Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mcnc!xanth!kent From: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.lang.modula2 Subject: Re: The Amiga unchained, OXXI Modula-2 Message-ID: <2356@xanth.UUCP> Date: Thu, 3-Sep-87 22:20:16 EDT Article-I.D.: xanth.2356 Posted: Thu Sep 3 22:20:16 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 21:19:40 EDT References: <466@esunix.UUCP> Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va. Lines: 104 Keywords: Modula-2, Programming Environments Summary: more notes from a new user Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:8092 comp.lang.modula2:337 Hi, again. Just another update on my new modula 2 package from OXXI. The bad news first: One of the demo source disks had three files (out of a hundred odd), that I couldn't read. The medium was visibly damaged. No biggie, could happen to anybody. The demos, as far as I can tell after a brief look through the docs, had better be self documenting, the only printed doc I saw was a list of the disk directories (the demos spill over onto the IFF source disk). That's OK, too; this is a beta release. After backing up disks, I spent a night executing the demos. I got through most of them OK; a couple I'll have to read the source code to get running; I don't understand what answer is wanted. The demos don't seem to be all written with multitasking in mind, I got real good at recovering from gurus. Of course, I was stress testing them, too. My add on memory is out to lunch, so I was doing ray tracing and such in a 512K system. Raytracing and showilbm could put quite a strain on 512K, and it showed. Then the good news. Bob Pendelton noted that the compiler, editor, etc. work nicely. I'd rather play! I loved the ray tracing demo! Glorious HAM pictures. Not too fancy, but I could get a full screen picture up while I tested a few other demos. There is one vanity piece: "LEON" engraved in a solid sitting on a patterned surface (author is Leon Frenkel). There are two other pictures, one with a sphere on a checkerboard surface, and one with a group of spheres. I think the latter group are random, but I was messing around with the viewpoint and direction so much, it may all have been my doing. Anyway, the one I saw before I started changing parameters was really pretty, with 8 or ten reflecting spheres in the picture. Another winner was Mondrian. This demo builds Mondrian style (colored rectangles separated by black lines) _instantly_. It has a color palette adjustment, a few other features. Very pretty graphics, and if you don't like one, poof, there's another. GravityWars, published earlier here, was included. I played with the one here a lot, so I just tried this one once to make sure it worked. I forgot to test whether the typeahead bug got fixed in converting from TDI to OXXI. There is a doodle program - your basic iconedit colors, but full screen resolution. Cute for a two command package (change color or clear screen). Nice for the kids, 'cause it's not overwhelming. There are a couple of speach demos that work OK. There is a cross reference routine that works on any ASCII file - I fed it the disk directory, the only piece of text I had handy, and it gave me a cross reference. There is a multi-featured file manager (super dir) with a directory window, a dozen or two commands, and such, that seemed to be a pretty nice tool. There is a cute little routine for dumping all the intuition messages it sees, and a window full of gadgets to play with to cause messages. Very impressive, both in terms of showing off Oxxi BENCHMARK's proper interface to the Amiga, and in terms of showing off Intuition. There is a cube, in wireframe, bouncing off the near and far clipping planes, and another cube, in shaded solid model, rtating and moving about a bit. There are lots of test of console input, character sets, and do on. These include warptext and warptext2 - who'd have believed you could do text that fast in a bit map? There are three walking figure demos, good old sparks, one called lines, and a walking, pastel color cycling triangle that is very pretty. One, TAlert, gave me a good scare, when I saw the typical guru red requester, but this one said recoverable, and it was! There is a visual solver for the eight queens problem that lets you watch the board while the recursive solver goes through its paces. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't stop at the end long emnough for me to see the solution. There is a title bar clock, the size of RSLclock. And lots more, 73 in all. A real tour de force (sp? I don't do French) demo of the capabilities of Modula 2, the Amiga, the Oxxi BENCHMARK implementation, and the quality of the interface between BENCHMARK and AmigaDOS+ (how's that for an entry in the "Whatta we call all this stuff, anyway?" sweepstakes?). The kid is still happy about where he spent his $203.50_with_shipping. ;-) Now to catch up with Bob in my Oxxi manual reading. More when I know more. Kent, the man from xanth.