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Archive Magazine 1996
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1995-02-21
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87 lines
Brainsoft are offering an RS423 connecting lead plus software for ú14
which allows you to transfer programs, data files, w/p files etc from a
BBC to the Archimedes. This is done öby turning the BBC into a disc
drive controlled from the Archimedesò!
1.2
Video Digitiser
1.2
Those of you who went to the PCW Show would have seen the impressive
demonstrations that Mike Harrison was doing of his Archimedes digitiser
which Watford Electronics are marketting. The basic resolution is 512 x
256, in 64 grey levels, though you can go up to 512 x 512 on a station
ary object. The speed depends on the resolution, but at 512 x 256 it
does approximately 10 frames/second and 128 x 128, 25 frames/second. The
low level software driver will be in ROM and will include frame
grabbing, previewing, scaling, rotation, X/Y flip, negative and pseudo-
colour images, printer dumps and data compression. These will all be
available via OS commands and SWI calls, so programs can be written in
BASIC or other languages with access to these facilities. Price is
öaround the ú200 markò and availability is öhopefully the first week in
Novemberò.
1.2
Logo
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Logo devotees will be interested to know of two ways of getting Logo
going on the Archimedes. The first is LOGOsoftæs Master Logo. It will
run under the 6502 emulator and is available now. Ring Chris Squire on
01-891-0989 for more details.
1.2
For a Logo that will make best use of Archi-medesæ amazing processing
speed, you will have to wait for Logotronæs Archimedes Logo which uses
full native ARM mode.
1.2
Lindy Beveridge, Logotronæs PR agency, writes: öThe arrival of Acornæs
Archimedes is excellent news for Logo users, and Logotron, whose Logo is
the standard for British school with over 50,000 users, now supplies it
to run on the Archimedes, taking full advantage its high speed process
ing power. Schools already using Logotron Logo will be perfectly at home
with the new software but will notice a considerably enhanced
performance.
1.2
Archimedes Logo has all the features of a mainframe Logo. It is the most
powerful debugging environment for Logo with a workspace of potentially
up to 16 Mbytes, the largest Logo workspace on a microcomputer. There is
a 132 column editor with 1024 x 1024 pixel graphics resolution.
Documentation for the new Logo indicates ways in which Logo users can
benefit from the power of the Archimedes.
1.2
The first generation of 8-bit educational computers was never able to do
full justice to the potential of Logo because of limited memory space
and relatively slow processors. öThese restrictions have limited the
take-up of Logo, but things will change rapidly when people see Logo on
the Archimedesò, says Logotronæs technical director, Christopher Roper.
The Archimedes Logo was developed jointly by Acorn and Logotron so that
it is functionally compatible with Logotron Logo and has all the
characteristic extensions.
1.2
For further information, please contact Wendy Frazer on 0223 323656.ò
1.2
(Ed: I was a bit suspicious of the 1024 x 1024 pixels and asked Logotron
to confirm it. They said that it was done by re-programming the VIDC
controller and obviously was using a multi-sync monitor. They said that
Archimedes Logo should be available in full release version in öfour to
six weeksò from now, which would make it the end of November or the
beginning of December.)
1.2
Computer Conceptsæ Wordwise Plus is now available for the Archimedes Ö
working under the emulator. ú29 (+VAT) for the complete package and ú10
(+VAT) for an up-grade for those who already have the ROM version for
the BBC. (See the separate article.)
1.2
Itæs not strictly Archimedes, but you may be interested to know that
Intelligent Interfaces who produced the IEEE interface podule that we
mentioned last month, have now launched an ARM second processor for the
BBC micro. For ú999 +VAT you get a 6.6MHz RISC chip with 4MBytes of RAM.
The Twin Editor and BBC BASIC are supplied with it. For more details,
contact Mr N Ray of Intelligent Interfaces, on 0789 415875.
1.2
We have a pre-release version of Artisan from Clares Micros Ö itæs a
very impressive art package using the WIMP environment. It has tremen
dous potential and looks as if it should come up to the standard of some
of the Apple Macintosh art software, but we are not going to review it
until we get the full release version. It is difficult to give a fair
review when a number of the features are still missing.
1.2