Hmmm, this monochrome text is a bit boring, how about some colour? Ah, that's better. Amazingly enough, Fantasm is now entering it's THIRD year on the Mac!! This is
quite incredible when you consider that it was only ever developed for our own
in-house use! We would like to thank all those of you that have registered previous versions, including the numerous educational and R&D departments taking site licences. We have sent Fantasm to all parts of the U.S.A., most of Europe (specially Sweden and Norway), U.K., Southern Hemisphere and even Japan. We have not once missed an order! Our only regrets is for the people with 68000 Macs - we are really sorry Fantasm won't run on anything less than an 020, but there is really very little we can do about it. Talking of registrations, why no females??????? We have not had one single
registration from the fairer sex - anybody care to comment why? Anyway, this
message will probably go down hill very rapidly, but we really must thank some
people first.......... Starting with, of course, good old Apple Computer. Now
people may get upset at them for numerous reasons - for example not making
public certain formats such as PEF - I mean come on guys, we all know the format
now, so why not make it public???? But, hey, they do make some amazing
machines! So lets "Give it up" for Apple - we know you guys can do it - don't worry about world domination, just get more Macs on more desktops and the world will be a better place. I consider it my duty to immediately "convert" any poor DOS box user I come across - they don't know what they're missing - we need more advertising. Come on Apple, you've produced some GREAT machines just recently - now how about letting the world know about it? BTW, how about an upgrade to the server on "seeding" please?????? (And great job on Sound Manager 3.1 - much faster! Thankyou.) •••••••••••••••••••••Secondly, all those talented MOD writers out there, without
which Fantasm would not exist••••••••••••••••Thirdly, we really must thank all our testers
- well done guys! Ok we can't guarantee no bugs, but having you people certainly
helps me sleep at night :-)....................... Ok, as I
promised, this message is going down
hill (and up as well). Ahem, hang on, slight technical problem....... There we go, now then, where was I..... Version 4 of both Fantasm and PowerFantasm have taken ages to get working, mainly because
theres just a lot it has to do. You may be wondering why the price has
shot up by quite a large amount - well it's simply that V4 has taken a
tremendous effort to put together - you may think that an editor is a trivial
piece of coding - I can honestly say that Eddie (either you love it or hate it :-))
is one of the hardest pieces of
coding we've ever undertaken. One of Eddies' bugs took over 6 months to track down - it really was the mother of all bugs - and all due to a handle not being locked down when it should've been! (Expletive deleted) A word of advice - NEVER attempt to write a Mac
editor from scratch - if possible use TE - the memory management is just horrendous! Similarily you may say, that
compared to the 68k assembler, the PowerPC one would be a doddle - again not so
- RISC may mean reduced instruction set, but what you end up with is loads of
"extended instructions" all of which are pretty unique and can't be clubbed
together into nice groups like 68K instructions..................................Anyway, some information you may find
interesting....Fantasm V4 was written with Fantasm Versions 3.22, 3.5 and V4 (it was nice when we finally integrated Eddie with Fantasm - so much faster! V3.5
was never released as it runs under a development version of LIDE, but was held up by
problems with system software - bet you can't guess which part of the system has big problems????Answers on an email postcard please........................The main
development machine is now a 7200 with three hard disks and a really old monitor - one of these days
we'll get some level two cache for it (why don't Apple include a cache card on a $2k5
machine???). Testing takes place ona variety of Macs and PowerMacs. We test under
7.1, 7.2 and 7.5.2. The picture above was done in Persistence Of Vision and post processed in Colour-it! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . Hang on, I gotta turn off this sine thingy - it's driving me mad!....... Thats better...During development, Apple went through some turbulent water, and we would be lying if we said we did not think of ditching the Mac! but then we thought the following: a) The Mac will survive, simply because compared to the opposition, it's great. b). Things can only get better for Apple. c). We love the Mac. d). Mac owners are very loyal. e). During difficult times, it's up to everybody to pull their own weight and muck in. f). PREP (or whatever the current favoured acronym is) is coming, and we've already seen that PowerMac apps will run fine. To sum up, I think we're more committed than ever - the Mac and Apple deserve to survive - we're just trying to do our little bit to help out. Finally, I'd like to say "Hi" to those people and
developers who said (a long time ago) that we didn't have the resources to
produce a PowerPC assembler or system, and that their's would be out long before
PowerFantasm - well to those people I say "Where are these assemblers guys?" It's
harder than it looks isn't it! :-) :-) What are we doing now?
V4.1 of course - any questions, please email to either:
lightsoft@zedworld.demon.co.uk....OR....100625.720@compuserve.com..or..write to:
Lightsoft, 55 Sidney Street, Grantham, Lincs. NG31 8AZ. United Kingdom. /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ We
hope you find Fantasm useful and enjoyable - please take the time to read the
manuals and get to know it - there is no limit to what you can do. If you feel
upto it, I would be eternally grateful if somebody, somewhere, would write an"Elite™" clone for the Mac - forget the fancy rendering and raytracing - just a
simple 3d space shoot em up with a bit of trading would make a mint in the
shareware market!!!!!! Quick hello's and thank you's go to:- G.H
Harwoods for supplying the hardware, Sam, Tam, Yanto, Tim and David,Michel Touchot for the excellent eDOC™ package, any ex-amiga crews
now on Mac with Fantasm....... and likewise ex-ST crews. Sympathies with DOS crews :-)Thanks also go to: THE SWATCATS - brilliant :-) The amazing people
who have written some tremendous mods...including Aaron (probably called Tony), Mel o' dee
, ####moby####, Tyrell/dual crew - check out Axxess, it's great, FBY~~~~~~Big thanks go to the good folks at "wuarchive" for main taining one of the best mod collections on Aminet - thanks guys! Mr. Paul Carter for maintaining a great sound archive on MacLincs BB (+44) 01427 718950 - I hope we have all the development sounds out of Eddie now - if not, errm, we're sorry - but the one where Eddie picked up that Fantasm had crashed was well worth it :-) Nope, just checked - they're all out - however please feel free to insert your own sounds using Resedit (great program) •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••If you would like to put your own message in this scroller, simply edit the Fmes 128 resource. Don't worry about CR's - they are filtered. To toggle the colours use a 1.B and to toggle the sine thingy use a 2.B. Oh, one last thing - The upgrade to V4.1 will be free to all registered owners of V4 - we have lots of enhancements planned, mainly designed to make life easier, such as a brand new "labels" processor which should be a lot faster than the current one, and incorporating local labels for the first time. However, we really are well worn out at the moment - towards the end I was working 15 to 18 hours a day on Fantasm (as I'm writing this it is 03:30 on Monday 5th February 96), which is too much for anybody. So we'll probably take a week off before starting 4.1 Like all good scrolly's, this one will repeat.... But not quite yet****************Big thank you's to our families - we spend far too long at the keyboard. We really appreciate our partners understanding in all that we do, and to them many kisses XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - S.B. February 1996.
