★ APPLICATIONS ★ AIDE A LA CREATION DE JEUX ★ GAMESLIST ★ BONZO'S BIG BATCH ★ |
BONZO'S BIG BATCH (Amstrad Action) | BONZO'S BIG BATCH (Amstrad Computer User) |
In the blue corner we have a pools predictor. In the red corner. a screen designer. Refereeing the pair is a database program. Perhaps this is intended as evidence Nemesis can program things other than tape-disk utilities. The screen designer boasts an inbuilt 'sprite' design program. The problem is, they are static. Rather than writing an arcade game, you're expected to use them just for designing screens. Bit of a cheek to call them sprites, really. The Screen Designer lets you mix and match 25 of the 36 sprites' loadable at one time. These screens are always in mode 0. You can stretch the sprites' in both the x and y axes. There is no clash between them, because the colours do not clash with each other. Specifications are not that special: 60 screens can be remembered at once. Bear in mind all those screens consist of is the positions and sizes of 36 different sprites. What's good about the system is the way in which ordinary screens can be loaded in and played around with. Merging two screens together is no problem either. Although nothing overly special, this is a worthwhile program. The Database is more useful. Putting information into this, sorting it, and printing it out in a given format is easy. To demonstrate this, a sample datafile, handling a record collection, is included on the disk. Allsorts Once you have some data to work with, you can sort it. The Big Batch Database supports two forms of search, the standard and sliding varieties. The former compares the beginning of fields with the search string, while slide searches go through the whole field looking for a match with the search string. Sorting a file by any one field is easy enough to select, but takes time to complete. Oh well, they also serve those who only stand and wait. On a similar note, a sub-file can be drawn from the main database: this can be totalled up, erased or saved separately. The logical operators are concerned with 'equal to', 'not equal to' and greater or lesser than certain values. Similar searches can be performed on characters. You could, for example, delete all the entries beginning with A, or get a list of records larger than a certain value. The last major feature of the program is tied up with the latter: you can output groups of records as reports. The reports can be sorted by fields, but fields which don't matter don't have to be printed (clever!). There are also various odds and ends to look after the filing system and screen colours. The most important feature, though, is in a separate program - the initializer. This resets the database, letting you edit file sizes, layout of records, etc. Up to 500 records can stored at once. The field types can be alphabetic, numeric or simple Y or N. File structures can be loaded and saved, and configuring the program is not difficult. The Football Predictor progam is simply a souped up database with a few logical guessing routines that is really aimed only at people who want to introduce some method to their madness. Forget it. Although the manual for this is much better than for either Super Meddler or Blitz (it's book shaped rather than a few tatty sheets of A4), it still suffers somewhat from being unreadable if you're a novice. A few more examples and discussion would have been nice, rather than a fairly dull list of features. Still, it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Big Batch is pleasant to use, efficient - if not lightning fast -has a passable manual and is well worth the asking price. Let's hope that Nemesis continue their range in a similar vein. AA#40 |
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