Mini Review
                             of
                      AMOS Professional
           Reviewer: Paul Dale (p.a.dale@bath.ac.uk)
    -----------------------------------------------------
Product: Amos Professional

Price: 69 pounds sterling, ($111)
upgrade for registered user 30 pounds before 31-Oct-92
35 pounds after 31-Oct-92

Publisher: Europress Software Ltd.
           Europa House,
           Adlington Park,
           Macclesfield,
           Cheshire.
           SK10 4NP
           UK

Main programmer: Francois Lionet
Manual author:   Mel Croucher
Technical author:Stephen Hill
Demo programmer: Ronnie Simpson
Project manager: Richard Vanner

Should run on A500, A500+, A2000, A3000 but check for non-standard
configurations. Review system, A500+ (2MB chip), A590 (2MBfast),
external floppy, Phillips 8833 monitor.

Introduction

For your money you get 6 disks, a hefty soft covered, spine bound (NOT
ringbound) manual and a manual for the four games (includes a Golden
Rules of Programming section which will amuse professional programmers,
mainly for its omissions) and a registration card.

The obvious intent is to provide the user with a complete development
environment for software on the Amiga. There are substantial language
extensions and improvements, the principal ones being, support for MED
and Tracker modules, an Amos Interface (Amos equivalent of intuition),
Arexx, serial port support, access to system libraries and devices and
machine code support.

A lot of this is to provide more complete access to the full functionality
of the machine and for many programmers is chrome. Of the extensions,
the Amos Interface is possibly the most useful.

System Utilities

The area which makes Amos Professional a "must buy" is in the development
utilities. The editor has been transformed and includes full online help
(place cursor at start of function name, press help button and up comes
a screen).

The Editor

The look has been transformed to be slick and pleasing to the
eye. The edit functions have been improved with a comprehensive set
of pull down menus to access improved block functions, to name but one
feature. There is split window support, intelligent program buffering
and a much improved file selector.


Another addition to the editor is a monitor to step through programs
at various speeds with a psuedoscreen showing what will happen. This
can't be used with Amal but then there is a separate Amal editor
and monitor accessory.

The single greatest improvement is the configurability. You can configure
the editor to behave almost exactly like your favourite editor. This
includes not only being able to redefine keystroke combinations but
being able to create your own menus as well.

Object Editor

Again this has been transformed to look and behave, well, more
professionally :-) Amos users will have no problems as the basic
functionality is much the same. The single item worth attention
is the animation previewer which allows 16 (PAL)/ 8 (NTSC) frames
for previewing object animation. It works simply by placing
images into a "film" which can then be played from 1-100 frames
per second. A hot spot is placed in the viewing window to place
objects but is constant for each object.

Other Accessories

As this is a mini review I don't have time to give these other
accessories any real justice. In addition to the editor and object
editor there is a menu builder, Amal editor and monitor, resource
manager and sample bank maker. I've only had time to look at the
menu builder which is fairly good (not up to the editor or object
editor standard but very useful).

Productivity, Tutorial, Examples

There are two productivity disks, a tutorial disk and an examples
disk. These have four well commented games and a host of other
Amos programs. It's a fairly safe bet that you'll be able to find
just about most things in there. The Amal tutorial is quite funny,
check out the silly game.

Conclusion

This mini review can only scratch the surface of this product.
There is a lot of stuff I haven't even mentioned. For current
Amos users it is a great step forward. For people who want
to do more than play games it's a great way to explore the
capabilities of the Amiga without having to read the RKMs.

As a programmer, who is more comfortable with C than a Basic,
I have to admit Amos Professional is a good product. The
updated compiler will appear very soon. Having been down the
RKM path, and enjoyed the experience, I believe Amos is a much
smoother introduction to a machine which is complicated. The
return on effort is more immediate. Amos Professional is worth
checking out for anyone who just wants to enjoy their machine.