This program is supplied 'as is' with no guarantee of its suitability for any purpose. Neither myself nor any third party who has contributed to any part of this program will be held responsible for any loss of data, money, freinds, hair, or anything else which may occur through its use or misuse. If anything goes wrong with Black Hole please let me know. Preferably gently. Then peel me off the ceiling and sit me down in fron of my computer with an intravenous drip of caffeine whilst quitely phoning for an ambulance.
{subhead}Public Domain Notice:
Black Hole is released by courtesy of the Fat German in association with the Great Green Gollywog and his minions. It may be freely copied and used, as long as the following conditions are met:
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a) That this notice is distributed unchanged with every copy.
b) That the application is supplied unchanged.
c) No charge is made for the distribution. Public domain libraries may make a small charge to cover distribution costs
d) That you all smile and have a good time.
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All copyright is reserved. You may not use any part of this application in any project which is to be sold for profit without my express permission in writing.
If you wish to use pieces of my code in your own pd programs then please feel free to do so, provided these programs are not intented for sale. I say this mainly because my telling you not to do so would not stop you, but also becasue I learned programming by nicking and splicing bits of other people's programs, so why shouldn't you?
Historical Note: The above paragraph was written before I started compacting the program. Anyone wanting to copy my code now is going to find it rather difficult. But I left that paragraph in to show what a nice, generous chap I am.
{subhead}**Competition**
The prize of a year's free subscription to "Sad Boring Gits Monthly" will be presented to the first person who manages to de-compact the BASIC program so that it is indistinguishable from the original (including all the REM statements that have been removed). Entries on a postcard to be delivered by carrier pigeon. Please enclose a stamped, self-addressed banana.
If you do use my code, a credit would be nice. Money would be even better. Anyone out there feeling particularly generous can send me a ú5.00 (ono) registration fee and a disc, (well, actually a disc and a nice letter saying how wonderful my program is would probably do the trick,) and I will send them a free upgrade, possibly accompanied by any PD applications I can get my grubby little mitts on. Come to that, a picture of you smiling contentedly watching the icon spin round would make me very well disposed towards you. And believe me, you want that. The Black Hole is not merely a program - it's a living, breathing entity that will become very nasty if you annoy it and has a very nasty sting. No, hang on, that's a wasp. The Black Hole is a piece of code which runs in a 64K wimpslot and never crashes unless I specifically programmed it that way. But that doesn't sound as impressive.
Wibble.
{subhead}Copyright Notice for CompoSupport
The CompoSupport module is included by permission of its author, Rob Davison. The following Copyright notice refers only to that module:
"The CompoSupport module included with this application is (c) R. Davison 1995. The author hereby grants permission for the inclusion of this module in any application which may benefit from its use whether commercial or public domain as long as this message is included in full and the module is not modified in any way. I would appreciate notification of such use prior to release.
The author accepts no responsibility or legal liability for any loss through use or misuse of this software even if the author has been advised of the possibility of such loss. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome however.
Programmers: Please contact me prior to release in order to insure that you have the latest version of the module.
Rob Davison (rdavison@es.co.nz)
Southland, New Zealand"
{subhead}Iconbar Animations
Many of these came from the Internet. They are public domain but I can't remember where they came from. If they're yours and you'd rather I didn't use them, please let me know.
{subhead}Thanks go to:
All the programmers who unknowingly taught me how to program RISC OS; I've only just bought my PRMs, so looking at other people's code was the quickest way to learn.
Particualr thanks to the following:
Robin Watts (a.k.a. Warm Silence Software)
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The finer details of one or two SYS calls and the associated routines for extracting the useful data from them were purloined from his excellent !Larger - 'Sticky Backdrop Extraordinaire', which I spend most of my time beta- testing for him. (I've got RISC OS 3, which has a built-in sticky backdrop, but it's crap, so !Larger is a most welcome burden on my hard disc.) Robin was also never too busy to give advice or to let me peruse his PRMs. (Well, hardly ever.....). The routines for doing the Config. window as a composite window also came from Robin. I don't use these routines any more, but thanks anyway.
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James Miller
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Thanks to James for mailing me with a bug in the File Finder and informing me of the existence of the Boot File Creation message.
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Emmet Spier
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Emmet's Help file said that he didn't mind people nicking his code, provided he got a credit, so I wholeheartedly and ruthlessly butchered out the code for a filetype menu from his !Set-Type. Then I decided that it took up too much memory so I vastly simplified it to remove the sprites. Then I found a new way of doing it so I put the sprites back in. I can't remember whether any of Emmet's code is still in there, but if it is thanks are due to him.
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Jason Williams
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For designing the Shredder sprites. Very nice they are too.
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Mark Kempster
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For the Burn sprites. They're cool. Er, hot.
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Steve Singer
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I didn't copy any code from Steve, but it was he who complained that he wouldn't even look at my proggy if the iconbar icon didn't spin round. And he also wrote Bloxed. He also showed me the NeXT workstation which was running the program which gave me the inspiration for Black Hole. And now he tells me he never uses Wastebin programs.....
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Dominic Symes
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For writing !Zap, the best editor around. Even if it does crash quite a lot...
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Jason O'Broin
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For letting me have the tiny routine for detokenising BASIC tokens, which saved me a lot of worrying.
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Rob Davison
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For the CompoSupport (Foggy) module which allows Blackout to do those screen fades on a RISC PC.
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David Glover
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For mailing me with a list of ideas, some of which I bothered to implement.
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And Everyone who mailed / wrote to me with bugs. Yes, all of you. I really appreciate this. The more bugs I fix the better my software becomes and the closer I get to being able to take over the world. Hahahahahahahahah! Power!
Sorry, got carried away there. Thanks anyway, guys. I'll go and have a lie down.
Special mention goes to all those people named in the scrolltext in the Information window.
{title}The Fat German, 1997
{centre}(He's not fat and he's not German either)
I can be contacted via the remarkable British postal service at:
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Mark Greenwood,
99B High Street
High Barnet
Herts EN5 5UZ
England
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Or via the slightly quicker but infinitiely less reliable wonders of telecommunications science at:
