Talent Graphics Toolkit

[RWAP]

I have recently been talking with Seumas Macmhicean (formerly known as Stuart McMeekin), who designed some of the graphics for Talent whilst he was at University.

He wrote the fractal program (Talent Graphics Toolkit) which was published in the Sinclair User Annual for 1986.

I have never come across this before - does anyone fancy typing it in or trying to OCR it - it appears on page 34, and pages 97-100 of the annual which can be found at: https://ia800306.us.archive.org/1/items ... al1986.pdf

[vezhlys]

I may try to do it if nobody else wants. Not sure how long it will can take though.

[RWAP]

I have to admit that we tend to forget how much you can learn from entering a type-in from a magazine and then tracking down the bugs you have introduced by mis-typing parts of the listing.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi Rich,

The scanning of the article was not good. So the OCR process did not do a good job.

I have typed the first page of the listing.

Is it worth putting this into Github or just type in the listing and make it availanle for download.

I have downloaded most of Sinclair User from Archive.org. But am only up to 1983 with the reading.

[RWAP]

If more than one person wants to help type this in, I would suggest uploading what you have done so far as an attachment on here, so someone can pick another page to type up - they can all later be merged and added to the Sinclair QL Homepage

[vezhlys]

Yes, OCR doesn't do good job. I'm also finished with the first page and working on the second currently. I am not familiar with SuperBASIC, some places are difficult to read from the scan and I am just guessing (especially difficult to differentiate colons, semi-colons, commas and dots). I believe I will finish next week the latest. Your version would be good to make comparison.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I will upload each page as I type them in.

As Rich says typying in programmes is a good way of learning the language.

Superbasic and Sbasic are really good implementations of the Basic language.

[stevepoole]

hi,
Does this post refer to the Talent Graphics-drawing GRAPHIQL program ?
If so, I would be interested to know if the 'Find area and FILL colour' routines could be made freeware for SuperBasic programs ?
They are very powerful, and if my information is correct, are very short algorithms.
(I have wanted these for decades, and believe that Rich has GRAPHIQL on floppydisc).
My own microtape version is no longer readable... and I most often use QPC2.
Best Wishes,
Steve.

[RWAP]

The post relates to a specific "Talent Graphics Toolkit" which was written for the Sinclair User Manual in 1986. This is actually a type of fractal drawing program written by Stuart McMeekin who did some of the graphics (loading screens etc) for Talent at the time; and who contacted me.

Unfortunately, GraphiQL remains a commercial program and there is no source code that I know of. I can of course provide you with a working version on disk.

If you can extract the Find area and FILL colour routines from the machine code, then I can ask Tom Dolezal who owns the copyright whether these could be released specifically as freeware for use as a SuperBASIC toolkit.

[vezhlys]

Initial version for review if somebody has time to do that (I didn't try to execute it and still need to review it myself).