ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MICROPENDIUM P.O. Box 1343 Round Rock TX 78680 Phone 512-255-1512 Internet jkoloen@io.com MICROREVIEWS for October 1994 by Charles Good In the case of the two products reviewed this month I am deviating from my usual practice of offering to directly send my readers public domain or sharware software I review. The following two collections of public domain and sharware software were compiled by and are sold by the M.U.N.C.H. user group as a fund raiser project. As librarian of the enormous Lima User Group software library I am familiar with lots of the public domain 99/4A software that has been around for many years. Although much of what I describe below is older software, some dating from 1982, most of it is new to me, meaning I havn't seen it before. This means that the software is probably NOT in your personal or user group library, and old software that hasn't been seen before is usually just as interesting to a user as new software. Send your money for what I describe here to M.U.N.C.H. c/o James Cox, 905 Edgebrook Dr., Boylston MA 01505. If you want to talk to me or send me software to review my evening phone is 419-667-3131, my internet email address is cgood@lima.ohio-state.edu and my post office address is P.O. Box 647 Venedocia OH. ------------------------- THE TI EDUCATIONAL WORLD OF TONY FALCO Tony Falco is a high school teacher who has been with the TI community for a long time. He had a couple of his extended basic programs published in 99er Magazine way back when and still sometimes attends meetings of M.U.N.C.H. user group, although these days he writes software for other computers in addition to the 99/4A. For the benefit of his students and his children he has written lots of XB software, mostly of an educational nature. His programs are full of color graphics sprites speech and music, making full use of all the TI's bells and whistles. The technical quality and interesting design of his XB programs are comparable to what Jim Peterson used to produce. I am amazed that we TIers aren't more familiar with this talented individual. M.U.N.C.H.'s entire Tony Falco collection consists of 5 SSSD disks and 94 files. They are asking $8.95 plus $3 postage for the complete set. Topics include basic math, algebra, foreign language drill, writing music, spelling, health, basic computer, geography, drawing, and just for fun games. Each disk comes with an XB LOAD that allows you to run everything on the disk from a menu. It would take too much space to individually describe all the programs, so I will highlight some that I find particularly interesting. CRAYON-BOX. This is a drawing program that doesn't require joysticks. By moving the cursor with keyboard keys you leave behind blocks of color 8*8 pixels. These color blocks can each be any of 11 colors and any of 8 shapes (squares, rectangles, triangles, solid or alternating pixels, etc). Kids can make some really colorful interestng designs, or you can play with the 11 pictures that come on the disk with Crayon-Box. Probably the most suprising part of this program is its screen dump. Press "P" and you are in for a suprise if you don't know what to expect. Your printer grinds on and on and on as your picture is automatically printed 6 different ways before the printer stops. Some are large, some are small. Some have a white background and some have a black background. Some are vertical and some are horizontal on the printer paper. Each of the screen colors is represented by a different dot density. WORD-WORLD, ARMY-WORLD, POLICE-WORLD. These are all similar spelling games for early elementary school kids and remind me of TI's Story Machine cartridge. You type a word from the game's list and a sprite appears on screen. Sometimes you can then type another word like LEFT or FLY and specify movement of the sprite. If you type something the game doesn't recognize you are given unlimited additional opportunities to get things right. Eventually the screen fills with all these sprites walking, driving, flying, sailing, etc. Sound effects used with each sprite are well done. For example, for the different kinds of mobile pictures such as cars and planes you hear their motors rev up as they start moving, and each motor sounds different. Word-World was originally published in 99er. USA-MAP gives you a rather blocky map of the United States and ask you to identify the state indicated. If you guess the wrong state or type nonsense the correct answer is given. If you guess the correct state, but misspell the name, the computer tells you to try again and spell the state's name correctly this time. The program recognizes the difference between "correct" but mispelled answers and incorrect answers. HEALTHEXAM. Based on a 1982 Blue Cross/Blue Shield questionnaire this program asks you a long list of multiple choice questions. The usual overweight, family history, and smoking questions are included as well as a bunch of questions designed to guage your emotional health. Do you live a stressful life? At the end you are given a numerical score and short written evaluation. I like this program because it says I am in "excellent health". Computers, being very exact machines, always tell the truth. -------------------------- ADVENTURE COMPENDIUM II This comes archived on two DSSD disks (not DSDD as stated in the July 94 issue of Micropendium). The Geneve and 99/4A archiver programs are included so you can unpack the disks. Cost is $6.95 plus $2 postage. Included are adventures that require the XB, Tunnels of Doom, and Adventure modules. Everything is in English, but some of these adventures were written by German TI users and are probably new to most of us in the states. DUNE for the TOD module. DUNE was a popular science fiction book. It is now a very popular game for IBM and maybe also MAC PCs. As evidence of its popularity, there is a DUNE newsgroup on the internet. My kids spend hours and hours playing Dune on our home PC and the soundblaster sound effects drive me nuts. Now there is a version for the 99/4A, and at least there is no sound. Dune is a planet with a desert environment that contains the most valuable substance in the universe, a particular kind of spice. Two groups are each trying to harvest the maximum amount of this limited resource. You are the Atreides and the enemy are the Harkonnens, just like the book. You meet all kinds of creatures and weapons including sand spinners, sand splitters, sand throwers, sand jumpers, sand ghosts, sand dragons, etc. GARFIELD for the TOD module. Garfield, comic strip cat, has lost his toys and has to hunt through the basements in the neighborhood to find them. The neighborhood pets and pests want to keep the toys for themselves, but Garfield has a group of friends to help get them back. NINJA for the TOD module. A party of adventurers must enter the Ninja temple and retrieve gems within. Also, they need to find the Ninja's golden throwing star. Getting out of the temple alive before the Ninja destroys his gems is not easy. The following eight adventures each require the Adventure module; Escape from Alcatraz, Bigfoot, Escape from Cannibal Island, The Mystery of Cap' Kidd, The Great White North Adventure (save the world from contaminated beer), Moon Adventure, Nessy (Loch Ness of course), and Travelling (you are a passenger on a jet with no pilot). Each of these adventures is new, to me. None of them are my user group's software library. Among the adventures that run from XB is ALADDIN. This is a very complex game that runs similar to an Adventure module game, with no graphics. There are lots of files that load into memory at the appropriate time. The story pretty much follows the fairy tale. You have to rescue the beautiful princess from the Sultan's palace. It helps if you find and figure out how to use the magic lamp. You also get Carfax Abbey, an old favorite of mine that has been enhanced so it loads faster. The game hasn't changed, but it now takes tens of seconds rather than minutes to load Carfax. There is also "Visitor From Outer Space" and "Nasty". Nasty isn't really an adventue so I don't know why it is included in the package. Nasty seems to take over your computer and delivers humerous on screen messages and altered color bar and first menu screens. The adventure I guess is trying to figure out how to get out of Nasty and back into regular old console or extended basic without shutting down your system. Last but not least, Adventure Compendium II includes a group of fast Infocom game loaders. They are all much faster than the original and are all generic loaders. This means that the same loader can be used to load all the infocom games. Just put your GAME1 and GAME2 files for the particular game you want to play in DSK1. Your game will start in 10-20 seconds. The original Infocom loaders took over a minute to start a game. There is an XB loader and an EA5 loader for 40 column systems. These both have a nice lower case character set. You also get two different 80 column loaders. One will work with any 80 column TI system and the other will run directly out of MDOS on a Geneve.