News & Products
Microsoft Write For ST
Atari Corporation has announced an agreement with Microsoft to offer Microsoft Write for the Atari 520ST and 1040ST computers. Microsoft Write is based on the Macintosh version of the bestselling Microsoft Word word processing program. It takes advantage of the powerful monochrome and color graphics capabilities of the ST computers.
The agreement gives Atari the rights to sell, market, and distribute Microsoft Write worldwide.
Atari, 1196 Borregas Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086.
Circle Reader Service Number 198.
Eight-Bit Atari World War II Simulation
Rommel: Battles for Tobruk covers four crucial WWII tank battles between the German Afrika Korps and the British 8th Army. This detailed, historically accurate game covers every aspect of the desert war, including individual men, guns, and tanks, as well as minefields, morale, fatigue, supply, air power, and intelligence. A 32-page historical notes booklet is included. After resolving both players' moves simultaneously, Rommel displays a strategic map showing a "movie" of everything that happened in the turn.
Rommel can be played against the computer or another human opponent—even by mail or modern. For the Atari eight-bit line, it retails for $40.
Game Designers Workshop, P.O. Box 1646, Bloomington, IL 61702–1646.
Circle Reader Service Number 199.
Broderbund Educational Program Available For Commodore
Brøderbund has announced that Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? is now available for the Commodore 64. It's a mystery game in which players track Carmen and her infamous gang of thieves around the world to recover stolen treasures. Players use The World Alamanac to decipher clues as they chase the thief from continent to continent. The program helps players learn world geography and reference skills in an exciting and challenging game setting.
The Commodore 64 version retails for $34.95.
Brøderbund Software, 17 Paul Dr., San Rafael, CA 94903–2101.
Circle Reader Service Number 200.
Talking Educational Software For Amiga
Speller Bee and KidTalk are the first titles in the Talking Notebook Series, a line of talking educational software from First Byte. Each program offers self-contained, unlimited text-to-speech capabilities, using First Byte's SmoothTalker speech technology.
Speller Bee improves children's spelling skills by providing them with practice routines, a variety of challenging games, and simulated test situations. The program helps preschool children improve their word recognition skills, and helps students from first grade through junior high levels increase their vocabulary by allowing them to enter their own spelling lists from school. Speller Bee is self-paced, making it especially attractive for students who have difficulties in learning, or who need extra spelling practice at home.
KidTalk is a talking word processor that helps children improve their reading and writing skills and guides them in communicating their ideas more effectively. Children learn the relationship between the sight and sound of individual letters, the relationship of letters to words, and that of words to sentences. Like Speller Bee, it contains graphics that help make learning more fun. KidTalk is also beneficial to young children who don't yet read because it provides them with a way to hear and recognize letters and words.
Each program retails for $59.95.
First Byte, 2845 Temple Ave., Long Beach, CA 90806.
Circle Reader Service Number 201.
Apple, TI Spelling Practice
Students can practice their spelling skills at home or in school with Spellbound, a Robinsoft program from Roberts Information Systems. This educational program for the Apple II series, Commodore 64, and TI-99/4A displays words from a list one at a time and waits for the student to type in the correct spelling underneath. Teachers and parents can enter any word list and save it to disk or tape.
Challenge levels make the spelling words disappear from the screen at faster rates so the student learns to spell from memory. Any misspelled words are recalled when the list is completed, and repeated until spelled correctly. When the student successfully spells the whole list, Spellbound scrambles the letters of each word and challenges the student to randomly unscramble them for learning reinforcement.
Spellbound keeps a record of successful attempts by each student.
Spellbound is not copy-protected. The Apple II-series version requires Applesoft BASIC, and the TI-99/4A version requires Extended BASIC.
Spellbound is available for $14.95. Schools may buy a site license for an additional $10.00.
Roberts Information Systems, 152 W. 4th, P.O. Box 666, Prineville, OR 97754.
Circle Reader Service Number 202.
New Stickybear Apple Software
Weekly Reader Software has announced four new Stickybear software packages to help youngsters develop reading, math, drawing, and music skills.
Children ages seven and up can be introduced to drawing with Stickybear Drawing, a menu-driven program that lets you use freehand DRAW, CIRCLE, BOX, LINES, BRUSHES, and COLORS features to create original pictures. You can erase portions of the picture or use the zoom feature to adjust individual pixels. All pictures can be saved to disk and printed out.
Stickybear Music teaches the fundamentals of music notation and composition to children seven and up. This program lets you compose a piece of music, play it, modify it, and save it to disk for future replay. With a printer, you can print out the composition and see the notes. There's also a music editing system and a selected group of tunes already on the disk.
Teachers or parents can select from over 150 word problems in Math Word Problems to drill students ages eight and up in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Plus, you can create your own word problems to suit individual needs. This program allows you to record and print out report sheets for up to 50 students, screen the calculator option, and print out problems for test master sheets.
More than 30 stories are stored on the Stickybear Reading Comprehension disk for 8- to 11-year-olds. Each story is followed by reading comprehension questions that automatically adjust to the user's skill level. You can also enter your own stories and questions. All the stories on the disk have been approved by Weekly Reader editors and can be printed out.
Stickybear Drawing, Stickybear Music, Math Word Problems, and Stickybear Reading Comprehension all work on the Apple II, II + , He, and Ik with 48K memory and DOS 3.3 or higher. Each package includes a disk, user's guide, poster, and Stickybear stickers.
The suggested retail price for each of the packages is $39.95.
Weekly Reader Family Software, 245 Long Hill Rd., Middletown, CT 06457.
Circle Reader Service Number 203.
More ST Software From Michtron
Michtron, one of the first companies to release software for the Atari ST, has introduced several new products.
Cornerman is a desk accessory offering features similar to those in Borland's Sidekick, plus a few additional ones. Features include a 16-digit calculator with binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal modes, scientific function, display formatting, and a printing tape display; a notepad with automatic wordwrap and automatic time and date stamping for every note you write; a telephone log and dialer; a print function; DOS window for instant access to other programs; and a setup function to customize the display. It retails for $49.95.
The Animator lets you take images from a drawing or painting program and bring them to life through animation. After having created the images you want to use, you design a short movie by selecting which frames to show and when and how long to show them. It retails for $39.95.
Mighty Mail contains an easy-to- use database manager that lets users store in each entry a personal name, a company name, two address lines, city, state, zip code, and a telephone number. There are 16 user-definable flags to mark customer types or mailings. Mighty Mail then lets the user print mailing labels or generate reports, using the program's search function. It retails for $49.95.
Michtron, 576 S. Telegraph, Pontiac, MI 48053.
Circle Reader Service Number 204.
Do You Have Tass?
Gramps has disappeared to Tonetown, a bizarre place full of snousers, doods, and tass cits. You have to find Gramps and get tass, because if you don't have tass, you'll be labeled a stupid tourist and booted out of Tonetown. Chaz, the keeper of the 'Tique, can help you up your tass level and improve your mental and physical health. But you have to watch out for Franklin Snarl, the green-scaled, furry, and fanged villain.
Tass Times in Tonetown from Activision combines action and animation into an interactive-fiction adventure game.
Tass Times in Tonetown is available for the Commodore 64/128 for $34.95, for the Apple II series and IBM PC/PCjr for $39.95, and for the Amiga and Macintosh for $44.95.
Activision, 2350 Bayshore Frontage Rd., Mountain View, CA 94043.
Circle Reader Service Number 205.