Last Updated: Wednesday, 14 January, 1998

Late in 1996, three perfectly normal (in the Munsters' sense of the word) students from Manchester had the marvellous idea to write a sound-to-light program for the Atari Falcon030. The result of that collaboration was KP Flash, and the formation of Kosmik Phish Productions.

Work then began on their next project - the monster GEM application, KP Coolabah. This is actually the collective name for a suite of programs, including Coolabah itself, KP Koala, KP Eucalyptus, KP Dingo, KP Kangaroo, KP Wombat and KP Kookaburra (and possibly some others I've forgotten). It's still being worked on, and will be a little time in coming yet. Until we get nearer completion, we don't really want to give too much away, but suffice to say that if it includes even half the things we've specified for it, this is going to be one brilliant application.

We also have a couple of other completed applications (see the information below for downloading). KP EJP Tester is a program for testing various add-ons for the enhanced joystick ports on STes and Falcons. It was written by me (Xav) to accompany my series of articles in Atari computing.

KP SACK (SAA Construction Kit) is a program for generating SAA files (strangely enough). These are esssentially files which can be used with the System Audio Manager (SAM) from Atari/SDS, and which allow users to easily assign sound samples to various operations within programs. For anyone not familiar with SAM, it works on any Atari with DMA sound (i.e. STe, TT and Falcon030) and allows you to assign samples to system events - even if there is no accompanying SAA files. The SAA files simply extend this ability, and allow the programmer to specify certain custom events that can have samples assigned to them.

From a programming point of view, interfacing with SAM is simple (requiring just a couple of lines of code), and is fully documented in the KP SACK online help (in ST-Guide format). KP SACK also comes with the necessay header files to make it as easy as possible for a programmer to use. If you program GEM apps then please download KP SACK and have a look at the docs - we think you'll find that the minimal effort required to support SAM is well worth it from your users' point of view.

In order to encourage usage of KP SACK and SAM, we have decided to make KP SACK freeware so please pass it on to anyone who might find it useful, and feel free to put it on FTP sites, or web pages.

Xav

Xav is the "ideas man" in KPP. He generally comes up with weird and wonderful concepts, and brilliant improvements in the features and ease of use of KPP programs. He does a little programming, but generally leaves it to...

Anthony Jacques

Anthony is the main programmer in the outfit, and spends much of his time (silently) fuming at Xav for actually bothering to be extensive in his bug searches. Nevertheless, I'm sure he'd agree that the quality of the final programs is well worth it - honest! Anthony also has some useful programming information on his web pages, and is currently the best source for downloading KPP software.

Phil Hough

Phil gets the cans of Coke at each KPP meeting. He also has some web pages, although they seem to be strangely devoid of cans of Coke.

For anyone looking for SAM or SACK, I apologise but magazine lead times and college work have got on top of me, so I haven't got round to putting them here yet. If you get the Atari Computing reader disk, the latest versions will be supplied with issue 5. If not, try Anthony's pages. Sorry for any problems this may cause.

On KP SACK

"There are a couple of bugs, it looks crap in mono, and there are some single pixel redraw problems" - Xav

"Grrrr...." - Anthony

"Put the knife down Anthony. They're only minor problems - we'll tell everyone it's designed to run under XaAES" - Xav (sorry Craig)

If you have any great ideas for new projects we can work on, I won't make any promises, but feel free to mail me:-