････････････････････････････････Fantasmｪ and PowerFantasmｪ are brought
to you by Lightsoft and are copyright ｩ 1994, 95 and 96.-----Click the mouse button to exit this message････････････････This is Fantasmｪ V4.10. Thank you for registering! The views expressed in this message are not necessarily the views of Lightsoft but merely of one poor, starving, underweight programmer with sixteen kids, 5 cats, two budgies and a hamster to feed..., well, sort of......... but seriously, not a lot of people know about this scroller! ﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾑﾐIf this scrolly is running too fast, we appologise, but decided to leave out the hardware delays just to see how fast we could get it to run. If you are running in 4 colour mode, this text will appear strange a little later on.....
Hmmm, this monochrome text is a bit boring, how about some colour? □Ah, that's better. Amazingly enough, Fantasm is now entering it's □THIRD□ year on the Mac!! This is
quite incredible when you consider that it was only ever developed for our own
in-house use! We would like to thank all those of you that have registered previous versions, including the numerous educational and R&D departments taking site licences. We have sent Fantasm to all parts of the U.S.A., most of Europe (specially Sweden and Norway), U.K., Southern Hemisphere and even Japan. We have not once missed an order! Our only regrets is for the people with 68000 Macs - we are really sorry Fantasm won't run on anything less than an 020, but there is really very little we can do about it. Anyway, this
message will probably go down hill very rapidly, but we really must thank some
people first.......... Starting with, of course, good old □ðApple Computerð.□ They do make some amazing
machines! So lets "Give it up" for Apple - we know you guys can do it - don't worry about world domination, just get more Macs on more desktops and the world will be a better place. Oh, and Copland sometime this year, would be excellant, that's 1996 please.... ･････････････････････Secondly, all those talented MOD writers out there, without
which Fantasm would not exist････････････････Thirdly, we really must thank all our testers
- well done guys! Ok we can't guarantee no bugs, but having you people certainly
helps me sleep at night :-)....................... Ok, as I
promised, this message is going down
hill (and up as well). Ahem, hang on, slight technical problem....... □There we go, now then, where was I..... Version 4 of both Fantasm and PowerFantasm have taken ages to get working, mainly because
theres just a lot it has to do. You may be wondering why the price has
shot up by quite a large amount - well it's simply that V4 has taken a
tremendous effort to put together - you may think that an editor is a trivial
piece of coding - I can honestly say that Eddie (either you love it or hate it :-))
is one of the hardest pieces of
coding we've ever undertaken. One of Eddies' bugs took over 6 months to track down - it really was the mother of all bugs - and all due to a handle not being locked down when it should've been! (Expletive deleted) A word of advice - NEVER attempt to write a Mac
editor from scratch - if possible use TE - the memory management is just horrendous! Similarily you may say, that
compared to the 68k assembler, the PowerPC one would be a doddle - again not so
- RISC may mean reduced instruction set, but what you end up with is loads of
"extended instructions" all of which are pretty unique and can't be clubbed
together into nice groups like 68K instructions..................................Anyway, some information you may find
interesting....the original Fantasm V4 was written with Fantasm Versions 3.22, 3.5 and V4 (it was nice when we finally integrated Eddie with Fantasm - so much faster! V3.5
was never released as it runs under a development version of LIDE, but was held up by
problems with system software) Version 4.04 was produced with V4.02 - did we fix some bugs! 3 months for a "maintenance update"!............... Testing takes place ona variety of Macs and PowerMacs. We test under
7.1, 7.2 , 7.5.2 and 7.5.3. The picture above was done in Persistence Of Vision and post processed in Colour-it! Some artwork is done with Painter 4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . Hang on, I gotta turn off this sine thingy - it's driving me mad!.......□ Thats better...During development of hte (ARGGH - I hate hte's - for the rest of this message "hte"="the" ok? ) original V4, Apple went through some turbulent water. Now six months later, Apple have signed licensing deals with Motorola and I.B.M. - will we see an explosion of clones? Who knows... Either way, the Mac will survive! /¥/¥/¥/¥/¥/¥/¥/¥/¥/¥ We
hope you find Fantasm useful and enjoyable - please take the time to read the
manuals and get to know it - there is no limit to what you can do. If you feel
upto it, I would be eternally grateful if somebody, somewhere, would write an□□"Eliteｪ"□□ clone for the Mac - forget the fancy rendering and raytracing - just a
simple 3d space shoot em up with a bit of trading would make a mint in the
shareware market!!!!!! Quick hello's and thank you's go to:- G.H
Harwoods for supplying the hardware, Sam, Tam, Yanto, Tim and David,Michel Touchot for the excellent eDOCｪ package, any ex-amiga crews
now on Mac with Fantasm....... and likewise ex-ST crews. Sympathies with DOS crews :-)Thanks also go to: THE SWATCATS - brilliant :-) The amazing people
who have written some tremendous mods...including Aaron (probably called Tony), Mel o' dee
, ####moby####, Tyrell/dual crew - check out Axxess, it's great, FBY~~~~~~Big thanks go to the good folks at "wuarchive" for main taining one of the best mod collections on Aminet - thanks guys! Mr. Paul Carter for maintaining a great sound archive on MacLincs BB (+44) 01427 718950 and FINALLY, poor old "Algae" - that, believe it or not is what James has named his cat - the man has no limits :-) - I hope we have all the development sounds out of Eddie now - if not, errm, we're sorry - but the one where Eddie picked up that Fantasm had crashed was well worth it :-) Nope, just checked - they're all out - however please feel free to insert your own sounds using Resedit (great program) ･････････････････････････････････If you would like to put your own message in this scroller, simply edit the Fmes 128 resource. Don't worry about CR's - they are filtered. To toggle the colours use a 1.B and to toggle the sine thingy use a 2.B. Oh, one last thing - The upgrade to V4.1 will be free(as is this upgrade to 4.04) to all registered owners of V4 - we have lots of enhancements planned, mainly designed to make life easier. Like all good scrolly's, this one will repeat.... □ But not quite yet****************Big thank you's to our families - we spend far too long at the keyboard. We really appreciate our partners understanding in all that we do, and to them many kisses □XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - August 1996. □ (Thanks for all the bug reports - hopefully we can get on with the 4.2 stuff! ) Some dead handy Eddie tips....1. Get to know the comment/uncomment command in the Edit menu - very handy. 2. Tickle Eddie often - during development this has been proved to make Eddie far more stable (tongue in cheek a bit). 3. If you have an extended keybaord - WAIT for the scroll lock led to go out before double clicking your app on the desktop - so embarrasing to run an app before it's finished building :-) (Been there, done that etc.) B F N! □ The phantom scrolly writer will return in F4.2! Until then..................................Code on! □ □□
