Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

1In the last part of this
guide to multimedia,
Phil South looks at
animated buttons
and sounds
happen by using the mouse, and now
L ast well month look we at making talked about buttons making onimate things so
IIMED that the user gets a bit of feedback for his
mouse click.
You'd be surprised how many Amos programs
omit any kind of feedback, that is to say a visual or
audible cue to confirm that a mouse click has been
mode and accepted. If you make your buttons with
Amos drawing commands this couldn't be easier.
let's take our example program from last time and
odd animated buttons
keserve lone 3
Set Zone 1,10,10 To 30,10 Set Zone 2,35,10 To 51,30
Set Zone 3,60,10 To 80,30
Curs Off : Cts 0
Ink 2 : Bar 10,10 To 30,30
Ink 1 : Bar 12,12 To 30,30
Ink 7 : Bar 12,12 To 21,28
Ink 2 : Bar 15,10 To 55,30
Ink 8 ; Bar 37,12 To 55,30
Ink 7 : Bar 37,12 To 53,28
Ink 2 : Dar 60,10 To 80,10
1
Ink 8 : Bar 62,12 To 80,10
Ink 7 : Bar 62,12 To 71,28
Pen 2 : Paper 4 : locate 0,8 : Print "Ctiek tke
dove buttons to sake a noise.'
Do
SOUND SENSE
Its tempting to use the built-in sounds for oil your Amos programs, mostly
because the sounds ore right there and the commands are simple
Type BOOM, BELL or SHOOT and you are there I olways use them in examples
because they are so easy, but you can odd other sounds to Amos very
easily.
Sound sampling has always been an easy technology on the Amigo. Most
of the hardware you need to grab sounds is built in to the system, and with
the addition of a simple I/O box you can sample 8-bit sound into the Amiga
directly. To use your own samples, like a button on o computer keyboard
being pressed, you hove to pock the samples into a sample bank (Amos Bank
or ABK file), which can be loaded into an Amos program From where the
samples can be played bock at any time in the program using the SAM PLAY
command. Using:
SAN PLAY 1
for example, you will play the first sample in the bank. For really interesting
multimedia with the minimum of sounds you should steal a trick from the
arcade game coders and ploy back a sound at different speeds, thereby doubling
and tripling the amounts of uses you can put a single sample to Use
the
SAN PLAT 15,1,1000
Formal where 15 • maximum number of voices for best sound quality, 1 •
sample name from the bank, and 1000 • samples per second, with 1000
being around the lowest and 30000 or more being the highest. The only way
to tell what different speeds will do to your samples is to try it and see. You'll
be surprised at the amount of ideas this will give you.
-;antatiatiNIMININIT
1
1
AMIGA 1 COMPUTING
1MAY
1996
-v
i
t
a
r
t
3
PP
Loot
Perfect
buttons
AMOS Professional Sample Bank Maker
Version 1.141
By Francois Lionet
Copyright 1992 Europress Software Ltd.
Nouse Zone
CnNouse Ctick
If Col and 2.2 Then Boos
If Ces0 and 1.3 Then Shoot
The basic listing sets up the zones and senses
when a mouse dick has occurred. This time if we
reverse the white and dark grey colours on the
button it'll seem as though the button has been
inverted.
So for each button we need to do a redraw each
time the button is activated So after the button is
pressed we redraw it with the colours reversed,
wait for half a second, and then redraw them the
way they were, as in this example for the first
button
47P Mgt7ONNI=18777.1.111MININ,
Bank: not named
Nom Name Bytes
'4 567
9
.113
2
11!
Empty
ur„ 1 , 1 4 L I
APAOS's sa mple e ditor is not the be st the re e ve r wa s but it is, a t le a st, inte gra te d
into the progra mming e nvironme nt, ma king it e a sie r to incorpora te sa mple d
sound into your multime dia production
IT co(' and 241 Then Bell Ink A: Sir 10,10 To
30,30 : Ink 2 : Bar 12,12 To 30,30 : Ink 7 : Bar
12,12 To 28,28 : Wait 25 : Ink 2 : Bar 10,10 To
30,30 ; Ink 8 : Bar 12,12 To 30,30 : Ink 7 : Dar
12,12 To 28,28
We only reverse the white (colour 2) and the dark
grey (colour 8) colours and leave the body of the
button (colour 7) as it is. After o wait of 25 clicks
(half a second in new money) we redraw the button
the way it was, as if the button pops down for a
second and then pops up again.
It's easy to rewrite all this information onto the end
of the line as you simply do a block copy and paste
with the code from the original lines which drew
the buttons in the first place. This saves having to
laboriously retype all the data for the buttons, but it
also avoids any mistakes in the data if it is identical.
USE YOUR INTUITION
One last thing I've reviewed o lot of extension add'
ins for Amos over the years which make the program
access the Intuition libraries. Don't neglect Intuitionbased
programs in your search for the perfect multimedia
app. One such extension is reviewed in this
very issue, in fact) Multimedia doesn't hove to be
carried out on custom screens using Amos, but can
be made perfectly transparently with Intuition, and
sound samples and other additional multimedia bits
con be added. If you are really clever you can even
interface the Amiga with other devices to make your
Amiga truly multimedia, But that's up la you and
how much code bonging you want to get involved
in. All the relevant data for taking this further is in
the Amos manuals and the various hardware
reference works.
Back to our normal transmissions next month
when we'll be learning how to make Amos do all
sorts of clever tricks again. I'll be delving into my
Amos notebooks to remind you of a few little tricks
which are not in the manuals and showing you easy
r± : • 7-1I1W51.11M111111MINIC' "111.1.11.11r18.1
ways to make tricky things possible, See you then, orni
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