by Brian Moriarty
I was sifting through a pile of mail a few months ago, when I came across an intriguingly thick shipping envelope. It contained a draft for an article, a disk and the following cover letter:
Dear Sir:
Enclosed please find my submission for possible inclusion in your publication.
It is a character set editor/tutorial that, quite frankly, rivals
commercially available ones.
I have also enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope so that the diskette
may be returned.
Sincerely,
Vince Erceg
"Another charset editor," I muttered as I pushed the disk into a drive and slammed BASIC into my 800. Nearly every magazine that covers the Atari has published a character editor at one time or another (including this one), and the commercial market is flooded with utilities designed to do exactly the same thing. So I didn't expect much in the way of excitement as I typed RUN "D:FONT" and hit the return key.
If you've read this far, you've probably guessed what happened. Create-A-Font had our programming staff hopping up and down with glee. Vince Erceg's utility combines a slick, utterly professional design with shameless visual gimmicks to make an otherwise boring chore fast and entertaining. If you do anything with redefined character sets, take the time to type in Create-A-Font. It's one of the nicest character editors ever created for the Atari. Need I add that Mr. Erceg's return envelope found its way into the Round File.
We decided to make Create-A-Font the centerpiece of an entire issue devoted to Atari computer graphics. Tom Hudson's Solid States is a 3D plotting package that lets you define any type of solid object and "look" at it from any perspective. 10/7 Painter is a follow-up to Peter Budgell's Extra Graphics Mode article from Issue 15; it's a GTIA painting program that lets you create and save your own high-res Rembrandts on either disk or cassette.
Tom Newdome's Bar Chart Subroutine offers business programmers a convenient way to display statistics without a lot of head-scratching. Sally Forth presents FPLOT, an impressively fast routine for 2-color plotting. And Kyle Peacock wraps up his four-part Fine Scrolling tutorial with an all-purpose utility you can install in your BASIC programs to achieve impressive Eastern Front-type visual effects.
We didn't skimp on our regular utilities this month, either. If you've been going crazy trying to find an 850 Interface Module for your Christmas printer, look over Paul Swanson's Low Cost Printer Interface on page 36. It lets you hook up your printer using just two joystick ports (XL computer owners, take note!) for a total cash outlay of less than ten dollars. XL users will also appreciate Jerry White's XLDEMO, which highlights a couple of features your skimpy XL owner's manual didn't tell you about.
This month's games department introduces Dennis Fox to the pages of ANALOG with Shooting Stars, an assembly-language endurance test that will set your teeth on edge. Joel Gluck insists that his Four Letter Words listing on page 42 is big and ugly, but that didn't stop it from earning him a round of applause at a recent Boston user group meeting. Parents should not overlook the educational potential of FLW.
Demand for reprints of our C:CHECK and D:CHECK2 articles has been so high that we decided to publish them again in this issue. If you're a new ANALOG reader, drop whatever you're doing and type in one or both of these programs immediately! It'll save you hours of frustration when debugging the other BASIC programs appearing in this and future issues.
Looking for a demo to silence that neighbor who won't stop bragging about his new Commodore 64? Sit the poor sucker down in front of Craig Patchett's Stars 3D. Show him how short the program is. Then tell him all about display list interrupts and color indirection, the two features that make Atari's hardware second to none when it comes to fancy graphics. You may also wish to remind him that his jaw is still hanging open.
Hope you enjoy ANALOG's Atari Graphics Issue.