Amigraph - SynTax PD 401
            (Dungeon mapping utility for Amiga)

                 Reviewed by Bill Commons

I had great difficulty in loading this program on my Amiga 600. It
led to me asking help from the editor of the Amiga section on
Silicon Village who kindly sent me a disk with some PD programs on
it to look at why the program wouldn't run. It requires a system
disk to be set up with Workbench on it, see my review of Legend of
Lothian on how I did this, although the manual will tell you how
to delete some of the programs on a copy of your original
Workbench system disk to make room for the File Requester program.

I still could not get the program to run due to it sending me the
error message "Unable to open your File Requester Prog."

On this disk was a file which unarchived the compacted programs on
it and I was surprised that this used the very program that
Amigraph refused to load. I can only assume that the archiver
opened the File Requester program because when I then loaded
Amigraph it worked fine.

The screen shows a grid of squares similar to a sheet of graph
paper and you can alter the size of the squares to suit your map.
There is a key to insert doors and circles and triangles on your
map, also secret doors plus stairs up/down.

The program allows you to change the colour of the various
functions and will print the map for a permanent record of the
dungeon maze etc. This is where the utility fails and I found that
I still had to make a map of the game that I was playing on paper,
to enable me to copy it onto the graph on the Amigraph screen. I
suppose that if you had two computers running side by side with
your adventure running on one and the mapping program on the
other, this would be fine.

It is also suitable for putting maps on disk or printing out to
send elsewhere.

I must admit that it was a very enlightening exercise to play
about with it though, as I have learnt a lot about the workings of
the AmigaDos way of moving and accessing files.