THE ADVANCED OCP ART STUDIO Review by Paul Hughes Advanced Art Studio from Firebird Licensees; imported from Rainbird in England (as the 21st Century begins, most programs like this are available only on the used market). Advanced Art Studio is an incredible art package for the price, power and value. It can be found at some mail order houses as low as $26.95. It comes with attractive packaging, two user manuals and two diskettes. This art package will become the standard for many years to come. It has almost every command or function that any computer graphic artist could ask for in ONE package. Among its many AMIGA-like features that are standard in both the high resolution and multicolor modes are windows, icons, pull-down menus, and pointing devices. There is full control over attributes of color. All information is on screen - no need to repeatedly switch between the picture and a menu screen. Art Studio is compatible with multiple input devices - keyboard, joystick, mouse in joystick mode, and Koala pad. It supports Commodore and Epson compatible printers plus a user-defined printer driver option. Save, load and merge pictures to or from cassette or disk. There are 16 pens, 8 random sprays and 16 user-definable brushes to draw with. Window areas can be cleared, inverted, cut and pasted, enlarged, reduced, squashed, stretched, flipped and rotated. Solid and textured fill option, with 32 user-definable patterns and a wash texture feature. Three levels of magnification (2x,4x, 8x) with pan and zoom, pixel clear and plot. Text in 9 character sizes, 2 directions, bold and rotate with a comprehensive Font Editor with clear, invert, flip, rotate characters or whole font, copy ROM, and capture font from window. Standard shapes like: lines, points, rectangles, triangles, circles and rays with point or elastic rubber-band facility. Hires mode has snap into color grid. Undo facility for last operation. Enhanced facilities in the Multicolor version of the program are as follows: 48 sizes of grey scale dump, continuous display of cursor, coordinates. Cursor speed control, and cursor may reflect the current ink color, current pattern or pen or may be shown as a cross-hair to aid alignment. Color priority and exclusion lists, enabling powerful manipulation of all colors, such as drawing behind areas of the screen and ignoring any colors during cut and paste operations. Multicolored patterned fills, 12 user-definable patterns from 1 x 1 up to 12 x 16 can be saved to and loaded from cassette or disc with Comprehensive Pattern Edit Facility. There are 12 user-definable multicolor brushes. Windows may be saved to disc, enabling libraries of picture elements to be compiled and called up onto the screen at any time for rapid picture creation. Windows allow color change facility. Program setups may be saved to cassette or disk and reloaded automatically. Automatic loading of specific character fonts and patterns on program startup. Multicolor version has in Text mode 9 character sizes, 4 directions, bold and italic with variable spacing. 91 User-definable font characters with comprehensive editor. Fonts may be load from and saved to disk. The two very well-written and profusely illustrated manuals, which accompany each disk for each mode, will have you becoming a computer graphics artist in no time. The manuals wonderfully explain the different resolution modes and their inherent limitations as well as what is a pixel and color blocks for the novice. I highly recommend this Advanced Oxford Computer Publishing Art Studio Package for the first time computer graphics artist as well as the experienced computer user. It cannot be beat on price, value, power and ease of use. You get two disks, two manuals for the price of one and almost very feature a computer graphics artist could ask for in one comprehensive art package. (From The Commodore Information Center web site (http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)