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STOS corner

Martin Milner looks at Anthony Hoskins' Falcon Extensions...

Over the last few years Anthony has developed six new extensions for the Falcon, with others under development, providing a great deal of control over the machine. These extensions are:

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* System Control: Allows things like setting the processor and blitter speed, switching the processor caches on or off, cookie detection, bus manipulation and others. If you have Nemesis installed, you can control the speed at which it runs from within STOS with this extension.

* Grafix II: Provides replacements for many of the STOS graphics commands such as PLOT and BAR which also now work in the the Falcons 16/256 colour modes. It also can perform the printing of STOS fonts in these resolutions. There are also functions to define drawing modes and fill patterns. By using the new commands, I've been able to get the Sprite editor to work well on the Falcon.

* Video: Provides commands to detect the type of monitor connected, get or set screen resolutions, get the amount of memory required for specified screen resolutions, mouse commands for the extended resolutions (along with a new pointer), zone commands, palette commands, ST low to 16/256 colour palette and image conversion commands, GEM font handling commands and others too.

* 3D Menu: Provides a whole new set of menu commands for use in Falcon 256 colour resolutions.

* DSP Tracker Player: Plays tracker modules using the falcons DSP chip for better quality and less processor slowdown.

* DMA Sound: Gives complete control over the Falcons DMA sound subsystem, including commands to reset it, allocate internal record and playback buffers, record samples or play samples at given frequencies and many others.
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Support
If you register the shareware version of Anthony's Falcon extensions, you get a massive bundle of software complete with many example programs to try out along with excellent support - Anthony is very knowledgeable about many aspects of the Falcon's inner workings. If you use STOS on a Falcon this is a must-have. Available from any good PD library.

Gemma
On the reader disk this issue you'll find an archive containing the latest available version (0.98) of the Gemma extension which allows the use of GEM dialogs and more in STOS programs. It's still early days yet, but watch this space!

Stop Press
I've just received news of another new extension in development. Currently support is in place for:- Joypads in ports A & B, the Atari Team Tap, Digital Paddles (these return values like clockwise or anticlockwise which is ideal for driving games), Analogue joysticks, Analogue paddles (a variation of Analogue joysticks) and finally Dynabuster adapters (these allow a pair of "normal" joysticks to be used in each EJP) - more news as development progresses.
Anthony Hoskin has now added a FLI/FLC (animation) Player extension which works well and added more commands to the Video extension.

Next issue I'll take a look at Anthony Jacques Falcon extensions along with some of the other STOS related stuff he's been working on recently.