★ APPLICATIONS ★ AIDE A LA CREATION DE JEUX ★ PANDORA: THE GAME CREATOR ★ |
| Swift Software - Pandora (Amstrad Action) | Swift Software - Pandora - a Peek Into Pandora's Box (The Amstrad User) |
So you can't write Machine Code. Suddenly that's not the barrier it used to be: PAT McDONALD takes the wraps off a new package. Bored with Basic, you sit there, drumming your fingers on the desk and wishing the programs you've spent half a lifetime perfecting didn't take the other half to run. Very sad. There must be many with this problem of programs that just don't get a look in because they're in Basic. 'You could always write in machine code," some clever dick says. "Ha!" you reply: I'm not a megagalactic Skol drinking alien. And even if I was then I stili probably couldn't understand assembly language.' What would be really good is if you could take all your Basic games and convert tnem to machine code without messing about re-writing them. It probably wouldn't be that easy, but there's got to be a better way :han pure binary gibberish... Enter the dragon Pandora is a compiled version of Basic designed to take the sweat out of programming. To write a program using it you first type out the relevant code into an Ascii word processor (Brunword - late version - and Protext are fine, Tasword isn't). If you don't have u suitable word processor, Swift have thoughtfully included a small program that stores the data as Ascii. The Pandora Basic language is not the standard Locomotive variety built into the CPCs. Instead it's a sawn-off version lacking in certain areas (such as string and text ban dling) and built up in sprite graphics handling. Sprites, of course, are an integral to almost every computer game, but as the manual says, you can ignore them if you all you want is a faster version of Basic. The sprite handling is of a reasonable standard, though, and certainly offers exciting possibilities to the games writer.
You can have up to 32 sprites driven along independent courses at the same time. 48 different frames can be held in memory at once, and different banks of sprites can be loaded when required. One drawback is that sprites cant overlap very well onscreen flicker is quite horrendous when this happens - and they also cant go in front of any background graphics. Still, it's early days yet, with this being only version 1.00...
Arcade action men you have your Ascii file you must run it through the compiler program. This goes through the code looking for errors, and if it doesn't find any it turns al". the Basic commands into a machine code file that can be run independently of Pandora. Although not as fast as 'the real McCoy, a compiled Basic effort is faster to write in order to get programs finished quickly. So what sort of program could you write with it? Well nearly anything is the disappointingly vague but uncompromisingly accurate reply. The only tricky area is when you try to drive the sprite routines past their limits. What you get is superfast sprites that flicker. You'd be writing something along the lines of Silkworm before this got to be much of a problem. Another limitation is the lack of a real meaty data area. OK, so you can use the bottom end of memory (see the box) but you're not going to squeeze a DTP package into it. Thai leaves spreadsheets, art packages, finance planners, utilities, adventure games, and of course arcade games. The standard of finished game that can be achieved using Pandora is admittedly unlikely to reach Mastergame status: on the other hand, budget games wouldn't be a problem. If you played around with overlays, it would be perfectly feasible to create a mega disk-only game AA
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