
^A ^D ^M
Ron Collins, of the Akron AUG, left this report on CIS:


     [AS reported to us by the lovely editor of the MOAUG
news, Patricia Herrington, THANKS PAT]

 
 ^I"...I spent the last hour looking at the program with
SuperZAP.  Sol has done some really amazing things.  First,
he borrowed from the Coleco SmartBASIC interface just enough
to make the system recognizable to our system ROMs and also
familiar enough to US for easy use.  He has added a massive
amount of new command syntax and capability.  I saw
references to turning speech on and off, setting mouse
speed, drawing and erasing circles, blocks, etc.  Accessing
the colors of text/borders/screens is also a piece of cake
now.  Still not enough?  He has added enough other stuff to
the software that makes it really useful.  My best
description of it, based on what I saw with the block editor
and my own trials to date is that GoBASIC is a super
modified version of SmartBASIC blended expertly with the
finest sound and graphics capabilities of LOGO.  I think (a
proposed) online RLE viewer might be a bit easier to realize
under GoDOS.  The pull-down menus are also quite nice... as
is the ability to change character fonts on demand....
   "I have finally been able to compare the two programs...
GoBASIC and French SmartBASIC+.  There is NO comparison! The
beta release from Sol and Tony is... astounding! * Ron * "
   ^J
Ron is on target about the LOGO-like commands.  While you
are waiting for GODOS to become generally available, which
should be any day now, you might as well dust off your LOGO
tape and play with the demos.  Many of the GoBASIC graphics
commands are similar to LOGO commands.  Remember, "sprites"
in Basic are the same entity as "turtles" in LOGO; it's just
always been so much more complicated to use them in Basic.
That's a thing of the past.  The more comfortable you are
with LOGO features, such as hiding turtles, rotating them,
and changing their shapes, the easier it will be to jump
into the GoBASIC sprite-handling commands.

You won't believe how flexible the fonts are, too... you can
change fonts to any of six sets already in memory, or you
can use your own; and you can easily rotate them, reverse
them, or display them in mirror-image, and place them
anywhere you like, even scrolling them in windows.  I've
tried before to describe this, but you just have to see it.

The documentation has been the major holdup in getting GoDOS
distributed, and even though TSF has been working steadily
on it, it's still on the skimpy side.  Knowing Sol and Tony,
I am positive that they will write reams about GoDOS and
GoBASIC eventually, but at this moment we have to make do
with descriptions of the commands.  (Which is why I really
appreciate the early PD releases by other parties!)  The doc
files on the commands are thorough and clear, though.  We
have included in this issue several of the files from the
doc disk, so you can get a general idea even before viewing
GoBASIC.  There are over 300 of them, so we didn't have room
for all of them in one issue.  (We'll run more next month.)

 
 

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