★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION GRAPHIQUE ★ THE ELECTRIC LANTERN SHOW|Amstrad Action) ★ |
| Pride Utilities - The Electric Lantern Show | Applications Creation Graphique |
The package is billed fuzzily as a 'Fun Entertainment Packaqe'. What it actually is: it tries to provide powerful manipulation of the video screen to whoever uses it. its name may be daft, but it does include some outstanding demo pictures. If you want to show off your Amstrad's graphics, the Electric Lantern Show will do just that. Also included on the disk is Printer Pac 2, which on its own can produce small A5 graphics copies on your printer Epson-compatible. Shinwa CPA-80 or Amstrad DMP-1. There is also a facility for echoing all screen characters to the printer. When used in conjuction with the Electric Lantern Show it can produce larger A3-sized dumps by pressing two keys. If loaded on its own. Printer Pac 2 uses RSXs to control it. This magazine has published listings to produce A4 and A1 sizes of video dumps, so you can see why this program comes free with Pride's package. (A4 is twice as large as A5. and A3 is twice as large as A4. All sizes are approximate, because you generally end up trimming large picture dumps.) Once the program has started, you sec a menu The first option lets you load in a picture. This can be a standard screen, but the Electric Lantern Show prefers you to use us compression utility. All the demo programs are compressed some are only 4k long and when a program is saved, it is always saved compressed. The program can also load in pictures from the ESP lightpen format or Screen Designer , though which screen designer is not mentioned in the provisional manual. The second option on the menu changes resolution and pen colours. No prompts are given, since any message printed would cornipl the screen. If a mistake is nude (yes, I made some!), the colours and mode can be reset to what they were before you started messing around. The next option (Show) is the core of the program. The cursors keys will now scroll the screen around a quarter-screen window Pressing Control and Up will zoom in on this window. Control and Down will mirror the picture - RAM it upside-down. Pressing Control and Right will mirror the left from the right Control and Left will divide your picture into four. The Clear key wipes whatever is in the window to the paper colour. These operations are very quick, probably using machine-code or a compiled language It's fun taking a picture and playing around with it like this. Again, there is a facility to redraw the picture from its basic state: however, pressing Space will take whatever is or. screen and lock that as the native picture. The fourth option simply saves the screen, and the last returns you to Basic. The menu system is annoyingly noisy, using beeps and crunches to dramatic effect. The trouble with the actual program is ihat ii does not deliver any really powerful functions. 'Fun entertainment package' reads toy' in my book. Come on, Pride, release a full 128k version with picture merging, editing and rotation.
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