Who Works at Home, Why, and How You Can Join Them How ...

COMPUTE!
specific
Butcher is a strange amal
gam of image-processing rou
tines, though related functions
are grouped into menus.
Among the effects you can
achieve arc toning, comple
ment, false colors, pscudo col
ors, and edge enhancement.
The more unusual features in
clude screening, diffusion, and
mosaic. It's really enjoyable to
load a digitized picture and try
these effects.
Although Butcher works
with overscan mode (which al
lows a picture to go beyond the
normal edges of the screen), its
support of HAM {Hold And
Modify) mode is limited. You
can convert 32-color images to
4096-color HAM images and
back, but the conversion is dis
appointing, leaving color
smears along some edges. And
worse, you can't perform very
many of the image-processing
routines on HAM images.
However, future upgrades are
planned. The next one is likely
to solve this problem.
PhotoSynthesis is the new
kid on the block. A nice fea
ture of this package is its programmabilily:
You can write
script files to perform a repeti
tive or complex set of imageprocessing
steps. For those
who would rather not program
their own image processes,
many operations arc available,
including addition, subtrac
tion, thin, ihicken, average,
and more.
PhotoSynthesis is power
ful, but it's not very easy to
use. This program isn't for art
ists or casual users but is better
suited to the professional.
PIXMate sets the stand
ard for future image proces
sors. It's fast, easy to use, and
it converts images to all stand
ard Amiga modes, including
HAM and EHB (Extra Half
Brite). All of its operations can
be done in all modes.
PIXMate uses the Amiga's
blitter to perform its opera
tions, making the program ex
tremely fast. PIXMate
supports many color effects,
but its real power can be found
in its Image Processor win
dow. The full range of logical
operations (not. and, or, exclusive-or)
is supported. Eight
pixel operations are included.
These perform four different
types of smoothing, two types
of image sharpening, and two
operations that remove select
ed pixels. Two matrix opera
tions are also included. These
are the Laplacian and edgedetection
operations, two op
erations that bring out the
edges of objects. Three slider
controls affect the severity of
all operations.
While the manuals for
Butcher and PhotoSynthesis
arc adequate. PlXMate's is
excellent.
Jet Flies High
Jet is a new flight simulator for
the Amiga by SubLOGIC
(SubLOGIC 713 Edgebrook
Drive. Champaign, Illinois
61820; 217-359-8482; $49.95).
While SubLOGICs famous
Flight Simulator demands pa
tience and care. Jet appeals to
the arcade players who just
want to get the plane up in the
air and start flying.
Jet was first developed for
the IBM PC, but the Amiga
version uses the computer's
graphics system to make the
game look better and feel more
responsive.
Jet puts you in the seat of
an F-i6 Fighting Falcon or an
F-18 Hornet. You can choose
simply lo fly around (a great
way to explore the SubLOGIC
Flight Simulator Scenery
Disks) or dogfight computercontrolled
MiG fighters. If you
have two Amigas, you can
connect them via their serial
ports and take on a friend in
aerial combat.
You can see the action
from a variety of viewpoints.
One of the best is a missile-eye
view, which lets you visually
ride along with your missile.
Jet feels realistic. The tar
gets are solid three-dimensional
objects, and you even cast a
shadow. Jay Miner said that he
designed the Amiga to be the
perfect flight simulator ma
chine. Jet shows that he knew
what he was doing.
Fast OS Face Lift
Version 1.3 of the Amiga oper
ating system should be in the
stores as you read this. Al
though it's being touted as a
cosmetic change, it makes the
Amiga significantly faster and
easier to use. Version 1.4.
promised to be a more exten
sive revision, is expected early
next year.
Version 1.3 comes on
three disks. It will ship with
new Amigas and be available
to current owners at a small
price (Commodore used this
approach when they released
Version 1.2).
The first disk is Kickstart
1.3. Since only Amiga 1000s
use Kickstart on disk, owners
of newer Amigas must replace
a ROM chip. Kickstart 1.3 is
most useful to those who want
to boot from an external de
vice like a hard drive or recov
erable ramdisk. If you have an
Amiga 500 or 2000. and you
aren't interested in booting
from an external device, you
don't have to replace your
Kickstart ROM to be able to
use the new Workbench 1.3
and Extras 1.3 disks.
The word that best de
scribes the new Workbench 1.3
disk is speed. Workbench 1.3
includes the Fast File System.
which speeds up data transfer
by a factor of 7 and lists direc
tory contents ten times faster.
Unfortunately, the Fast File
System speeds up all types of
drives except the floppies. This
will be remedied eventually.
The most obvious change
in Workbench 1.3 is its new scl
of printer drivers, which run
about six times faster and per
form color correction and
smoothing. In addition, many
new printers are supported. A
new Preferences screen (which
can already be found in prod
ucts like ProWrheand Shake
speare) allows you to select
among several options to finetune
your printouts.
Workbench 1.3 also con
tains a new math library. If
you have a math coprocessor
chip installed, the library will
use the chip automatically. If
you don't have a coprocessor,
the new math library still oper
ates several times faster.
In an effort to accommo
date the quickly expanding
Amiga desktop publishing
market. Commodore has
added three official Adobe
fonts to better integrate the
Amiga with PostScriptcompatible
laser printers.
To speed up text display,
Workbench 1.3 includes Fast-
Fonts, a svstem that makes
text scrolling and paging sever
al limes faster.
Many new commands
and utilities have been added
to Workbench 1.3. including a
text reader and a program that
lets you execute batch files
from the Workbench (especially
useful for running compilers, as
semblers, and other programs
that were previously CLIbound).
Those who would rath
er stay in the CL1 environment
will benefit from command-line
history and editing features.
— Rhett Anderson
If you're used to the black-andwhite
world of Macintosh,
(and even if you're not), you
might find questions like Does
it do 24-bit color? and state
ments like a palette of16 mil
lion colors a little hard to deal
with. What do bits have to do
with colors, and why in the
world do you need 16 million
of (hem?
Maybe you don't need ev
ery one of the 16 million, but
you need a lot more than you
think for true-to-life color ren
derings on a computer screen.
Even if you can't name every
color in the 64-count box of
Crayolas, your eye can discern
minute gradations of color, or
lack of those gradations. You
need more than 256 colors for
good shading, and once you go
past 256, you get to 16.7 mil
lion or so.
A black-and-white display
is really one-bit color. Every
dot on the screen is either on
or off. black or white. In the bi
nary language of computers,
44 COMPUTEI