| Posted By
Luca
on 2014-11-15
12:30:13
 |  Improving The Unimprovable
 How possible would be, to improve something that just went beyond any expectation, pushing the limit of a certain machine's environment far far away from what anybody could imagine?
Exactly after two years from the release of the powerful version 2.0, SVS as the serious and professional side of the FIRE crew throws an ultimate hit in order to definitely close the match, advancing the program which has been usually indicated as the highest in quality he did ever: SVS-Calc 2.5 is out now, and it looks like being the tool that candidates itself to become the most advanced on 8bit machines in its category!
Apart of the loooong list of fixed bugs, there's a huge amount of new features and improvements: complete usage for the Symbolic Names managing relative coordinates too, speed up video, Plus Graph / Plus Graph 2.0 total integration, new nasty-to-find easter eggs to spot out... Too many features, that's quite impossible to write'em all here, in facts there's a very long whatsnew.txt included in the package in order to keep track of the fresh new weaponry available in SVS-Calc 2.5. Some of the new characteristics are completely innovative and miss into the most known nowaday PC tools, like the PUT() option, the WHAT option available by menues or the recalculation counting in lthe eap years. So many news about the video output too, with the implementation of dedicated ML routines to speed it up, and several new customizable themes have been included too. The shiny instruction manual in .doc format will be your guide thru the most professional ways to use the tool, in order to maximize its efficiency.
Congrats goes to SVS, who worths big respect for winning his challenge to improve something that sincerely would seem to be out of further improvement. And now, it's SVS-Calc 2.5!
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2014-11-17
12:30:13
| Re: Improving The Unimprovable
I can't find proper words but I am lost in admiration.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2014-11-17
14:11:18
| Re: Improving The Unimprovable
Downloaded the update, read through the news and played with it for a while. Fantastic stuff!
One very small thing I just noticed; pressing Shift+C= toggles the font, but it doesn't look ideal with the "lowercase" font. Perhaps it should have been disabled. Doesn't matter though, very minor.
Tons of great stuff, the German option for menu/errors seems very useful as well. Hats off to you, SVS 
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Posted By
MMS
on 2014-11-17
22:28:12
 | Re: Improving The Unimprovable
Even with 2.0 I was totally impressed. What to say about such a great tool continuously finetuned since years?
I think SVS is fully aware, that IF this SW would be the package in the initial Plus/4 package, (even on a floppy, like GEOS for C64), instead of the expensive, but ineffective 3PLUS1 ROM package, the Plus/4 would have a completely different history (even better fits to 364 with numeric keyboard).
together with such an effective and serious SW no journalist would mixed the machine with a games machine 
But we all know, that it is just a daydreaming, you cannot change the history, and the existence of this SW required the experience with current applications, like MS Excel too.
OFF
Sinclair QL had more memory(128k, upto 640KB), faster 68008 processor (7.5MHz), higher resolution screen (512x256), good application SW from PSION(!) and built in multitasking Opsystem in ROM. It also failed to report success, although from all aspects seems to be a much stronger "serious" machine than Plus/4 (OK, 100kb microdrive was a huge failure, had very buggy initial ROM)
http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/gen/aboutql/aboutql.html
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