| AMOS TOME Series IV Manual Index |
|
|
66 |
TOME Series IV is now the result of around three and a half years development work. The first proper version of TOME was developed back in 1989 specifically for the game YOMO, written in STOS on the ST and released as part of Mandarin Software's "Games Galore" package. TOME V1.0 was a short (768 byte) machine code bank, and a 1 screen editor, where only about a third of the screen could be used to display the map. TOME Version 1 was never released, except for about 4, which were sent out as temporary packages to those that had put in very early orders for TOME V2.0.
V1.0 is a rarity, as even I've only got one copy, and that's somewhere at the bottom of a disk box !
TOME V2.0 was the first production version of the system, being released on the ST for STOS. It was on 2 disks (360K disks were the standard on the ST at the time), had an 18 command extension and an editor more along the lines of the current one, in that it had a main menu, which selected sub menus. Several amazing features, such as the help mode, user tile palette, random draw and block (STOS TOME's equivalent of a Brik) fill were also introduced in this version. To date, TOME V2.0 (and the slightly later V2.1 which introduced the edge scrolling commands) have been used on several projects, not just on the ST. Despite being blown away by TOME Series IV, TOME 2.1 is the most powerful map editor on the ST still, and still ranks among the top 10 most powerful map editors available
When AMOS was released we started work on the Amiga. After quickly writing TAME (The Temporary AMOS Map Editor) to go with the AMOS package, a program which I'm not incredibly proud of, as we were told it had to be finished in two weeks, had to work in 512K and had to use menus (as AMOS didn't have a menus demo at the time). As menus are not something you would want to use with a map editor, TAME didn't come out too well, and we got started on TOME Version 3.0 before everyone lynched us !
TOME V3.0 was the first AMOS add on to be released, on March 8th (my birthday) 1991, 3 months before the AMOS Compiler ! Version 3.0 had 27 commands, full niceness controls (2.0 had limited control) and thanks to the power of AMOS it had multiple screens in the editor, making the user's life even easier. Because of a low budget, the manual was written as a hyper text program on the actual TOME disk. Despite problems with the installation program on the first 30 disks released (Which was immediately rectified by sending out new disks) TOME V3.0 took off, and soon all the major AMOS programmers were using it. With the release of the AMOS Compiler, TOME V3.1 was released (with upgrades being sent to all the V3.0 users) and TOME had grown to 36 commands The TOME Goodies Disk 1 was also released around this time. In early 1992, TOME V3.2 was