An artist born too late

ARTIST - Computer Aided Design (MRM Software), would have been a winner if produced two years ago. As it is, now that there are so many similar packages about it falls less than half way up the league table.

It has an excellent introduction sequence and the fact that the menu of possible drawing techniques is on continuous display at the top of the screen makes for easy switching between them.

All input is through the keyboard, mainly cursor controls and the < > keys.

The introduction cleverly des cribes all the drawing routines and commands, but a big niggle to me was the fact that I kept forgetting them.

A simple reminder reference card packed in with the cassette would help a lot.

Mode 2 allows the best selection of colours, but the fact that this is the lowest resolution screen unfortunately dictates the crudest style of drawing of which the BBC Micro is capable.

Here the pixel size obtrudes too much, circles and ellipses being obviously jagged. This screen really is not suitable for any but the most simplistic poster or infant storybook styles of drawing. Fine detail is out.

The system allows all the main routines such as line drawing in a choice of four widths or open/filled triangles, squares, circles and ellipses.

All can be expanded or reduced from the initial size which appears at the cursor position when the appropriate menu selection is made.

As all the routines are machine code. I feel that a lot more could have been done to allow other, more sophisticated and perhaps innovative features to be added to compensate for the limitations of resolution.

Unfortunately because of the lack of memory the designer either provides low resolution and a range of colours or higher resolution and only two on screen colours. Black and white aren't colours, despite what Acorn claims.

So although this package is quite a lot of fun to use, it isn't Computer Aided Design as the package proclaims.

Terry Hallard