Columns Max is a fast-paced, colorful, and sound-filled arcade exercise for your mind created by Steve Chamberlin, the author of the award-winning game Tetris Max. The game's beautiful 256-color artwork, all-new music soundtrack, and awesome sound effects will keep you playing well past bedtime. The game's concept is simple to learn, but real skill requires lots of practice. As multi-colored columnar pieces drop from the sky, you must race to arrange the falling pieces to create matches of adjacent colors. Matching colors disappear and make room for new columns above, but watch out, because the game ends when the pit becomes entirely filled with pieces, so the more colors you clear, the more pieces you'll have room for, and the longer you'll be able to play. The appearance of special "wild" and "nova" pieces adds an extra twist to the game that makes sure you're always thinking ahead.
If you enjoy Columns Max and play it often, please send in the $15 shareware fee. It is not very much compared to the cost of a commercial game, and it motivates me to keep improving Columns Max as well as to work on new games. By even optimistic estimates, only a few percent of the people who play shareware games actually send in the shareware fee, so if you play, please pay! New versions of Columns Max are always free for registered users of older versions.
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2. Making your own music files for Columns Max
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Creating your own music files for use with Columns Max requires using ResEdit. If you're not familiar with ResEdit, it's a resource editor made by Apple. Resources are special pieces of data in an application or data file, like a sound or a picture. Using ResEdit, you can change these resources, thereby causing the program that uses the resources to exhibit new behavior. For instance, you might edit some of the graphics resources of Columns Max to make all the pieces look like they're made out of miniature teddy bears. If you don't already have a copy, you should be able to find ResEdit from a local Macintosh user group, or if you have a connection to the internet, you can ftp it from ftp.apple.com.
ResEdit is not for the faint of heart. It is possible to completely trash a file by screwing up its resources with ResEdit, so always work with a copy of the file, never the original. It's not the most friendly and intuitive program around, either. However, if you exercise common sense and work on a copy of the file instead of the original, you should be able to accomplish a great deal using ResEdit, and no one will get hurt. Attempting to explain how to use it is a huge task, so this document will assume you already know your way around ResEdit fairly well. If not, Apple publishes a book that describes the use of ResEdit thoroughly. Please do not send me email asking how to use ResEdit! I have already received more than a lifetime supply of such messages.
1. Using ResEdit, create a new ResEdit document. Change its creator to "ColN" and its type to "tMUS". You will add your music segments to this document as "snd " resources.
2. Digitize some music using your favorite digitizer. With a program such as SoundEditPro or Sample Editor, break the music up into segments of a few seconds each. The general idea is that if there are themes or refrains in the music which repeat, you need only make a single segment for each, and Columns Max will play the segments more than once as appropriate. When you're done, you should be able to play the whole song by stringing segments together, perhaps repeating some segments. Add the segments as "snd " resources to the file created in step 1, giving them whatever names you wish. Each segment must have a unique name.
For example, if my song had the logical structure ABACAB, I would cut segments out of the full-length song corresponding to sections A,B, and C. I would then add three "snd " resources to my ResEdit document, and name them A, B, and C.
3. For Columns Max to play your music, you need to tell it in what order your segments should be played. Essentially, you just list the order, so for the example above I would give Columns Max the order "A,B,A,C,A,B." (The exact manner in which you specify the ordering is described below.) When it reaches the end of the order you've specified, Columns Max starts over at the beginning, so I would end up with music playing ABACABABACABABACAB...
You can also make Columns Max loop back to someplace other than the beginning of the ordering after it reaches the end. This is useful if your music has some kind of "intro" to it that you only want to play on the first pass through, but not on the loop-backs. Simply rename the sound segment that you want Columns Max to loop back to "repeat". So if what I really wanted was ABBCBBCBBC..., I would rename the sound segment "B" "repeat". Then I would give Columns Max the order "A,repeat,repeat,C". (If the repeat sound appears more than once in the order, it must be called "repeat" at every occurrence. Thus "A,repeat,repeat,C" is acceptable, but "A,repeat,B,C" is not.)
The exact ordering of the segments is specified in a STR# resource. Create a new STR# resource in your music file with ID 128. The name of the first segment in the order goes at index 1, the second at index 2, and so on. So for the example above, I would put "A" at index 1, "repeat" at index 2, "repeat" at index 3, and "C" at index 4.
4. You should also put a description of your music, with information such as the title, author, etc, in STR# resource ID 129, index 1. This string will be displayed whenever the user selects the "about music" option from the apple menu. Here's your chance for fame!
Some things to watch out for:
• You may need to increase the memory allocated to Columns Max (using the Finder's "Get Info" box) in order to use large music files.
• The snd resources must all be format 1 resources. For most people this is the default anyway, so you shouldn't need to worry about this.
• If the snd resources are marked "purgeable", you may be able to get away with allocating less memory to Columns Max. The program will attempt to dynamically load and purge the sounds as they are needed. However, marking the resources "purgeable" can result in audible delays between music segments as the next segment is loaded from disk.
Have fun!
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3. Memory considerations
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To use some of the larger background music soundtracks, you will need to increase the memory allocated to Columns Max by your Mac. In general, you will need to allocate roughly 550k plus the size of the music file in order to use a particular music file.
To change Columns Max's memory allocation, click once on the Columns Max icon in the finder to highlight it, then select "get info" from the file menu. From the info window that appears, edit the field labeled "preferred size" to set how much memory will be allocated to Columns Max. When you're finished, close the info window, and you should be all set.
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4. Frequently asked questions
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• "Is there a DOS or Windows version of Columns Max?"
Not currently.
• "What is the best high score you've seen?"
The best I've seen personally is about 24,000, but I'm guessing that there are plenty of people out there on the internet who've scored much higher.
• "I'm new to Mac programming. How do I get started?"
First you'll need a compiler: a utility that turns source code that you create into a program you can run. These days most people are write Macintosh programs in either C or Pascal, so look for a compiler for one of these languages. I'll suggest Metrowerks' Code Warrior compiler, which includes both a C and a Pascal compiler, and has also received many favorable reviews. Next, you'll need some reference books. The "Inside Macintosh" series of books published by Addison Wesley is the encyclopedia of Mac information. It's an extremely valuable reference, but a lousy way to learn the stuff for the first time. For that purpose, I recommend the Macintosh C Programming Primer (volumes I and II) by Dave Mark, also published by Addison Wesley. There are also some newer Macintosh programming primers available that I'm not as familiar with, so browse though your local bookstore and find the one you like best. Finally, it'll really help if you have somebody else's source code that you can look at for guidance. Joining a local user group can be helpful for this purpose. The USENET newsgroup comp.sys.mac.programmer is also an excellent source of program snippets and other good information.
