David Seaman has come out with 3 rather complex programs on one disk/ddp called /GROOVY GRAPHICS/ selling for $19.95.The first thing you should do (after making your backup copy of course) is to print out the readme file and then the 3 doc files through SmartWriter before booting the disk. Now after sitting down,reading the documentation and feeling totally confused by words you might not of ever heard before, don't worry it is not really as complicated as it appears.

Here is a brief description of the three programs included in this package.


CELLS-This program is the easiest of the three and is an adaptation of John Conway's "Game of Life".Alot has been written about it in Scienctific American's "Mathematical Games" and "Computer Recreations" columns.This program displays an 88 x 127 array of cells at about 2-3 generations per second.I tried drawing my name and then I viewed and printed it in the first 4 or 5 generations with some nice results.


LISSAJOUS-First of all a Lissajous figure is a type of curve made by plotting points whose position in one direction is determined by a sine wave,and whose position in the other direction is determined by another sine wave,usually of a different frequency and phase.These figures are usually made with a frequency generator and an oscilloscope.A few advantages of this program over the traditional method is that it allows the curves to be saved and printed out;it allows two different sine waves to be mixed on each axis;and it allows a third axis to be represented by color.This program can make some stunning pictures with different color pulsating sine waves.


IFS-This is a technique for making fractals and stands for "Iterated Function System".With this program you can make shapes and textures that you can save and then use with different painting programs.I made triangles,leaves ect... with this program and then printed them out with twice the resolution in each direction as is displayed on the screen using my dot matrix printer.David says there is a good article on this technique in BYTE magazine,January 1988,called "A Better Way to Compress Images".


Some of the nice features of these programs are the use of SMARTKeys (S-key I gives you one full help screen in all three programs and S-key VI is used to finish what you are doing or to switch modes) and if you press the print key you better make sure you have paper in your printer because it prints right after you touch the key.I might add that you must have a dot matrix printer to print out with this program.You can also make full use of your controller pad in various parts of the programs.Another nice feature is when you try to save a picture in the RLE format and forget to take the program disk out of the same drive you are writing to you get an I/0 error and then you just put in the other disk and it works fine.


I don't see how you can go wrong with these programs even if you just used CELLS which is the easiest program to learn considering you get all three for $19.95.I am sure once you learn how to use all the programs within /GROOVY GRAPHICS/ you will realize all the different shapes and pictures you can create.


RATING-A