Gone are the days when I used to spend many a boring evening scribbling on a grotty piece of over-used graph paper, attempting to design yet another alien for the world's billionth version of Space Invaders. All I have to do now is load Graphics Creator, and after tapping in my requirements all the hexadecimal coding is worked out for me. Very convenient.

As well as Graphics Creator and Screen Editor there are three other programs containing character sets, but I found these rather hard to load.

Upon execution of the program, an 8 x 8 character grid is displayed on the screen, together with the letters A to Z and, underneath them, two rows of un-defined characters.

To design your own character, all you have to do is tap in the co-ordinates of the squares you need filling. Characters can be rotated, inverted, stored as one as the user-defined characters, and saved on cassette. Their hex listings can also be shown on the screen.

The screen editor allows you to design a screen using your predefined characters, which is very useful when planning a title screen for a program. A must for all TI owners.

J.J.