GraphiQL

Your Sinclair

Max Phillips

Max Phillips tangles with TechniQL from Talent, takes on two new games and puts in for a transfer with Archive... FAX BOX Title: GraphiQL Publisher: Talent Computer Systems Phone: [redacted] Price: £49.95 Reviewer: Max Phillips Fifty pounds on the counter suggests that Talent's new 2D CAD package is no ordinary drawing program. And it isn't; it's a real Computer Aided Design tool for producing complex and accurate diagrams, such as circuits, floorplans, maps, flowcharts, construction plans and so on. These drawings can be much larger than the screen (in fact, you can only see a rather small chunk of drawing at any one time). You move around by driving the cursor off the edge of the visible area. Pressing PA then moves the window to show the drawing around the cursor position. This is very awkward but there's no way TechniQL has the performance to scroll as you move the cursor. It's quite possible to draw with the cursor off screen which is even nastier but at least there's a FIND CURSOR command if you manage to get wholly lost. The other way to handle big drawings are the ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT commands. Like something out of Blade Runner, you can zoom in or out as far as you like. (Although, unlike Blade Runner, you can't actually zoom into detail that wasn't actually there in the first place - now that would be good!). But you can reduce a drawing several feet wide to a single dot on the screen and then magnify it up so that you're looking at an area an inch wide stretched across the viewing window! And all the drawing and editing tools work at any zoom position - magic! The crunch comes when you want to print your huge creation. TechniQL is a bit weak here - it works by printing a drawing in up to nine vertical strips. And it only prints on Epson or Epson-compatible dot-matrix printers. Including the official Sinclair printer. TechniQL's other big advantage over common-or-QL Paint packages is that it's great at building up diagrams from pre-defined shapes and symbols called 'cells'. These can be elements of a floorplan such as doors, windows, tables and so on. Or electronic components in a circuit diagram. Each of the 74 cells in TechniQL is a complete drawing area in its own right (in fact, your overall diagram is just one big cell). You can set up the cells you need and then plonk them into position, scaling, rotating or mirroring them as you need to. Time, effort, memory... you name it, cells save it. If you change a cell, all the times where that cell is used on the diagram change too! And you can warp your mind by putting one cell into another and then dropping the second cell back into the first. To help make drawings accurate, you can 'snap' all the elements of your diagram onto a grid - this also helps in copying existing diagrams and roughs onto the QL. And the status window gives a precise readout of cursor position. Finally, If you've still got room left to understand it, TechniQL has seven layers of drawing. Imagine layer 0 as a piece of paper with the base drawing or it. You can then add sheets of clear acetate (posh tracing paper) over the top of it. with extra elements on them. So layer 0 might contain the basic floorplan of a house. The next might be the electrical wiring diagram. The next might be the position of the furniture and so on. If you happen to design silicon chips in your spare time, you'll recognise how useful this can be. You can switch the different layers on and off at will to view the whole shebang or just work on one particular level. This is a real help on very complex diagrams and also does a lot for the speed of the program. One very useful trick is to draw a rough on one layer and use it to position the final drawing on the other. Switch the rough off when you print and bingo! Beyond this, all the usual drawing tools are there; lines, circles, fills and so on. The drawing may be labelled using a special font made up from straight lines. This has the advantage that it can be reduced and enlarged without losing readability and the disadvantage that its capital letters only. Talent is promising a package with a range of fonts and a font-designer for TechniQL in the future. By and large, the actual drawing facilities are much the same as most painting programs (maybe it's because they all use the same QDOS routines...). However, Talent makes much of its Bezeir curve drawing algorithm for producing smooth curves. Watch it though - small curves look like a seismograph recording the noise of a planet falling off the edge of the universe. Kerrr-plonk! Using the program is much like QLPaint (nee GraptiQL) with unhelpful pop-up menus and cryptic one, two or three character key sequences. The QL chirps if you've got it right, blows a raspberry if you were close and does something you didn't want if you hit the wrong key sequence. You try remembering the difference between the EC and CE commands; the first selects a cell, which may have taken hours of work, for further editing. The second erases it instantly. Yuk! To reduce the chance for errors, TechniQL won't let you type ahead of the program. So it's still horribly slow even with expert users. All this is made much harder because Talent doesn't think that £50 is worth a printed manual. You get a compressed 45-page text file on the microdrive. If you don't want to print it yourself. Talent will bash you one out free. But only on receipt of your registration card - so you've got to wait. Nice program, shame about the scuzzy presentation. TechniQL may well be the most advanced QL program since Supercharge but its appeal is pretty limited. It must be the cheapest CAD system around if you don't already have a machine. That said, you can't use a plotter, you've got to put up with a rather fiddly user-interface and you really need an expanded QL.

A lonely island somewhere off the west coast of Scotland, faithfully reproduced in TechniQL.

Almost hit the deck - a streetplan of a town is now visible.

Zoomed in a bit, more details of the island are visible.

WHAT A PERFORMANCE It's important to understand how TechniQL actually works to get the most from it. Rather than storing your drawing as a bit-map like other programs, it actually records the commands used to create particular cells and the position they were used at. Every time the screen is redrawn, the drawing is built up from scratch in sequence. This approach, and a bit of clever maths, provides all the zooming, scaling, rotating, cell planting stuff in one go. It also allows the RE-EDIT command, where you can step through from a blank screen right up to your finished drawing, adding extras, correcting mistakes and so on! Plus it saves memory. The problem is performance. Even when you're zoomed out and can't see the detail of your drawing, TechniQL has to do all the calculations for everything just to make sure it's got it right. The same goes for something as simple as panning the viewing window sideways - sit back and relax as the program works out what actually goes where. Careful use of the layer facility can make using the program a whole lot faster but the basic problem remains. On a 128K QL, you're simply designing and drawing in slow-motion. If you're serious, get a memory upgrade!

Your Sinclair

Overall 6/10

Graham Rydout 6/10

THE COMPLETE QL SOFTWARE BUYERS GUIDE At under £200, the QL has started to look a real bargain. If you've splashed out on one already or you're considering taking the plunge this Christmas, you'll want to know just how much software is available for the machine. The answer is still not much but things are starting to look up. Graham Rydout surveys the field. THE LANGUAGE BARRIER Very soon after its launch eighteen months ago, the QL was blessed with a wide range of languages and a couple of 68000 assemblers from Metacomco and Computer One. Now that range has been further complemented. Title: Assembler Development Kit Publisher: Metacomco Price: £39.95 Rating: 6/10 Title: QL Pascal Publisher: Metacomco Price: £89.95 Rating: 9/10 Title: BCPL Development Kit Publisher: Metacomco Price: £59.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Lisp Development Kit Publisher: Metacomco Price: £59.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: QL C Publisher: Metacomco Price: £99.95 Rating: 9/10 All of these come supplied with the Metacomco full screen editor that has now become the QL standard. So much so, in fact, that Metacomco have licensed it out to other companies for inclusion in their packages. Title: Assembler Publisher: Computer One Price: £29.95 Rating: 7/10 Title: Forth Publisher: Computer One Price: £39.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Pascal Publisher: Computer One Price: £39.95 Rating: 6/10 Title: Assembler Publisher: GST (via Sinclair) Price: £39.95 Rating: 9/10 Title: Editor Assembler Publisher: Adder Price: £34.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Publisher: Hisoft Coming Soon This list will give you an idea of the range of Assemblers and language packages available from companies other than Metacomco Title: Mon QL (Microdrive) Publisher: HiSoft Price: £14.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Mon QL (EPROM) Publisher: HiSoft Price: £39.95 Rating: 10/10 Title: QL Monitor Publisher: Computer One Price: £24.95 Rating: 9/10 Title: QL Monitor Publisher: QJump Price: £24.95 Rating: 7/10 With only three disassemblers/debuggers on the market, HiSoft comes out tops with MonQL on EPROM but the others are expected to follow suit shortly. Title: QL Monitor Publisher: Digital Precision Price: £18.05 Rating: 2/10 This is a very simple package and suffers greatly from a sever lack of features - not one I'd recommend. Title: C Compiler Publisher: GST Price: £59.95 Rating: 7/10 This isn't a complete implementation of the language but it's well suited to the beginner. Title: Supercharge (compiler) Publisher: Digital Precision Price: £59.95 I haven't yet seen the finished version or this compiler out it promises to be a product that everyone can make use of. It's written by Simon Goodwin oi Zip compiler fame (take a look at Your Spectrum 3) and it claims to convert almost every SuperBasic program into fully multi-tasking 68008 code. Title: SuperBasic extension Publisher: QJump (via Sinclair) Price: £24.95 Rating: 9/10 Title: SEE (EPROM) Publisher: Hisoft Price: £39.95 Rating: 9/10 Of these two SuperBasic extensions, QJump's leads the way but HiSoft's SEE has some very useful facilities. It gives the QL true windowing capabilities and as it's on ROM you don't have to keep loading it in. Title: Microdrive Toolkit Publisher: Compware Price: £9.99 Rating: 5/10 Title: Microdrive Toolkit (with source code) Publisher: Compware Price: £34.99 Rating: 5/10 The toolkits change the QL#s microdrive commands into functions so that values can be returned and errors such as 'drive full' trapped. Title: Keydefine Publisher: Psientific Software Price: £9.95 Rating: 10/10 This is a complete key redefinition package that'll let you use the redefined keys in almost every QL package. You could, for example, define the P key so that when you press it with the Caps Lock held down, the current document from within Quill could be saved and then printed. Freebie programs provided are a fast copier (a multi-tasking directory lister that lists directories from within other programs) and a printer spooler. Title: ICE (EPROM) Publisher: Eidersoft Price: £49.95 Rating: 9/10 ICE (Icon Controlled Environment) gives the QL a full Icon based Desktop Manager and Frton End to QDOS. It removes most mundane file handling tasks and I can thoroughly recommend it. Title: WD Utilities Publisher: WD Software Price: Microdrive £7.50, 5.25" £10.00, 3.5" £12.00 Rating: 6/10 WD Utilities are a complete set of SuperBasic procedures providing a menu driven system to manoeuvre files. Title: Cartridge Doctor Publisher: Talent Price: £14.95 Rating: 9/10 If you're frequently visited by the 'Bad or Changed Medium' error message, you'll welcome this program. It's a fully automatic set of routines to recover corrupted and deleted files. Title: Q Doctor Publisher: Talent Price: £14.95 Rating: 5/10 If you prefer doing things the hard way, Q Doctor only allows you to load and edit sectors from the microdrive. Unfortunately, there are no similar products available for disk users. Title: GraphiQL Price: £34.95 Rating: 6/10 Title: M-Paint Publisher: Medic Price: £49.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Paint Master Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £14.95 Rating: 7/10 Title: Tascopy Publisher: Tasman Price: £12.90 Rating: 8/10 Title: Sprite Generator Publisher: Digital Precision Price: £24.95 Rating: 6/10 Graphic printers are a personal choice. GraphiQL suits highly detailed work but is extremely difficult to use. For dedicated artists only! M-Paint is a coloured clone of Apple's MacPaint. Simpler to use but a shade less accurate on detailed work. Least sophisticated at all, PaintMaster is none the less the most appropriate tor your average QL user. Its ability to compile a drawing into a SuperBasic program that then copies it makes it practical if you want simple illustrations within your program. All have simple screen dump programs but Tascopy copies all or part of the screen in a variety of shades. Sprite Generator does just that but it's a complex to use package that isn't worth the asking price. DOWN TO BUSINESS The high reputation of Archive, Abacus, Quill and Easel is based on their quality - it's not just that they come with the QL. Other companies haven't released similar packages because most people are happy with what they've got. Doubtless improvements could be made but I expect these'll come from Psion rather than an independent house. Title: Q-Spell Publisher: Eidersoft Price: £19.95 Rating: 8/10 Pore spillars will welcome Q-Spell - a full-spec spelling checker to Quill. But be warned! Extra mamory's needed to check your document with Quill still in memory. Title: Home Finance Publisher: Buzzz (via Sinclair) Price: £24.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Self Employed and Cash Trader Publisher: Quest Price: £69.95 Rating: 7/10 Title: Small Business and Accounts Publisher: Sagesoft Price: £89.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Payroll Publisher: TR Rating: 8/10 Of the accounting packages aimed at home users Smallbusiness is the most professional. It has integrated Purchase, Sales, and Nominal Ledgers. Transferred from the IBM PC it just goes to show that the QL can compete in the business world. Payroll provides a perfect complement and deals with data for up to 75 employees. Title: Decision Maker Publisher: Triptych Price: £39.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Entrepreneur Publisher: Triptych Price: £39.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: Project Planner Publisher: Triptych Price: £39.95 Rating: 8/10 The Triptych products help solve various problems and educate you in the process. Title: Equate (Microdrive and disk) Publisher: Flite Price: £39.95 Rating: 7/10 For mathematicians, Equate can solve most problems - polynomial, linear, simultaneous equations, differentiation, integration, curve fitting and various graphical problems. Title: QL Gardener Publisher: Gordian Computing Services Price: £24.95 QL Gardener is a database with information on over 1100 plants. Just a shame that the package won't dig or even weed your garden for you! QL ADVENTURES When you consider the QL's large memory and excellent graphics you'd expect plenty of adventures. But only three quality games exist, and they're all text only. Title: Lost Kingdom Of Zkul Publisher: Talent Price: £19.95 Rating: 8/10 Title: West Publisher: Talent Price: £19.95 Rating: 6/10 Title: The Pawn Publisher: Magnetic Scrolls (coming soon) Rating: 10/10 The Talents were released early on in the QL's history and they're still looking good. Zkul is based on the popular Dungeons and Dragons format and plays very well. West is set in the desert wilds - complete with menacing Indians. Few reservations about this one! The Pawn is extremely high quality, similar to that of the Level 9 adventures. It's set in the magical world of Kerovnia during a period at social upheaval and includes a very complex command interpreter that can understand commands as complex as "Get all except the cases but not the violin case then kill the man eating shrew with the contents of the violin case. Remove the shrew's tail and use it to tie the pole and the noose together!" See what I mean? This game's by far the QL's best adventure yet. A WINNING STRATEGY If you compare this list of strategy games for the QL with the selection for the Speccy, it looks pretty paltry. Still, there are some good 'uns here. Title: Chess Publisher: Psion Price: £19.95 Rating: 9/10 Computer chess takes on a new dimension with a full 3D board display that makes impressive use of the QL's graphics. Title: Match Point Publisher: Psion Price: £14.95 Rating: 9/10 Match Point is converted from the Spectrum and improved graphics make the game more playable. Title: Area Radar Controller Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £14.95 Rating: 2/10 This is a very poor aircraft control simulation written in SuperBasic. Title: Bridge Player Publisher: CP Software Price: £14.95 Rating: 5/10 Title: Backgammon Publisher: Digital Precision Price: £12.95 Rating: 5/10 Title: Reversi Publisher: Games of Skill Price: £12.95 (Coming Soon) Aimed at novices, Bridge Player and Backgammon are of little value to the experienced. Coming soon is Reversi - a full version of Othello. Title: Comos Publisher: Talent Price: £14.95 Rating: 7/10 Patrick Moores, stand by your QLs. This is an astronomy package that allows you to display star and solar patterns as seen from any place on Earth at any point in time. From the star map you can choose any star with the cursor to find out extra data. ARCADE ACTION This list of arcade games for the QL may produce a snigger from Speccy owners - it doesn't exactly rival the selection on offer to them. Still, it's growing all the time! Title: QL Cavern Publisher: JMF (via Sinclair) Price: £12.95 Rating: 7/10 A massive 50 screen Jet Set Willy clone with 395 gems to collect. Good value, with a good many improvements over the standard platform game. Title: Meteor Storm Publisher: Arrakia (via Sinclair) Price: £12.95 Rating: 4/10 A bog standard version of Asteroids. Title: Booty Publisher: Firebird Price: £9.95 (Coming Soon) A locks and doors classic on the Speccy that sells for £2.50. Microdrive problems push up the price on the QL. Looks impressive! Title: EVA Publisher: Westway Price: £12.95 Rating: 9/10 A Jetpack-style game with very large sprite graphics. The most annoying feature is the almost continuous sound. Title: Star Guard Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £14.95 Rating: 5/10 Title: Galactic Invaders Publisher: Shadow Games Rating: 5/10 Shadow Games range from the reasonable to the pathetic. This pair come on the one cartridge and are just copies of Arcadia/Invaders. Title: Night Nurse Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £12.95 Rating: 3/10 This uses Digital Precision's Sprite Package (see The Language Barrier) and it just goes to show that commercial games cannot be produced with it. Shame. Title: Quazimodo Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £12.95 Rating: 7/10 Reasonable I suppose, very colourful and should satisfy if this is your thing. I'd back it! Title: Space Paranoids Publisher: Shadow Games Price: £12.95 Rating: 4/10 Another Arcadia style game - hardly worth loading up. Title: Zapper Publisher: Eidersoft Price: £10.95 Rating: 6/10 Similar them to Paranoids but slightly better value. Title: Master Blaster Publisher: Compugem Price: £9.95 Rating: 8/10 Excellent shoot 'em up that puts the rest to shame. Very smooth animated graphics and a wide range of aliens. Title: Cuthbert In Space Publisher: Microdeal Price: £14.95 Rating: 7/10 Microdeal has a very varied quality range. Cuthbert's aimed at the younger game's player and the hidden strategic elements make it more than a quick shoot out. Title: Lands of Havoc Publisher: Microdeal Price: £19.95 Rating: 8/10 A well packaged 2,000 screen arcade that players very well but could've made better use of colour. Title: Crazy Painter Publisher: Microdeal Price: £12.95 Rating: 8/10 You can hardly call this an Arcade copy - it's so different. Crazeee! Title: QL FLight Publisher: Microdeal Price: £19.95 (Coming Soon) A flight simulator that's due for release soon. Title: Hyperdrive Publisher: English Software Price: £14.95 Rating: 8/10 The QL's official Pole Position - rather disappointing considering what could've been achieved. It's on a par with the Spectrum version. LET US KNOW... We've tried to make this guide as comprehensive as possible but a list like this can never truly be complete. If you own a piece of software, or if you produce one, that's not included here, tell us about it and we'll pass the info on to Your Sinclair's software hungry QL readers. The address to write to is Your Sinclair, [redacted].

Sinclair User

Talent is one the very few software houses to take the QL seriously, and GraphiQL proves it. An excellent graphics package, it offers full rubber-band design for boxes and circles, magnification and panning for detailed work on individual pixels, user-definable paintbrush, airbrush effects, textures and all the usual draw, circle, fill and colour commands. There's even a sketchpad facility for developing patterns. It's reasonably fast and easy to use. Included are demo screens and a remarkably clear instruction booklet.

ZX Computing

Also from Talent is the most impressive graphics package we've seen for the QL. We showed GraphiQL to Colin Christmas and he wanted to buy a QL to use this program on! For those of you who have been following his articles or those of you who are interested in graphics I'll give a quick breakdown of some of its abilities, freehand drawing in eight colours with optional flash, rubber banding including boxes, circles and ellipses, Doodle Pad, colour and texture fill, User definable brush (any width or colour), Air brush effect and many others. The manual consists of 63 pages of text which is split into two sections, a tutorial and a reference section. The manual trots gently through the commands and provides a firm foundation on which to develop your artistic talent. At £34.95 + 50p for p&p it is not cheap, but it offers the best facilities for CAD on the QL so far, and until someone produces something else and proves it to be better (not an easy task) we have no hesitation in recommending it.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 5/5

Chris Bourne 5/5

Publisher: Talent Price: £34.95 SuperBasic is not the ideal medium for producing good pictures on the QL, but the machine has the potential for graphics of great sophistication. Talent Computer Systems has now released GRAPHIQL to remedy the situation. The program is an aid for developing graphic screens, and incorporates several features which make it easy to construct complex designs with a minimum of effort. The most impressive of those is a magnification facility, which allows you to blow up any section to 16 times actual size in order to make adjustments to artwork. Eight colours are available, but stipple and airbrush 'splatter' effects are easily produced to give an almost infinite range of shades and combinations. That is done through the use of a doodle pad, which operates much as an artist's palette. By defining a small box on the pad, you can then fill it with patterns, ranging from abstract shading to brickwork or even a small house or tree. That pattern, called a texture, can then be painted onto the main screen. Freehand drawing is supported, but a variety of circles and ellipses, squares and rectangles can be produced using a 'rubber band' system where the shape can be stretched or compressed until it is satisfactory. You can recolour areas, rotate and reflect shapes about the screen and use a 'paint brush' of any thickness. The manual supplied with the program is 60 pages long, but to their credit the writers have decided to assume users have no experience whatever and spell out each operation in great detail, with examples and suggestions. In fact, after reading through the manual once and trying the examples as you go, you should be able to remember most of the command keys available. If the program has a fault, it is in speed of operation, which is a little slow if you already know exactly what you want to do next. However, Talent has packed a great deal into the package, and uses it to produce its own title screens, which is surely one recommendation. Certainly anybody interested in computer graphics will want to own GRAPHIQL.

Sinclair User

DOCTOR RETRIEVES DATA Help is at hand for budding QL programmers from Glasgow software house Talent. A comprehensive graphics package has been released to enable full-screen or part-text graphics pictures to be drawn. The package includes facilities for 16 x magnification of any part of the screen plus the ability to pan the magnified picture. Other facilities include fill, routines for 'rubber' circles and ellipses, airbrush effects, reflection and rotation. The package costs £34.95, and comprises two microdrive cartridges. Talent is also releasing a Microdrive Doctor utility, which will retrieve corrupted data from a damaged cartridge. It will apparently deal with cartridges where data has been corrupted by faulty saving and also where the tape has suffered physical damage. Whatever data can be salvaged is transferred to a new cartridge and the contents listed. A spokesperson points out that commercially protected software cannot be copied using the utility. "It is not part of our policy to encourage piracy," she says. The product costs £21.95 and should be available as you read this magazine. On a marginally lighter note, CP Software are among the first established games companies to produce conversions for the QL. The first program to be released is Bridge Player, based on the Amstrad version of the game. The game allows the use of Stayman, Blackwood and Gerber bidding conventions, and full facilities for play, including doubledummy play, and standard play. The game retails at £18.95.