Just for the lulz : Imagery

Does anybody remember Imagery? It was a “commercial” graphics program given away on the front of an Archimedes Acorn World cover disc back in 1993. I say commercial in quotes because I’d never heard of it prior to that.

Anyhow, one thing that I noticed back in the day was an “Overlay” directory containing a number of small BASIC programs. This tipped me off to the idea that the entire program might be in BASIC. After less time looking at the program than it is taking to write this sentence, it turns out that the complicated protection system works by basically loading a wodge of data into memory, decrypting it (EOR!), then messing with PAGE to push the newly-arrived BASIC code into view. The non-existant “*Imagery” command at the end of the loader is never executed.

I just happened to come across this a few days ago buried in a backup disc. Actually, it was the zip file from the cover disc… no, I lie, it was ArcFS. God, I’d fogotten about that… Whatever, a blast from the past presented itself, so, given the core of the program is in BASIC, it remained to crack the installer, 32bit the assembler code, and the LZWFiler module. Thankfully the assembler code pretty much didn’t bother restoring flags, didn’t set V except one place, and didn’t do anything weird as it runs in USR mode. As a result of that, all of the conversion work took… oh… about as long as it takes to brew a decent cuppa.

Here’s a middling-quality (for bandwidth) screenshot of it running on my Pi2:

And here’s a download if you’d like to play with some software that is a mere quarter century old:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/imagery32.zip (about 80K)

These are both (archive and the image) being served off my Pi, so grab ’em quick!

Note: I don’t own this software, I don’t claim to own this software, and the only references I can find for John Whigham (the author) is that he wrote White Magic / White Magic 2 for The Fourth Dimension. 1992/1993 predates the Internet and ubiquitous email…

Hi Rick

I remember using this program on my A3000 and then when i uopdated to RISC OS 3 it stopped working and I tried altering things but could never get it to run correctly.

Anyway I’ve tried it on my HV 5.23 ROM Pandaboard and it locks up on the splash screen and even using Aemulor does’t help so it may not like something perhaps screen modes available?

Anyway I’ve tried it on my HV 5.23 ROM Pandaboard and it locks up on the splash screen and even using Aemulor does’t help so it may not like something perhaps screen modes available?

Similar behaviour on ARMX6 – ie Splash screen made from two sprites – title and horse.
The freeze is escapable using alt-break.

Strange. It shouldn’t need any particular screen mode as it is a Wimp program. It is working on my 1280×1024 16M display.

Oh, that’s bizarre…

Insert the following just before the line that runs !RunImBAS:

Set Imagery$File ""

I don’t know why this didn’t bite me earlier.
The archive on my site has been updated.

Known problems:

• As shown here, checking for a system variable that might not exist and not using an X form SWI is… dumb.
• Moreso when your error handler expects to be in a Wimp environment and thus fails when not in the Wimp. The program locked up because the error handler was causing an error which was causing an error which was…
• And, by the by, the font menu and font handling in general is pretty messed up. You’d best stay away from using fonts.

2410 IF MODE<>15 THEN GOTO 2430

Just a brief look, I think that is making assumptions for MODE 15 (what a 256 colour program written in 1992 thinks it would be likely to be used in) otherwise try to work out the correct scaling factors for the mode. Remember – modern monitors are 2:2 or 1:1, while MODE 15 would be 2:4.

Rick

Insert the following just before the line that runs !RunImBAS: Set Imagery$File ""

Yep that does the trick.

Great work and thanks for saving another program from oblivion.

Oh, that’s bizarre…

Hmmm: “Are you sure you want to quit?”

Well, since you ask, er, yes. That was sort of why I clicked on the Quit option in the menu.

That was sort of why I clicked on the Quit option in the menu.

Yes – God forbid it bother to note whether or not there are unsaved changes before asking…?!

That said, maybe people back then just made weird|dumb prompts and messages? In trying to track down information on this program, I came across this which nearly made me lose a mouthful of tea (my emphasis):

I did encounter a couple of bugs in this area of the software; the sorts of things that suggest (not too surprisingly) that this aspect of the program has not undergone much testing. For instance, whenever the PhotoCD info window is opened, ProArtisan feels the need to say “AARGH” in an error window which you then have to close, though there are no ill-effects and the feature works perfectly.

Even now I’m smirking.

There was probably some annoyingly convoluted thing that needed done, so an annoyed programmer made his/her feelings known with that message…
…that never got removed before the program was actually sent out to people.

I’ve put some weird messages in my software as placeholders or commentary of things that annoy me, but I do usually remove such messages when the job is done – but remember that should you see a message like Tribbles ahoy at five o’clock, blast ‘em with your slimy flibbit! (five o’clock would, in that case, would have been the time that I called it a day and went to bed… and flibbit apparently means an underwater fart (according to the infamously untrustworthy urbandictionary), but “slimy flibbet” was chosen because I couldn’t remember how to spell “flibbertigibbet” at 5am!). I think that one was in something for ages. Might have been OvHTML? But it was some weird edge-case that I don’t remember, suffice to say most would have been unlikely to see it.

Yes – God forbid it bother to note whether or not there are unsaved changes before asking…?!

Oh, you mean like having a message that actually said “Unsaved changes, are you sure you want to quit?”
a whole extra 17 characters including spaces.

“Are you sure you want to save me the trouble of tracking file modifications properly?”
[Cancel and I want a refund] [Okay I’ll do your thinking for you]

a whole extra 17 characters including spaces.

The extra words aren’t the problem. The problem is the lack of logic to detect if the base image has changed at all, and if it has, then display the prompt.
Otherwise you arrive at the stupid situation of loading the program and immediately quitting it only to see that prompt appear (…in other words, exactly as happens right now).

Of all of my emoji including snot 🤧 and poo 💩 and girl getting a head massage 💆, I don’t appear to have a facepalm. Weird. So here’s a headache pill instead… 💊

So here’s a headache pill instead… 💊

Oh, a pill – that’s a top end insertion isn’t it?

Note: I don’t own this software, I don’t claim to own this software, and the only references I can find for John Whigham (the author) is that he wrote White Magic / White Magic 2 for The Fourth Dimension. 1992/1993 predates the Internet and ubiquitous email…

While writing a quick ‘nybble’ about this for RISCOSitory, I thought I’d take a quick look – and I’m 99.99999% sure I’ve found the author. I’ve found his blog, Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

The blog hasn’t been updated since 2015 and has no contact details, but his bio page strongly suggests it’s the right guy (mentions programming on Acorn 8 and 32-bit machines). His Facebook page appears to be similarly dusty, but his LinkedIn profile is more up to date. He could probably be contacted through that.

the only references I can find for John Whigham (the author) is that he wrote White Magic / White Magic 2 for The Fourth Dimension

He also did The Olympics and Birds of War for The Fourth Dimension.