Section 9 of this User Manual is devoted to the AMOS Professional Interface. You should be warned that this is a very advanced feature of the system, and will take a while to fully understand, even for experts! Unfortunately there can be no short-cuts with such a technical subject, so please persevere.
Introducing the Interface
Imagine the possibilities of including all of the features of the AMOS Professional Editor inside
your own programs, and that they can be controlled directly from the screen via icons, buttons
and selectors!
How about a state-of-the-art graphics adventure, with selection boxes for the commands and an interactive inventory on the screen. Or a set of direction keys that display all of the available movements from the current location. Simple simulations could be transformed into complex fantasy worlds, arcade games could have interactive hi-score tables, and animations could be conjured up by the actions and reactions of the player.
Perhaps you are interested in more serious applications. Then imagine an animated data base, complete with intelligent dialogue boxes, or powerful calculators that appear above your program listings on demand. Even the humble File Selector could be transformed beyond recognition!
You can stop imagining now, because all this and more is already available. The control panels used by the AMOS Professional Editor were not written in assembly language or C, they were produced with the help of a built-in dialogue creator which we call the AMOS Professional Interface, and it is waiting to serve you!
The Interface is directly available from your AMOS Professional programs, so anything the Editor can achieve, you can do too! What's more, you have instant access to all of the original Editor messages and graphics, allowing an effortless matching of your own programs to the existing AMOS Professional style. Since the Editor messages are saved as part of the configuration file, it is simple to generate multi-lingual programs, with prompts and buttons available in a variety of languages.
There is no need to rely on the default settings, and graphics can be designed from scratch, using 16, 32 or even 64 colours. A powerful Resource Creator is provided on the Accessory Disc, allowing images to be grabbed from any IFF picture, and immediately assigned to your icons, buttons and requesters.
And if that hasn't whetted your appetite, see all of this theory in practice now, by running the following ready-made example program:
LD> Load "AMOSPro_Tutorial:Tutorials/Interface/Full_Example.AMOS"
The need for the AMOS Professional Interface
Experienced AMOS programmers will know that the features demonstrated in the above
example program could also be created using standard AMOS screen zones, so why is a separate
Interface language required?