alien.png Main window -- Extra menu
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extra menu.png
Figure 23. The extra menu


The extra menu contains the Preferences / Settings item which will warp you to the settings screen described earlier in this document (chapter 'The Settings Screen').

The other two items will be discussed extensive later on in this document.

Sprite Editor
The sprite editor is a VERY POWERFUL option of CA3. It's a Sprite Mode 2 editor. And I think it's one of the first and only sprite mode 2 editors... But to save things for later, I'll quit this subject now.

Image viewer
The image viewer is another very powerful tool of CA3. With this tool you can view almost any screen 5 and screen 7 image formats including palette information!

Chaotic Media Player
The only feature of CA3 I will discuss in this topic is the Chaotic Media Player. This feature is a nice add-on to the development environment. The only thing it can do up to now is playing MP3 files. This means you won't have to use winamp anymore to play your MP3's :)
The Chaotic Media Player (CMP) has pretty much to do with the project you are working on.

When you click this option, the window showed in figure 24 will show directly. This is also a child window, this means it will show inside the parent window.

extra menu (cmp).png
Figure 24. The chaotic media player!


Here you see the CMP in action! As you can see it just contains a list of files (which you can decide, of course) and some information about the current song and some buttons at the top of the window.

The buttons from left to right:

First  
Selects the first song in the list.  
 
Prior  
Selects the song prior to the current song.  
 
Next  
Selects the song after the current song.  
 
Last  
Selects the last song in the list.  
 
Play  
Starts to play the selected song.  
 
Stop  
Stops the playing of the current song.  
 
Pause  
Pauses the song. Click pause again to resume.  
 
Open song(s) and add to list  
Warps you to an open dialog where you can select MP3s, these will be added to the current list.  
 
Remove songs from list  
Removes the selected song(s) from the list.  
 
 
Interface
As you might think the CMP window has to be open if you want to play music, this is not true. The window is just a wrapper around the actual MP3 interface. If you close the CMP and the music is playing, the music won't stop playing, it will just continue! In this way you won't have to have the window open all the time when playing the music YOU like.
The CMP is project dependent. This means that the list you have in the CMP when you save a project, will be saved into the project. In this way each project can have its own CMP list.