Artsystenatic stands out from the crowd of art packages for the Beeb, says Simon Williams

There are many drawing and painting programs available for the BBC Micro, ranging from cheap and cheerful Basic offerings through to full-blown mouse-driven, icon-flashing mega-products, but Artsystematic provides one or two unexpected bonuses. If you know what you're doing, and can remember a lot of command keys, it could be just right.

The package comes on cassette or disk with a 16 page, computer-printed A4 manual. This covers all the features of both the Designer and Loader programs, and offers some useful hints and tips. It could have been better laid out, however.

Both the documentation and the program itself assume you know quite a bit about your micro and programming. At one point the manual states "For those of you who have managed to break into the program and wish to add your own routines, the variable m indicates...". If I'm being provided with information to adapt the system to my own needs, why protect it in the first place?!

The disk boots up to show a nicely drawn three-option menu. This was constructed using the system, and the demonstration screen shows a number of the other creations that can be achieved, including a nice sketch of a shuttlecraft from the film V.

The screen clears to a dotted cyan border with a command strip at the bottom and what appears to be a single, flashing cross-cursor in the centre. This is one of the first novelties of the program. There are two cursors, initially positioned one on top of the other, referred to as the master and slave.

Each cursor can be moved independently, using the arrow keys for the master and the ^, / and _ keys for the slave. This system works well, although it is still fairly easy to move the wrong cursor at a crucial moment. Each one normally moves one pixel at a time, but may be speeded up using the SHIFT key. Rubber banding is possible between the two cursors and makes things such as drawing enclosed areas within others much easier.

There are functions to rubber band a rectangle, and to draw circles and ellipses. These may be filled, either at the time of drawing or later. The Designer works in any graphics mode, and you can use any of the colours available within that mode. A shade option allows you to fill areas with a striped effect, but this relies on the computer's firmware by raising the first parameter in the GCOL statement above four. This can produce interesting effects.

Other useful features include a perspective aid, and a grid which may be drawn on the screen to aid scale drawing. Text may also be positioned anywhere on the screen. Once complete, the screen may be saved directly to disk or cassette, although a Mode 1, 2 or 3 screen takes a while to save to tape.

All the functions of the Designer are controlled with a single key. Some of these are letter keys, largely chosen for their mnemonic values. Others are function keys. It might have been easier to use the program if all commands had been assigned to the red keys, and a key strip provided.

The Designer program is impressive. It would be interesting to use the program with a joystick option, perhaps switching with the fire button from master to slave cursors. Screens created with the Designer can be loaded from within any Basic program, so you could use Artsystematic, for instance, to produce a title screen for a game.

The second, and more unusual, part of Artsystematic is a Loader program which allows you to load previously drawn screens from disk and display them in any order. You may specify a Loader, which could then be saved separately and catalogued and edited at will.

However, the Loader system works very well, and can be used manually, almost like a slide projector. The system automatically switches between modes, using the first character of the screen's filename to determine which mode it should be in.

The concept of Artsystematic is excellent, and the package offers a number of innovative ideas: the dual cursor, scaling grid and the 'slide' loader. But there's a certain raggedness in the way the program is put together: just a few improvements would turn a workable program into a very desirable one.

Features 5/5
Documentation 1/5
Performance 3/5
Overall value 3/5