TIP OF THE WEEK

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NEWS ARCHIVE

11 Sept 2002 - LoMem.def and Traffic Lights
Frank J.R. Hanstick has produced a carbon/classic LoMem.def include file for Fantasm, while Frank Feuerstack has sent in a small example project for OS 9 and earlier -- Traffic Lights. Both of these are available in the User Area.

22 May 2002 - Drawing Things From Scratch In Carbon
Part one of a two part series explaining the basics of a Carbon Application written in C. The emphasis is on both what you need to do to run either on 'Classic' MacOS or MacOS X along with Anvil configuration and using LIDE to build C applications.

27 Jan 2002 - New RandomRob?
Yep, RandomRob #7 examines Intel versus PowerPC clock speeds.

24 Jan 2002 - New Stuchat?
Not quite, but his current development diary/ramble can be found here.

21 Oct 2001 - TechNote 2030
Apple have just published TN2030 - GDB for MacsBug Veterans. Most useful!

10 July 2001 - Order processing shutdown 20 to 30 July 2001
Please note that due to holidays no orders will be processed between the 20th and 30th of July 2001. We apologise for any inconvenince this may cause.

30 June 2001 - LinkPPC PEF Carbon V2.09 beta 1 Posted
For those of you wishing to port Fantasm PPC apps to OS X we've posted a beta version of the current Carbon Linker. Because Carbon is such a moving target we've taken to using the Stub Libraries to define the exports from Carbon. Link PPC PEF Carbon 209 requires you to place the Carbon Stub Library in your Anvil Standard Libraries Folder. Once you've done this you can use all the exports from Carbon including Multimedia (Quicktime) and Networking as found in the latest Carbon builds. Be sure to edit your project to change the linker to LinkPPC PEF Carbon (and throw away any old Carbon linker you may be using)! In addition you can also link against existing shared libraries such as DrawSprocket, MathLib etc. Be aware that you should check Carbon Imports at runtime as quite a few of them are defined as being soft linked (NewSndCallbackUPP for example).

Download LinkPPCPEFCarbon209.sit. Includes CarbonStub1.4a3. 96K

30 June 2001 - Misc News
1. Ranko Bojanic has been busy and has posted more Fantasm example projects on his web pages: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~bojanic, just look for the link "RGB color interpolation related Fantasm projects"

2. We've just passed half a million hits on these WWW pages (501,077 to be exact) since the April 1999! Now I know that MacinTouch can probably manage that in a day but it is very gratifying to see this level of interest. I thought you may be interested in the way our hit count has risen since 1999:

I suspect things are only going to get better for Lightsoft as we move onto OS X, maintain Fantasm as the only real hand rolling assembler for the Mac, release our first game and generally move forward. We've been around a long time (and bloody proud of it too!) and look forward to being around a lot longer. In the meantime I'd like to thank all our customers; all the people who emailed us over the years with interesting comments and ideas; all the people we've worked with on products and finally the nice people who host this site for us (never been off line AFAIK).

Stu.

1 June 2001 - Simple Carbon App#2 - Ajay Nath
Ajay has kindly posted another Fantasm 6 project showing the basics of building an application for MacOS X.
Download [40k]

25 Apr 2001 - Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 Update #1 Posted

This update improves compatibilty with the Classic environment under OS X. Please see the Fantasm/LIDE package downloads page for download and details.

17 Mar 2001 - OS X and demos?
With just under a week until the release of MacOS X we take a look at what this means for demo coders. Is it going to be easier or harder writing demos for OS X? MacOS X and Mac Demos - The Opportunities.

13 Mar 2001 - René Trost releases MacMoorhuhn.
Rene posted to the Fantasm mailing list that he has released his first game, MacMoorHuhn.

Hi Folks,

I've finished my first game and it's written in 100% pure PPC-Assembler :)

The game is named MacMoorhuhn and features a nice graphics with a 6 layer
parallax-scrolling, 3D-Sound, HighScore to Web-Server and it's freeware!

For all who are interested to see it, download it here:
http://www.coolmedia.de/macmoorhuhn/MacMoorhuhn.sit (~264KB)

The game also requires two DAT files "gfx.dat" and "sfx.dat", you have to
download separately:
http://hosted.barrysworld.net/macmoorhuhn/files/MoorhuhnData.sit (1.9MB)

Simply move the files "gfx.dat" and "sfx.dat" into the MacMoorhuhn folder...

There is also a little web site about MacMoorhuhn but currently only available in German (I'll translate it tonight) at
http://www.coolmedia.de/macmoorhuhn/

Greetings from Cologne,
Rene.

This is a great game; good a for a quick frustration removing blast [Stu]

06 Feb 2001 - Call to arms! Clarus is in dire need!
In a current pre-release beta of Mac OS X, Apple removed the beloved Clarus the Dogcow from not only the Printer setup/page options, but the entire system. This cannot be allowed to happen; Calrus has always been there for us developers, through good times and bad she Moofed when needed! Luckily a petition is now on-line where you can help prevent this travesty happening.

Please do the honourable thing.

Thank you.
Fluff.

23 Jan 2001 - Fantasm 6 / LIDE 3 OS 9.1 compatibility, OS X.
We're pleased to report that both Fantasm and LIDE run with no problems on OS 9.1, no updates are necessary.

We're waiting on the final release of OS X before continuing development of the OS X versions of Fantasm and LIDE.

30 Nov 2000 - Simple Carbon App - Ajay Nath
Ajay has kindly posted a Fantasm 6 project showing the basics of building an application for MacOS X and how to use the Carbon Event Manager. More details and download in the User Area.

18 Nov 2000 - Fantasm and LIDE for OS X
More news in the Developer Preview Area.

8 Nov 2000 - Fantasm and LIDE for OS X
Phase 1 is complete. Anvil lives on X. See the Developer Preview Area for details and screenshot.

6 Nov 2000 - Fantasm and LIDE for OS X
Well the winter nights are truly here now. It's dark, cold and I've been moved into the dungeon. Makes a nice change from a tower I suppose. Anyway, it's at this time of the year when we start thinking about what we want Anvil to be doing this time next year. What users need, what we need and generally how to make some money to keep the server going :)

This year it wasn't a toughy. For a long time we wanted to use GCC and all those cool Nix tools, and we wanted to write assm for Nix as well. Now as fate would have it, catching us completely unawares (yeah, right), the Mothership decides to release a brand new OS based on BSD with an Apple gooey on top*. Imagine Fluffy's delight when she found this out!

About three weeks ago there were socks everywhere as she rushed out of the bottom draw 'swooshing' towards the dungeon. Ever since the whole place has been reverberating to the soundz of Faithless 'Sunday 8pm' along with Chris Rea, Floyd, Sky and of course Bjorn Lynne.

And the girl's doing well! I managed to 'claw' this shot off her earlier today...

The Developer Preview Area is now open again after its quiet holiday in the South of France. We expect this testing period to follow the release of OS X closely and considering the fundamental change in the underlying technologies we'd really appreciate your feedback. We'll be bringing not only Fantasm to OS X but also integrating GCC, GDB et al. We expect the first test release shortly which will be Anvil running on OS X integrating Fantasm and our tools. MrC and C++ will continue to run in the Classic environment. As we add more we hope to integrate GCC and GDB. We'll also be providing guides (a porting guide springs immediately to mind!) and hints and tips about coding for OS X in general.

So, wake up in the back there! If you haven't already got hold of a copy, get yer order off for OS X and...

Code on!
(In a brave new world)

(*You can read more about this in an upcoming Stuchat)

27 Sept 2000 - Building MacOS X/Carbon applications with Fantasm and LIDE.
I could write a big piece here about MacOS X and how you can now write Apps for it with both Fantasm and LIDE.

After being quiet for so long I can hardly resist the temptation! Unfortunately I fear they'd take my Mac away and replace it with something rather less wonderful (such as WinME - hiss!)

So. Instead, I'll keep quiet and just point you to this page where you can get all the bits needed to build both Assm and C carbon apps which run under X just fine. Example C and assm apps included.

We should point out that this is pretty 'bleeding edge' stuff. Use at your own risk.

9 June 2000 - iQuest finished.

Well the annual demo compo came and went; it's all over now. Whilst we didn't have the time to compete this year a Fantasm user certainly did and came a very credible second with a FantPPC entry Pixelstorm; not bad for a first try! Big congratulations to René Trost.

We're hoping René will release the project so we can all see what magic he's been weaving. For more info see:
The Mac Demo HQ where you can download all the entries.
The Fantasm Message Board.

23 May 2000 - LSResToFile Posted

This tiny project performs the highly useful task (if you need it that is...) of extracting all resources from any Mac file to individual data files named as TYPEID, where TYPE is the 4 char type code and ID is the actual number of the resource as 5 ascii digits. We were unable to find a utility anywhere to do this (well, not for free anyway) so this was quickly hacked up. LSResToFile was written primarily to aid porting Zex to other platforms, but it may be useful in other areas as well. Complete project (LIDE 3 C project) includes executable and source. Freely distributable as long as the source goes with it.

Download LSResToZex- 20K, Stuffit 5 archive.

13 Apr 2000 - The PowerPC Assembly Language Beginners Guide Chapter 8

Is now available. Chapter 8 discusses the PowerPC architecture in a little more detail and looks at some optimisation techniques.

11 Apr 2000 - Fantasm 6 and LIDE3 are released.

Lightsoft is proud to announce the release of Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3. Fantasm 6 is a Macintosh assembly language development environment. LIDE 3 offers the same functionality as Fantasm 6 and also integrates Apple's highly optimising MrC and MrC++ compilers. For more details please see the Fantasm page.

We have released three packages as follows:

1. The CD. This contains the full LIDE 3 (inc Fantasm 6).

2. The net download of Fantasm 6. (Basically LIDE 3 without the C/C++ functionality)

3. The net download of LIDE 3.

Pricing is as follows: Fantasm 6 net download - 45 UK pounds or 74 US dollars. LIDE 3 net download - 50 UK pounds or 83 US dollars, LIDE 3 CD - 65 UK pounds or 107 US dollars. These prices are down on version 5 pricing which was US 122. The CD version also allows you to get the net download of LIDE 3 whilst waiting for your CD to arrive. This will allow people to register a product and get it within a day or so by download rather than having to wait days or weeks for their CD to arrive.

The sizes of downloads are: Fantasm6 - 11 MBytes, LIDE3 - 17 MBytes. These packages include the full versions of the software and roughly 25 examples.

We have dropped our upgrade services in order to lower overheads. Users that are currently subscribed to the old upgrade service (anyone who bought Fantasm 5 in the last 12 months or subscribed to our upgrades service) can get a free upgrade to LIDE 3 by emailing us (details to follow). Customers that are out of date can upgrade for a flat fee (probably in the $40 range for the net download of LIDE 3 and $60 for the CD).

12 Mar 2000 - I can't believe we forgot this but... Anvil 3 colour sets. All Anvil 3's posted so far have not had any colour sets posted with them. You can download the latest by clicking here (7K .sit.bin).

Place the folder of colour sets next to Anvil then select MISC->CHROMA COLOURS->LOAD COLOUR SET from Anvil's menu. If you create a useful colour set Send it in...
For use with both Fantasm6 and LIDE3 downloads.

12 Mar 2000 - Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 The latest and greatest (and last) public test versions are now available for download. These are complete packages containing nearly all you need for both Assm and C/C++ development. Includes updated docs and all changes to date. Please see the Developer Preview Area for details.

5 Mar 2000 - A Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 updater is now available in the Developer Preview Area . This update will take both public test versions to FC6 status. FC6 expires 30 Apr 2000. The update requires that FC5 or FC4 is correctly installed.

Bug fixes for FC6 - All Anvil.
1. Fixed major slowdown when a CD was in the CDROM drive.

2. Fixed Anvil's Eject CD menu command. Now works for all drives all the time

3. Changed "About box".

4. Re-enabled Anvil's boredom timer. It's set to about three minutes. To see this in action ensure you have the stress-o-meter on (Anvil's general prefs) and just leave Anvil alone for a few minutes then watch das blinken lights.

5. Added a few more jokes to Anvil's boot up speech definitions. Obviously speech must be enabled in Anvil's General Prefs and the speech manager must be correctly installed for this to work.

Don't worry if you've lost sync with these test versions, a full test release of both packages is planned for next weekend complete with updated docs.

1 Mar 2000

A few short notes about various items worthy of mention...

1. The latest versions of all Ranko Bojanic's excellent Fantasm projects are available from his own web pages at http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~bojanic.

2. Yes, I've buggered the CD player in Anvil 3fc5. A bug which was cleared in fc4 is back; specifically a delay on menu access when a CD is present in the drive. What's happened is that some thrid party CD drivers do not return an error when I try to read the TOC on a CD if the CD is data (as they should - i.e. it's not an audio CD). So, I've changed the code for something more robust but it seems that on some machines (iBook for example) this causes a major slowdown. We'll get a fix for it.

3. Bit late on this one but it's time for the annual demo compo - iQuest 2000. Click HERE for the PR. You've got 'till 23:59:59 GMT on May 31st to get your entries in.

More details at:

http://www.sfu.ca/~akirczen/iQuest/ (Canadian mirror)
http://www.multimania.com/blopblop/iQuest/ (French mirror)

Stu.

20 Feb 2000 - Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 updates are now available in the Developer Preview Area . This update will take both public test versions to FC5 status. FC5 expires 30 Apr 2000.

20 Feb 2000 - Change of mailing address

After some major down-time (whilst moving) we're now back into a semi-serviceable state again. We're a little behind on order processing (due to Macs being in boxes) so please bear with us on that front as we catch up; if you have an order outstanding it will be processed in the next few days.

We are also behind on development but the next (and last hopefully) test version which will be out shortly. It looks like the last set of test releases was pretty stable and fixed a few long-time outstanding bugs.

Please also note Lightsoft's new "snail mail" address:

Lightsoft Software
205 Lindores Drive
West Mains
East Kilbride
Glasgow
G74 1HG
U.K.

Lightsoft email addresses are of course unaffected by the move.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you; we are catching up with outstanding work as fast as our little fingers can go.

1 Jan 2000 - Random Rob #5 is out bang on cue (not bad seeing as Rob has had terrible flu for the last week or so). RR5 covers:

Inventions of the last 200 years
Genetic Algorithms
Riven
Storage
A quick look at some OS's.

30 Dec 99 - Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 updates are now available in the Developer Preview Area . This update will take both public test versions to FC4 status. FC4 expires 28 Feb 2000.

28 Dec 99 - StuChat #38 After a pretty long gestation period, StuChat 38 is finally out. This is an extra large Millennium release containing amongst other things discussions on:

MOD Players
Fantasm - History & Future
ArcTan (Part III)
Late Night Conversations - A.I. Revisited.

6 Dec 99

Fantasm 6 and LIDE 3 Public test versions now available for download. These are complete packages containing nearly all you need for both Assm and C/C++ development. Please see the Developer Preview Area for details.

Screensaver 2 A new example project from Ranko Bojanic is available in the User Area.

20 Nov 99

Fantasm Mailing List Changes Subscribers to the Fantasm mailing list will shortly receive an email invitation to join a new mailing list called (funnily enough) "Fantasm Users", hosted on eGroups.com. This list will replace the current, somewhat clunky, mailing list in an effort to improve service to customers.

Should you wish to join this new mailing list either visit our mailing list page or send an email to: fantasm-users-subscribe@egroups.com

Wot menubar? Pascal Central has posted an article showing how to (correctly) hide and show the Mac menu bar from both Pascal and Fantasm. Useful stuff.

Fantasm 6 news Fantasm 6 (not yet released) will be distributed via secure on-line delivery. No decision has been made as to whether a Fantasm 6 CD will be available at this time. This will allow us to reduce the price through lower overheads and improve bug-fix response time. It is possible two versions will be available; Fantasm 6 for 68K and PPC assembly language work and LIDE 3 for 68K and PPC assembly language work (Fantasm), along with C and C++ via the MrC and MrCpp compilers.

Existing registered Fantasm 5.xx customers will be able to use their current Fantasm 5 licenses and registration numbers for LIDE 3.

We hope to post the first complete public test versions of both packages within a few days.

14 Nov 99 - Documentation for Fantasm 6 / Anvil 3 The complete documentation package for Fantasm 6 / Anvil 3 has achieved draft 1 status. This is an initial release for feedback purposes. Documents in this package replace those posted in the part 1 package posted 19 July 1999. For more details and download please see the Developer Preview Area.

30 Oct 99 - Fantasm 6 FC2 and MacOS9
Users running a prerelease version of Fantasm™ 6 on MacOS9™ should visit the Developer Preview Area for the latest compatibility information.

30 Oct 99 - The User Area has been updated with a new Fantasm 6 project called Edit Fields Demo from Ranko Bojanic along with updates to his MiniPlotter and OSARunner projects. Edit Fields Demo shows how to use Editable Text fields from within a Fantasm program.

As always, our sincere thanks to Ranko for making these available.

30 Sept 99 - Fantasm 6 FC2 released!

11 Sept 99 - The User Area has been updated with a new example project; PlaySID. Rene Trost.provides interface and example usage of calling SIDLib from Fantasm. SIDLib emulates the C64 Sound Interface Device; this demo plays one of my all time favourite tracks - the title music to Wizball by Martin Gallway (the music that is..).

Fantasm 6 project with source (the source should also work with Fantasm 5) and docs. Our thanks to Rene.
See 1 Sept for standard note re: Fantasm 6.

1 Sept 99 - The User Area has been updated with a new example project; OSA_Runner..It shows how to run a compiled AppleScript from a Fantasm progam. Complete Fantasm 6 project with source and notes.
With thanks to Ranko.
Standard note: OSA_Runner is a Fantasm 6 project and won't open with Fantasm 5, or if it does you'll be in trouble shortly :) Fantasm 6 is available in beta form at the Developer Preview Area. (Guess we'd better get round to actually releasing F6 one of these days... Actually, we now have a tentative date set for the release of Fantasm 6. Woohoo! Just one more test version, I promise).

28 Aug 99 - Interesting link of the week is to New Scientist and an article about how Genetic Algorithms (GA's) are being used to design very efficient analogue circuitry. OK, nothing at all to do with Fantasm, but we thought you may find it interesting.

For more on GA's see StuChat 36.

5 Aug 99 - A tool update for Fantasm 6FC1 is available for download in the Developer Preview Area.

3 Aug 99 - Fantasm 6 FC1 released!

23 July 99 Ranko Bojanic has updated Miniplotter including a new rational approximation for cosine. See the User Area for details.

19 July 99 The first part of the Fantasm 6 documentation package is available for download from the Developer Preview Area.

17 July 99 We are testing the Lightsoft Support Forum, a new facility we hope will build into a useful archive. Please go give it a try!

17 July 99 We have completed our move to the new server and most things should now work as expected.

14 July 99

hello (again!)

Welcome to our new home! We have moved our pages to a new server which offers us more features and speed. Some facilities are not yet working but we hope to iron out the bugs as soon as possible. Stay tuned!

Lightsoft

29 June 99 Many archives on this site are compressed with Stuffit™ version 5; unfortunately earlier versions of Stuffit Expander simply will not recognise these newer archives. For your convenience you can download the latest version from this link (Aladdin Systems).

22 June 99 loonygames has a series of articles discussing solid design and coding methods from a game authors point of view. We thought you may find them interesting.

21 June 99 As industry speculation grows about Intel's apparent problems with Merced some information is starting to appear for the G4 processor. See Description and Block Diagrams. These are large GIF's (450K), the links to which were originally posted on Accelerate your Mac! A much smaller (27K) block diagram is available here.
These links may be transient in nature.

18 June 99 - Fantasm 6b10. Hot on the heels of beta 9 comes beta 10. This one corrects a bug in the syntax coloring introduced in b9 and adds C++ project management and building. Please see the Developer Preview Area for details and download.

Please note: These beta versions of Fantasm 6 and Anvil 3 are not intended for non-registered users and require a valid user license to work. We may make the final candidate a public test; if you think this is a good idea let us know. Either use the support forum or email.

14 June 99 - Fantasm 6b9 posted. Please see the Developer Preview Area for details and download.

11 June 99 - Fantasm Master Class #2 published.
Abstract: This document will present an example of accelerating a C function using Fantasm.
The example chosen is that of replacing a C based pixel doubling blitter with a faster version written in PowerPC assembly language. [More]
(There's also an index of Master Classes available from the menu in the bottom frame).

2 June 99 - Two Additional Projects for The Beginners Guide To PPC Assembly Language Chapter 7 have been posted courtesy of Ranko Bojanic.

18 May 99 - User Area Update.
Ranko Bojanic has come up with rational approximations for both Sin and Atan functions along with an update to Mini Plotter. Download from the User Area. (Updated 2 June).

2 May 99 - Feedback Re: StuChat 36/Genetic Algorithms
It seems that Genetic Algorithms (GA's) may have been used (or at least could be used) in games as off-line AI constructors whereby some gene pool is allowed to run for a couple of hours, then the results codified into some form of AI driving structure. Anybody with any thoughts on this are welcome to send them in for posting on these pages.

2 May 99 - Feedback Re: StuChat 36/Atan
Following my discussions with Ranko ref: sqrt (as detailed in StuChat36) Ranko sent some additional material detailing a more accurate atan algorithm. I have appended his notes to the page.

2 May 99 - A Better Square Root
Robert Purves has sent in an article and code discussing square root algorithms. Read A better square root. (Also added to the docs index)

22 Apr 99 - LXT V2.00 available
Lightsoft Cross Translation V2.00 is available for download now. Version 2.00 adds improved code generation (major improvements in some cases), translation of more Mac OS calls and the ability to generate address checking code before any instruction that reads or writes from/to memory, thus offering bullet proof runtime quality assurance. More details and download here. Requires Fantasm 5.1x or greater.

21 Apr 99 - Coffee Break
A few releases (OK, two) close to my heart. Firstly eDOC has been updated to support URL access which'll mean yours truley can now reformat all the docs for Fant 6 and you can just double click over a link in eDOC to get the latest info. I spent part of today with the dreaded Acrobat Reader digging out the SPR mnemonics from the 750 UM and I have to say that Reader is verily a true pile of poo. Talk about grind! I figure it'd need something like a 1.5 GHz processor to make it feel nippy. Yuck.

Secondly, a wee while ago Addiction Interactive released Rainbow Painter at version 0.91. I believe the whole lot is written with Fantasm. It's a fast 16/32 bit painting/editing program with its own colourful interface - why not go DL it and give Mandus and Rasmus some feedback.

Yesterdays Coffee Break has been moved to archive in case you were wondering where it had gone.

17 Apr 99 - StuChat #36 posted
Containing such delights as sqrt, arctan and genetic algorithms

4 Apr 99 - CodeWriter Update
Cliff Harris has released an update to that ever so useful (if not down right indespensable) utility for us Assm programmers, CodeWriter. Version 3.10 is available from the User Area.

Cliff also has a page listing his diverse range of software here. (How come ALDL don't work with VW busses:))

27 Mar 99 - Mini Plotter
Mini Plotter is a full project (and very nice, useful one at that!) from Ranko Bojanic
Mini Plotter allows one to enter function variables and get a graph drawn of the result. Details in the User Area.
Standard note: Mini Plotter is a Fantasm 6 project and won't open with Fantasm 5, or if it does you'll be in trouble shortly :) Fantasm 6 is available in beta form at the Developer Preview Area. (Guess we'd better get round to actually releasing F6 one of these days...).

13 Mar 99 - FTP Updates
Ranko Bojanic has updated both Random Walk and Evaluation of sines.

Note that these are Fantasm 6 projects and won't open with Fantasm 5. Fantasm 6 is currently in beta test and is available to registered users via a download from this site.

11 Mar 99 - Idle Gossip
StuChat 34 is out.

5 Mar 99 - Some light hearted relief
Mr Dennis (or Ian to you and me) has updated his pages with an analysis of some of his favourite games from a coders perspective -- errm, sort of. (Truth be known, that's just his fave games from this weekend!). Take a peek.

With any luck I'll get a chance to do some actual programming this week! Ah, I remember it well -- the matchsticks, the potty under the desk....

4 Mar 99 - Demo Compo Ahoy!
A press release issued today by those ever so nice people at Stone Entertainment gives details of a Mac Demo coding contest.

The general media sites seem to be completely ignoring it which is a bit of a (not completely unexpected?) shame.

Anyway, the general idea is to write a Mac demo in under 64K (Wow! A whole UNIVERSE!) by May 1st.

So if you need a little challenge get over to: http://www.stoneentertainment.com/contest/
or click here to read the PR as posted (should their server be overloaded with requests <G>).

1 Mar 99 Home Sweet Home.
Welcome to our new home! Today is Lightsoft's third birthday, so we thought we'd celebrate by moving everything onto a new server and getting an address that would be easier to remember :)

Visible changes are that the downloads and user areas now link to our ftp site, and the Fantasm mailing list has been moved. Indeed all our www pages are now (for the very first time folks) on the same hard disk.

If you have items in the user area (now living in the pub/downloads directory of ftp) please check the info and version - we would appreciate the latest version if possible. We still have some tidying up to do in there.

Members of the Fantasm mailing list should receive an email shortly providing the new mailing address, however, if you don't want to wait for us to "port you over", please feel free to subscribe yourself. We took a snapshot at 0700 yesterday morning, so if you subscribed to our old list after that time, you need to resubscribe.

Plus we also have nice new email addresses which should be easier to remember - a full list will be published shortly.

If you have any bookmarks to any of our pages, please update them - old pages will wither and die.

Have fun and please report bad links or outdated email addresses - this has been a HUGE overhaul and we do expect some bugs. Please bear with us and thanks.
Cheers,
Stu.

Anvil Trois...
The API for Anvil 3 has finally settled. Anvil 3 has a new and faster API known as the Client Command Processor (CCP). It provides a superset of the original calls and thus breaks no exisiting tools. The new calls are mostly aimed at supporting high level translators such as compilers and providing additional project manipulation support and abstraction facilities.

A draft document describing the calls is now available as a self reading document (.SRD, 90K). If you want to plug your compiler or tool into Anvil 3, this document describes each call and the calls you will receive in some detail. Possibly not bed-time reading.

28 Oct 98 Fantasm 5.30 has been released
The main enhancement in version 5.30 is support for the AltiVec(tm) instruction set. Version 5.30 also contains bug fixes and tweaks applied to the never released version 5.22.

All registered users have been emailed the update. If you are a registered user and have not received your updated software there are two possible reasons:
1. Your subscription to our updates services has expired and you have not resubscribed. Details of how to re-subscribe are available on this page.
2. Lightsoft does not have a valid email address for you.

In the case of (2), please contact us at your earliest convenience quoting your current email address and Fantasm license number. We will then send you the latest update and documentation.

In related news, the demo of Fantasm is for the first time a fat build and contains most of the tools included in the full distribution. The demo will run for 30 days. It will not allow the creation of new projects.

16 Oct 98
Alok Menghrajani (http://alok.hypermart.net/) has made available two projects in the User Area; Life (a classic if ever there was one) and ImageReader. Both are Fantasm 5 projects with source.

11 Oct 98
StuChat 33 is available in The Programmers Dream covering such goodies as the state of Fant 6 development, a rant about OS8.5, a PPC bitclear macro and cats.

MUSIK
Looking for some music to ease those long coding hours? Why not start with the WMR where you can find reviews of over 280 mods suitable for use with AnvMOD. Alternatively if you prefer a more unstructured approach, why not try Aminets extensive archive.

Demos!
If this is your first visit here, or you have been away for a few months, you may be interested in some Mac Demo's. We currently have two crackers on-line - "The '98 New Years Demo" and "Scumble". Both of these are worth a run just to see what you can do with with a PowerMac and Fantasm. Go to our Downloads and Updates page and have a look. Alternatively you can download from here:

Scumble | New Year 98 Demo

19 Mar 99 - Site Updates
Random Walk and Evaluation of Sines were erroneously posted as .sea.hqx files to FTP. They are now reposted as .sit.hqx files.
For something completely different, we've also got our guestbook working (finally) so please feel free to go fill it in and let us know how we're doing!

13 Mar 99 - Searching for...
A new search page is being tested which will attempt to search most of this site. Feedback is more than welcome. Is it useful or not?

10 Mar 99
Evaluation_of_sines is a complete project available on FTP. Written by Ranko Bojanic it shows how to call MathLib functions (amongst other things). In particular it highlights the integer register skipping when passing mixed float and integer parameters to OS functions along with the management of controls such as buttons and text boxes. Note that this is a Fantasm 6 project and won't open with Fantasm 5.

6 Mar 99 - Problems, problems
We are aware of a problem when doing a clean install of Fantasm 6 beta 5 (i.e. you haven't installed previous betas). The problem appears when building; the software issues an error stating it has expired.
Any user experiencing this problem can email us requesting a fresh folder of beta 5. Please include your license number in the request and check your mail server can handle a 2 meg attachment before requesting the software. Thanks.

4 Mar 99 Quick site fixes.
More links have now been activated on this server: docs, links and list archives.

4 Mar 99
Continuing this weeks somewhat unnatural preoccupation with all things MathLib...
A new .def file for Anvil defining MathLib exports is available on ftp. It goes without saying that to use these functions you need to add MathLib to your project. And remember, floating params start at f1!

3 Mar 99 A walk in the park.
Ranko Bojanic's Random Walk project and a very small example showing how to call trig functions out of MathLib have been added to our ftp site.

Our thanks to Ranko.

Filenames: random_walk.sit.hqx and
trig functions.sit.hqx

1 Mar 99 - Rrrrrrrr.
Rob's been busy and has produced Random Rob #4, available in The Programmers Dream.

Did you know...
That if you email us after placing your order for Fantasm, we can email the basic software package and license to you almost immediately?

21 Feb 99
Fantasm 6/Anvil3 beta 5 is now available for download in the Developer Preview Area.

19th Nov 98
Nathanael Hübbe has posted some Fantasm macros in the User area.

18 Oct 98 - Fantasm Master Class.
This article by one of Fantasm's authors, demonstrates how you can use Fantasm's more powerful features to achieve a goal that at first seems either impossible or expensive. It explains how you can use Fantasm to automatically verify memory writes at run time from your code and stop if the instruction would write outside of your application heap. This will catch many bugs that can be extremely difficult to find

04 Oct 98
Paul McAllister has posted "Password App" to the User Area.

19 Sept 98
Ajay Nath has posted URLtility version 1.1. This version uses (and shows how to use) Navigation Services. You can download the complete Fantasm 5 project and find out more details in the User Area.

6 Sept 98.
Paul McAllister has been busy again and has posted "Dancing Girl" and "Colour2Greyscale" to the User Area.

1 Sept 98.
Paul McAllister has posted "Trinket" to the User Area.

Onwards PowerPC...
MacKido has an interesting article on future PowerPC directions. Click here to read it.

LXT
LXT version 1.05 is now available for download. (220K, .sit.hqx, docs included).Version 1.05 fixes a bug in translating the 68K st (Set True) instruction to PPC.
LXT is a 68K source to PPC translator and is quite capable of translating huge 68K assembly language projects to PPC. LXT is a free and supported product for Fantasm 5 owners. Requires Fantasm 5.10 or greater.

Mac assembly language articles
We are slowly but surely authoring and collecting probably the largest collection of modern Mac assembly language articles and code in the world. If you feel you could contribute a snippet, an article or some code, then send it in. We aim to foster a spirit of community. Meanwhile, why not check out some info?

Complete Beginner?
Try our Beginners Guide to PPC assembly language.

Apple Docs...
As Apple continues it's developer resources reorganisation, keeping track of various links can become difficult. Currently Inside Mac is available from the link below.
Inside Mac

USERS!
Check out the Fantasm User Area for some Fantasm Projects and Utilities written by users.

Looking for hard coding information?
Try The Programmers Dream.

25th July 1998
Chapter 7 of the Beginners Guide To PPC assembly language is now available.

9th July 98. Anvil 2.21 Updater
is now available in the Updates area. It fixes a crash in the native version of Anvil when Nav Services are installed and "this files preferences" are changed.