The AMX Mouse is one of the most enthralling peripherals I've ever used with my Beeb. I'd assumed it would be much like using a glorified joystick - in fact, it is so natural, it's more like writing or drawing than using a micro at all. Perhaps this is why the Art program suits the Mouse so well.

Although AMX Art is a great introduction to the mouse, once you start using it in earnest, you being to see it has a few shortcomings for serious applications. It is, for instance, hard to work in detail on small areas of the screen. If you're doing a symmetrical drawing, it's difficult to draw both halves identically. It would also be useful to be able to use icons with AMX Art and to design your own fill-patterns (not everybody's into drawing houses!).

AMX Utilities attempts to get round these problems. The package consists of a disc and accompanying manual. There are 31 files on the disc, covering the new routines, menus to link them together and a number of sample files to play around with or use in your own drawings. There are also copies of AMX Art - with a few minor bugs removed - and the icon designer.

The manual is similar in layout to the AMX Art manual, and is again well illustrated. It advises 80-track disc users to convert the disc from 40 to 80 tracks, and provides a program to do it. I was a little peturbed at the thought of rewriting my master disc, and more worried when I realised that the disc supplied had no write-enable cut-out.

The routines are all called from the main menu by clicking the mouse button twice, as with AMX Art. As well as the utilities program, there are routines to design fill-patterns, to strip pictures suitable for printing, and to build up your own XDUMP routines to print them. There is also a short program to build up a 'slide show' of mouse-generated pictures, and a sketch program which gives you some of the Art facilities, but in Mode 2.

The utilities program itself offers four main facilities: Zoom, Copy, Cures and Icons. Although you can use any of these routines on a new drawing. It is easier to start by loading in an AMX Art picture. If you then load Zoom, a small window appears beside the picture window, and this shows the area of the picture which will be enlarged when you zoom in. When you do, each pixel is magnified in the main window and you can turn any one on or off in a similar way to the icon designer. You can use Zoom to 'tidy up' pictures, or draw directly to the pixel.

To copy a section of a picture you define a source rectangle over the area you want to copy, and the program produces a destination box the same size and shape, which you can move to any part of the picture. You can then copy from one to the other, either pixel for pixel or reflected and/or rotated through 90, 180 or 270 degrees.

The curves option allows you to draw ellipses and arcs by manipulating up to three different cursors. The curves can be superimposed on an existing drawing or drawn and later enhanced.

The icon routine allows you to call any icon file and position individual icons on your drawing. These may only be placed in character positions (as with characters when you have selected 'gridlock' in AMX Art).

There are a couple of points which detract from the add-on utilities. It's a shame you can't directly carry a drawing across from AMX Art, or even all the utilities from the main Art screen. Instead you have to save your file, reboot the system, run the utilities and reload the file. Perhaps a leter version will integrate the package.

Overall, though, AMX Utilities is a very welcome offering, and deserves to boost the popularity of the Mouse even higher. At the price asked, it's exceptional value.