You can have a lot of fun with something like this trying to find out if you can irretrievably crash it. You can't. Carefully thought out and structured in such a way as to be simple to use, this is a good example of how to write software which a lot of people would do well to bear in mind.

Go-Sprite is a sophisticated sprite editor; a sprite editor is something that edits sprites. Got that? Right. Sprite editors are ten a penny and most don't do a lot but Go-Sprite takes you a step further into animation and, more importantly, does it so gently you might not even notice. The program goes to a great deal of trouble to be very user-friendly, making extensive use of icons - a trendy word for pictures.

The first screen is the draw screen where all the creating and editing of sprites are done. This is fairly standard stuff, a large grid of squares to draw your sprite on and a sprite-sized display in the corner plus various symbols for inverting, shrinking and stretching the sprite. The operation is very simple: hit an icon with the cursor and the appropriate function comes into play. I picked up the nearest cursor and hurled it at an icon. Small pieces of screen spread themselves all over the room. No Coronation Street tonight.

Luckily I had another screen tucked away somewhere so after making a few spaceships I moved on to the next screen. This is where all the copying and overlaying is done. Sprites can be copied over into each other and you can pile sprites on top of each other using a priority stack to control how they appear on the screen.

When you've finished making sprites you can move across to the animation screen where sprites are dumped onto a film strip together with screen coordinates so they can be animated about the screen.

After all this Go-Sprite lets you save all the sprite data and animation coordinates to tape or disc in Basic data statements and arrays so it's very easy to make good use of the program and, more importantly, it takes a lot of the trouble out of programming in Commodore's hideous Basic. Very nice.