Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: P.A.Dale@gdr.bath.ac.UK (Paul Dale) Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Amos Professional Message-ID: <1992Oct29.175254.21618@menudo.uh.edu> Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Keywords: programming, games, commercial Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Nntp-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Reply-To: P.A.Dale@gdr.bath.ac.UK (Paul Dale) Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1992 17:52:54 GMT PRODUCT NAME Amos Professional BRIEF DESCRIPTION Amos Professional is a program development environment. It is an updated version of Amos. This is a "mini-review." AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Europress Software Ltd. Address: Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire. SK10 4NP Main programmer: Francois Lionet Manual author: Mel Croucher Technical author: Stephen Hill Demo programmer: Ronnie Simpson Project manager: Richard Vanner LIST PRICE 69 pounds sterling, ($111 US). An upgrade is available for registered users for 30 pounds. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS The program should run on the A500, A500+, A2000, and A3000, but check for non-standard configurations. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING The review system was an A500+ (2MB CHIP RAM), A590 hard drive with 2MB FAST RAM, external floppy, Phillips 8833 monitor, and WB 2.04. INTRODUCTION For your money you get 6 disks, a hefty, soft-covered, spine-bound (NOT ring-bound) manual, a manual for the four games (includes a Golden Rules of Programming section which will amuse professional programmers, mainly for its omissions) and a registration card. The obvious intent is to provide the user with a complete development environment for software on the Amiga. There are substantial language extensions and improvements, the principal ones being: support for MED and Tracker modules, an Amos Interface (the Amos equivalent of Intuition), ARexx, serial port support, access to system libraries and devices, and machine code support. A lot of this is to provide more complete access to the full functionality of the machine, and for many programmers is chrome. Of the extensions, the Amos Interface is possibly the most useful. SYSTEM UTILITIES The area which makes Amos Professional a "must buy" is in the development utilities. The editor has been transformed and includes full online help (place cursor at start of function name, press Help button, and up comes a screen). THE EDITOR The look has been transformed to be slick and pleasing to the eye. The edit functions have been improved with a comprehensive set of pulldown menus to access improved block functions, to name but one feature. There is split window support, intelligent program buffering, and a much improved file selector. Another addition to the editor is a monitor to step through programs at various speeds with a pseudoscreen showing what will happen. This can't be used with Amal, but then there is a separate Amal editor and monitor accessory. The single greatest improvement is the configurability. You can configure the editor to behave almost exactly like your favourite editor. This includes not only being able to redefine keystroke combinations, but also being able to create yor own menus. OBJECT EDITOR Again this has been transformed to look and behave, well, more professionally :-) Amos users will have no problems as the basic functionality is much the same. The single item worth attention is the animation previewer which allows 16 (PAL) / 8 (NTSC) frames for previewing object animation. It works simply by placing images into a "film" which can then be played from 1-100 frames per second. A hot spot is placed in the viewing window to place objects but is constant for each object. OTHER ACCESSORIES As this is a mini review I don't have time to give these other accesories any real justice. In addition to the editor and object editor there is a menu builder, Amal editor and monitor, resource manager, and sample bank maker. I've only had time to look at the menu builder which is fairly good (not up to the Editor or Object Editor standard, but very useful). PRODUCTIVITY, TUTORIAL, EXAMPLES There are two Productivity disks, a Tutorial disk, and an Examples disk. These contain four well-commented games and a host of other Amos programs. It's a fairly safe bet that you'll be able to find just about most things in there. The Amal tutorial is quite funny; check out the silly game. PROBLEMS The "return to Workbench" feature behaves erratically in that sometimes you end up with just a white screen. This seems to be because a CLOSE WORKBENCH instruction may have been called in an example program you have run (or maybe an accessory; I haven't checked them all). The idea is to save about 40k. I have 2MB CHIP RAM, so why worry? A better way to program this would be to check memory and close the Workbench screen based on a threshold. I've had no crashes, no gurus. CONCLUSIONS This mini-review can only scratch the surface of this product. There is a lot of stuff I haven't even mentioned. For current Amos users it is a great step forward. For people who want to do more than play games, it's a great way to explore the capabilities of the Amiga without having to read the RKMs. As a programmer who is more comfortable with C than BASIC, I have to admit Amos Professional is a good product. The updated compiler will appear very soon. Having been down the RKM path and enjoyed the experience, I believe Amos is a much smoother introduction to a machine which is complicated. The return on effort is more immediate. Amos Professional is worth checking out for anyone who just wants to enjoy the machine. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu