CURRENT NOTES                                           DEC '87/JAN '88



                                  TACKLE BOX V.2

                           Review by j. Andrzej Wrotniak

         Although coming from an independent source, this is a related product
     (being marketed by OSS).  I am writing this review with very mixed
     feelings.

         Tackle Box is certainly the heaviest piece of software for the Atari
     ST, containing two disks of ARCed files (roughly 50% of it GDOS fonts)
     and the biggest imaginable folder with nicely printed documentation.

         The basic part of the disks are libraries of procedures to access
     various GEM and TOS functions in a way very similar to the one used in
     the Alcyon C library in the Atari ST Developer's Kit.  If you do not like
     the decisions made for you by the authors of Personal Pascal, now you may
     make all the calls in the more elementary (sometimes less convenient) way
     -and no feature is unaccessible any longer.  More -as the calling
     sequences almost exactly match the C ones, many of the published examples
     in C may be easily ported to Pascal (who said C is a write-only
     language?).

         This is the principle.  However, when some of the routines seemed not
     to work properly, I went into the enclosed Pascal code.  Unfortunately,
     what I found can be described as a mess.

         If a student taking a programming class tries to return results from
     a procedure by a value (as opposed to VAR) parameter, he just fails a
     test.  If a professional (and whoever charges money for his work pretends
     to this name) does the same in more than 100 separate instances in the
     same library, this means, that: (1) he did not even bother to test his
     product properly ("seems to work just fine..."), (2) something is
     generally wrong.

         Many of the Tackle Box routines have their exact equivalents in the
     Personal Pascal system libraries (peek/poke,VT-52, date/time, screen
     buffering and numerous others).  This also leads to unnecessary confusion
     and may need some cleanup work.

         There are also some other pieces of very ugly programming in the
     enclosed math library, so the code is not very useful, unless you are
     willing to devote some time to do a solid cleanup work yourself.

         On the other hand, I do not regret my 70 dollars spent for the Tackle
     Box.  The enclosed GEM and TOS documentation is as complete as the one
     coming with the Atari Developer's Kit and -in most cases -better or much
     better.  In many places the author provides additional detailed
     explanations; in other places, he limits himself to just rephrasing the
     DRI documentation, errors included.  True, 1/3 of the thick book is just
     a xerox copy of the Motorola 68000 chip, but the remainder contains many
     quite interesting items, including the memory map, useful information on
     the sound generation (proper procedures and a demo program enclosed), and
     others, some of which I am still discovering one by one.




                                    ST - 1 - ST




      CURRENT NOTES                                           DEC '87/JAN '88



         To add all this (and more) up: do not expect the Tackle Box to be an
     off-the-shelf subroutine library: well-written, tested and ready to use.
     However, if you program in Pascal (not necessarily the OSS one), and if
     you feel you need access to more features than the OSS high-level
     libraries provide, then the Tackle Box may be for you.




















































                                    ST - 2 - ST


ors becomes a painful
    experience.  A fix for this can be provided by using a handy (though