The Amigaphile
                               by Nick Cook

   "The court calls Loriann Babbit."

   The courtroom became still. Loriann strode to the witness stand. She
scanned the room. Her dark brown eyes flashed as her glance fell on the
man seated at the defense table. He shifted uncomfortably in his slightly
too-small suit and fingered some papers in front of him.

   "DoyousweartotellthetruthandnothingbutthetruthsohelpyouGod?" chanted
the bailiff.

   "I do."

   "Be seated."

   Loriann sat. She tossed her head back like a filly entering the
winner's circle. The attorney sauntered over.

   "Ms. Babbit, can you tell the court when the abuse began?"

   "Yes. It started the day my husband," Loriann put quotes around
'husband', "came home from Wal-Mart with that, that other machine."

   "The DOS one?"

   "Yes, that one. Nothing I did was right. I showed him ICONS (#22507,
NURICONS.LHA, 11392 bytes). It's a collection of unusual, multicolor
icons like Popeye (selects into Olive Oyl), a howling coyote, a wormy
apple, and cow. The artwork is excellent, and looks wonderful on 24 bit
boards. Then there's Busy Banana (#22445, BUSYBANANAPOINTERS.LHA, 10112
bytes), a group of animated busy pointers. The archive includes a peeling
banana and twirling dancer. I thought he would think them cute." "What
was your husband's reaction?"

   "He snorted. 'Not professional! he says. 'Professional is a gray
static hourglass. Professional is gray icons on a VGA screen.'"

   Loriann reached for the box of tissues. "I tried OPTICON (#22378
OPTICON.LHA, 53504 bytes)? It's a collection of utilities like Icon2C. It
reads in given '.info' file and writes out C code. This allows you to
modify any icon image to your own needs. OptIcon reads in given ".info"
files and scans the icon image in order to optimize the icon Image
structure and save space. It didn't help. John said rude things about my
computer."

   She pulled out more tissues. "I showed him FasterBlit
(#22384, FBL6.2.LHA, 7424 bytes), Arthur Hagen's program that
snaps up the Amiga's blitter (used for video display). Even
WordPerfect scrolls faster. While it multi-tasks! SuperDark
screen blankers zip along. Just watch where you put the program.
When I placed in my User-Startup sequence, the whole computer
slowed to a crawl. An iconX routine in WBStartup caused the
machine to be non-responsive to the mouse. So now I just type the
command in by CLI."

   The attorney leaned against the witness stand. "And your
husband was not impressed?"

   "No! So I demoed Fitter (#22502, FITTER_V1.01.LHA, 55296
bytes). Fitter is Joe Thomas' utility designed to make
transfering of files from a groaning full hard drive to floppy
disks easier. Fitter uses an algorithm to determine a way to put
these files on disks so that floppy diskspace is optimized. Most
features are accessed by mouse clicks."

   "And your husband?"

   "He looked at me as though I had gone senile. 'If you're
hard drive is full, buy a bigger hard drive! Floppies are old
fashioned!'"

   "I felt more and more degraded. I went on. How about Life and Death
Clock? (#22437, LIFEDEATHCLK.LHA, 80640 bytes). This is Mike Haas'
comparisons between causes of death versus civilian use of firearms for
self-defense. You may not agree with the politics, but the Clock is very
well designed and created."

   Loriann shot a glance at Mr. Babbit, then continued. "Games, how about
games? GEnie is fortunate to have some clever and creative members. Bob
Akerberg brings us Sydney (322490, SYDNEY.LZH, 255360 bytes), an AMOS
arcade game where you play Sydney, a snake fighting to free your part of
the desert from invaders. It's a little different, since initially, all
you can do is crawl forward, and burrow into the ground. But you can eat
scorpion eggs and get more powerful."

   Loriann leaned foward. "Then there's Scorched Earth (#22513,
SCORCH175.LHA, 498560 bytes), Michael Welch's near cousin to the IBM's
Scorched Tanks, a warfare game where up to 4 human players or computer
controlled opponents buy fancy weapons and try to blow each othe up.
'Taint as easy as it sounds. Scorched Earth features good graphics, a
slick interface, and a impressive intro. $10 bucks gets you a version
which saves games."

   "And still your husband was not satisfied?" asked the lawyer.

   "No, not John! He said the most vile, wicked thing he could." Loriann
stopped for a second. "He leaned close to me and...and...sneered 'you
don't have spreadsheets!' Then he leaned back and laughed. A horrible,
mocking laugh."

   "Then what happened?"

   Loriann dabbed her eyes. "Well, after my husband went to sleep, I went
into the kitchen..."

   "Yes?"

   "I picked up a new knife, then I...I," Loriann swallowed hard. "Cut
off my husband's p...p..."

   "I know this is tough for you, Loriann. Your husband was asleep, you
took a knife and ---"

   Loriann took a deep breath. She paused, like a diver perched at the
edge of the highest board at the pool. Then she jumped. "I took the knife
and cut off my husband's parallel cable!"

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