Kaleidosprite
by Colin Cassidy

I am sure we all remember those fascinating kaleidoscope toys with their ever-changing patterns. The program here does that and very much more, creating never-ending and fascinating sequences of patterns (generated by dragging masked sprites across the screen and reflecting a portion of the screen eight times). The display is constantly updated, but can be paused at any time by pressing 'P'. Pressing Escape briefly will start a new sequence of patterns, while pressing and holding down Escape will return to the Desktop.

Real kaleidoscopes use the random arrangement of coloured chips of glass to make a pattern. The electronic equivalent is a sprite file which can be created in Paint or an art package, and should contain ten or eleven mode 13 (or mode 15) sprites. These sprites do not have to look like or be called anything in particular, but in general should be colourful and ornate (some coloured outline fonts work well), approximately 100 pixels square and collectively occupying no more than about 160K. They should be created with a mask, all unused pixels being made transparent (specified in the initial dialogue box).

For a more accurate (but probably less interesting) representation of a kaleidoscope, try removing the REM keyword in line 350 of the !RunImage file.



 RISC User 1993
