems rather complex. To set up the equivalent of the empty loop FOR A = 0 to 100 NEXT requires the following commands:

10 REM Var,a,0;
20 REM Label; A;
30 REM Inc;a,1;
40 REM Test,194,a,100,A;

But the language's graphics commands like Plot, Draw and Attr are familiar enough; while Fscr is a useful addition which scrolls the screen pixel in any direction.

By using Scope to build up graphics routines you could undoubtedly speed up your Basic programs considerably. It is also an interesting introduction to lower-level languages - a compromise between Basic and assembly language. As an alternative to Scope one could use a fully-fledged Basic compiler or Forth.

Richard Taylor's Fifth is a more accessible aid to writing fast games and, arguably, just as effective. One of Your Computer's regular contributors Richard Taylor needs, as they say, no introduction. In an interview he once said that he like to make machine do thing they are not designed to do. Having given the ZX-81 high resolution and speeded up its loading rate, he is now doing amazing things for the Spectrum.Fifth is a 4K extension to Basic which lets you harness effects normally only available through machine code. It supplies 25 new commands and a further 13 functions. To use them you simply enter the commands and their parameters after Rem statements.

The largest group of commands provide the Spectrum with a sprite facility. The beauty of this is that since the sprites are interrupt driven they move independently of your program. You can specify the direction of one of up to 255 sprites and then set the speed and number of pixels un;p at a time. Once set in motion the sprites carry on moving while the program attends to something else. If a sprite collides with another object or veers off the screen control returns to Basic whereupon you can redirect it.

Along with the spite facility Fifth offers a number of other new commands. Among them are Sound, a far more powerful instruction than Beep, and Replace which changes colours on screen in a similar way to the BBC's VDU 19 command. With Get and Put you can store away any rectangular section of the screen and then reprint it at a new position.

Put together these facilities make up a hugely useful tool for writing games without dipping into machine code. The sprites are particularly impressive. As they can be set to move pixel by pixel at a rate of 50 jumps per second they are both fast and smooth.

The Commodore 64 already has sprites but using them in Basic is a slow and tedious business. Almost unchanged since the days of the PET Commodore's Basic now looks a little long in the tooth. It has no specific commands to handle sprites, high resolution graphics or the 64's sophisticated sound chip. To access these facilities you must instead rummage through the manual in search of the requisite Pokes.

Simon's Basic remedies this state of affairs. It is an extension to Basic which makes good the resident Basic's shortcomings with a further 114 commands.

NUMBER OF NOVELTIES

With the Simon's Basic cartridge in place Commodore's Basic can hold its own and indeed feel superior to any other versions of the language on the market. Before writing it David Simons drew up a shopping list of all the commands and features he would like to see in his idea of Basic. And here they all are: structured programming features such as Repeat Until and local variables; programming aids such Auto, Trace and Remember; error trapping commands, extra string handling commands, scroll commands for any direction; and, of course, an extensive range of instructions to deal with sound, high-resolution graphics and sprites. There are also a number of novelties like Delay which varies the rate at which a listing is printed and Disapa which hides a program line as a security aid.

The graphics commands, in particular, do all you could hope for. To mention just a few, Paint fills in an enclosed area, Rec draws a rectangle, while Rot will rotate and expand a predefined shape.

In return for 8K of your RAM Simon's Basic gives you a remarkable number of new software features. Some were sorely needed, other cans be considered bonus extras.The pity is that Commodore did not think to rewrite its Basic at the outset incorporating some of these features in the ROM.