After loading this program, you'll find "f1" will call up a single brush and colour menu. Remember to call up JOY from the menu, though, or you'll spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to move the cursor! The menu was good, with instructions and colours in a panel on the bottom of the screen.

The commands were chosen by moving the cursor, a task I found fiddly and often inaccurate. But with use would no doubt be easier.

The CAGE facility was no more than a Windowing mode but useful due to its expandability - still it was hard to understand. Creating and storing new UDGs was very simple. You can call up this drawing facility and make a big image, reduce it to whatever size you like and store it for further use. The problems I had with Artstar were getting worse as I went on. Perhaps it was just me, but I found that the cursor kept sticking. The fill commands sometimes didn't work - and generally gave me a hard time.

Overall, Artstar, although powerful, was hard to understand and difficult to get the hang of.