Unobserved by many people, a smart new mouse has recently entered the BBC market place. Its producers are very modest and do not seem to be mounting an attack upon AMX, rather the opposite. Wigmore House Ltd are taking a distinctly quiet approach with their Megamouse and its two accompanying software packages.

The design of the mouse is very different from the familiar chunky black BAMX product. It actually looks like a mouse - long, grey and sleek. Ergonomically designed, it fits the hand beautifully, with no cramped feeling. The buttons on the wedge-shaped front end fall exactly under the fingers. The ball, unlike the polished steel of its cousin, is made of hard black rubber (the latest AMX mouse is a new design which also uses a similar black rubber ball) which will not slip on any surface - even glass!

The mouse, attached to the Beeb by a metre of cable, glides around smoothly and works with all the AMX products that I have tried, except the original AMX Art package.

There are two accompanying software packages at present available from Wigmore. Cadmouse comes on disc and is geared principally for the Acorn DFS. An A5-sized 26-page handbook is supplied, with diagrams dumped from the program itself onto an Epson dot-matrix printer, which is the main type of printer that the program supports. Machine code dumps for other printers can be added by the user. The directions and explanations given are clear and readable, and the program is quite comprehensive.

It is similar to many drawing programs available for the Beeb but has many ambitious extras. The working screen has two menus, an options menu consisting of boxed icons up the right hand side of the screen, and a similar command menu along the bottom. This leaves a substantial area of the screen for the user.

All the expected drawing features are there (using 4-colour mode 1 or finer, 2-colour, mode @): the usual lines (freehand, dotted and rubber-banded straight ones) plus a 'corrected line' (which straightens out lines where required, either horizontally or at 30 degree angular increments, automatically correcting errors in placement), an excellent 'centre line', and a sophisticated 'dimension 1line' function. There is a choice of open or filled geometrical plane figures - rectangle, circle or arc - and a polygon call which allows shapes of up to 8 sides, or complete ellipses. The technical drawing illustrating this review makes extensive use of these functions.

There is a 'fill' option, whose textures can be complemented by 'palette' changes and extended by other commands. 'Paint' allows the user to choose from a large number of brush widths and types or even an airbrush spray, while 'hatch' gives a wide choice of different filling patterns including 45 degree hatching and various useful combinations of dots and stripes. A couple of these can be seen in the aircraft picture. The screen dump, incidentally, is one of the fastest that I have come across.

The only real criticism that I have is the absence of an 'eraser' function such as in the AMX packages. Instead, this means creating a special 'black filled rectangle' every time you want to remove a clanger (although immediately after an item has been drawn, pressing the right hand 'cancel' button will delete it).

There are also three useful and quite sophisticated functions which rely on a window being created around a feature - in this instance the first aeroplane, which was drawn freehand. It was then 'dragged' around the screen until the best position was found. Then it was 'duplicated' to form a pair and then one more was 'inverted' to give a wing-over attacking effect. All in all, I would say that this is a very useful CAD - package, using the Beeb's graphics capabilities to the full.

Nice as Cadmouse is, it is The Artist which is the real stunner. I don't know how many readers have seen on TV the mainframe Megabyte-gobbling package which allows cartoon film designers to create their products rapidly, especially backgrounds. The designer only has to define a flower once and he can 'spray' it around where needed. Other effects allow multiple branched trees to be quickly brushed in as can long freehand lines made up of adjoining lengths of different colours. Well, The Artist not only lets the user do these things easily and more, it also lets you create simple animated pictures.

The first demonstration I saw of this package swiftly put a waterfall on the screen - then the water started to gush over the fall, rippling and splashing in the pool beneath! Another screen showed the black outline of a Frankenstein castle and a craggy path leading to it - then irregular flashes of lightning lit up the whole picture, showing detail and colour, only to plunge back into dark shadow again until the next flash! The effect is impressive, though difficult to describe adequately. You need to see it for yourself. The package contains a 16k ROM, utilities disc and handbook. The manual adopts a quite light-hearted approach which, while giving a neat, one page explanation of each function, encourages the user to explore for himself the goodies on offer. Examples are given of how to obtain some special effects, but in the main you can get great fun out of just 'fiddling around' and achieving results by accident.

The Artist is menu driven, the main menu offering colour selection and a number of manipulating options which are called 'flags'. The commands range from the usual line, triangle, rectangle, circle and ellipse drawing, through to 'fill' and many special effects.

The flags are the real key to the program's versatility, allowing the most subtle and ingenious effects to be achieved. For example, areas of the screen can be repeatedly copied anywhere, normal, reversed or upside-down. However, copying a rectangle usually produces unwanted 'corner bits', especially if copies are superimposed. Use of 'without' does away with all this. Using the 'special effects' menu, you can indicate any number of colours which will be ignored when copying. Thus if we have a shape to copy, other than a rectangle, 'without' the background colour allows only the shape to be copied and placed elsewhere. Similarly, 'over' allows you to specify that, say, red and blue will not overlay white or green on the screen. Now any drawing option will cause the red and blue *but not any other colour* to appear to pass behind any existing white or green object.

The 'animation' effect depends upon converting part of the screen into flashing colour. First the areas which will move are drawn in the 'static' colour, but with a mind to the right flashing colour eventually needed. This is saved and then passed through a 'convert' program which changes them into flashing colours. It is then reloaded and the rest of the drawing put in - then an 'animation' program is appended.. On booting up, the picture is drawn statically and then the flashing colours take over giving a very effective display.

I have by no means covered all the possible effects, partly because I am discovering new techniques each time I use the package. All I can say is that I thoroughly recommend this program to anyone wishing to get some really stunning graphic output from the Beeb. Indeed, Wigmore can feel pleased with themselves that they have, like AMX, greatly enhanced the capabilities of the BBC micro.

Products: Megamouse £68.89, The Artist £51.39 (both together £114.89) Cadmouse £34.39
Supplier: Wigmore House Ltd, 32 Saville Row, London, W1X 1AG.