BENJY SOUND MONITOR V1.9
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Reviewed by Alphasys.

Well, yet another sound monitor. In this test I compared it with several other
sound-composer programs available.

The sound monitor is recorded on a single disk and consists of two programs. A
packer and the monitor itself. It comes together with a 17 page booklet in
German in which the programs are explained.

The disk is protected with a childish protection. (1 bad sector on the first
track.) They could have left this protection out, because it's very easy to
break. But who cares...

When I started using this program in the usual way, that is: immediate without
reading the booklet, I found that it was an impossible task to find out what it
does. So I started reading the booklet.

Then I found the problem: The Benjy-boys haven't used any standard in the usage
of the keyboard. For all the functions of the monitor they have used a lot of
unlikely key-codes. The overall usage of the monitor is very tricky. A large
amount of SHIFT-CONTROL-KEY codes are used and the console-keys are used in
various ways too.

The monitor itself is very criptically set-up, and you have to use a lot of
Hexadecimal codes in it. A mistake is easily made, and when you are editing the
song while it is being executed, you can get very unusual effects.

The overal sounds you can create are diverse, but only few possibilities sound
good. In other composers you can create fairly likable sounds, just by typing
random numbers. In this composer this only leads to total chaos.

There is no support for samples in this program. I think this is a pity. You can
never create a nice drum-sound with the standard pokey-registers. It will
allways sound like you are playing inside a tin can.

Well, anyone will have heard the musical quality of one of the Benjy's. This
quality is about the maximum you can get out of this program.

The packer is used to create a file with the sound routine in it, so you can use
it in your own programs. They succeeded in the latter, but I don't understand
why they call it a PACKER. The files produced are quite large. The routine
itself is quite large too. It must be called at in a VBI-routine. It is quite a
time-consuming job for the computer, so there isn't much more you can do in the
VBI-time.

This was also the problem when using the Black-Magic composer by Gnome Design.
But at least those musix have some MAGIC in it. I mean: They really sound GREAT!

So, I think these boys from germany should take another look at their program,
and try to make it better. It really isn't worth what they ask for it. So it's
back to the drawingboard for you guys!!!

Actually it's a pity I have to say this, because they aren't bad programmers at
all. Maybe their better of concentrating on making games with nice graphics in
stead of trying to program the pokey-chip for some bleeps.

My advise: Don't buy this program unless you want to make a sound-monitor
yourself and want to see how NOT to do it.

If you want to make music that's worth listening to, and you don't want to use
time-consuming samples, the Chaos-Music composer is a good program.

If you really want a terrific sound and you don't bother about the memory is
uses and you have time enough, try the Black-Magic composer.

Editor's note: Pff.. I don't think the Black Magic Composer is a good choice. As
far as I know there are some bugs in the play routine. Maybe somebody who knows
much about music composers can clear things up for us. I can only say that I
haven't found a good music composer for our computer yet.