Precision Software Applications Silver Collection 1

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Text File | 1990-02-04 | 17KB | 343 lines

| | | | | | | | | | ██ ██ | █ █ | █ █ | ██ | █ █ | █ █ | ██ ██ DARNIT! | Version 10.0 | | ██ ██████ | ██ █ ██ A Shareware | ██ █ ██ Solitaire Thingus | ██ █ ██ | ██ █ ██ | ██ █ ██ User's Guide | █████ ██ | | | ███ ████ | █ █ █ | █ █ █ | █ █ █ | █ █ █ | █ █ █ | ██████████ | | I n t e r n a t i o n a l | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | BSX's No-License Nonsense Statement! This product (C) 1990 BSX International This software is provided "as is" with no guarantees of any kind. You, the user, are permitted and encouraged to distribute it and use it, but under the following conditions: 1) You absolutely, positively may not sell this program without the permission of BSX International. 2) Under no circumstances should you distribute versions of this pro- duct which have been altered in any way without the permission of BSX International. 3) Under no circumstances should you remove the copyright notices from the code or from the documentation which is provided with it. 4) This is a shareware product. You may use it for free for a short period. After that you must either register or stop using it. You may still distribute it, however. If you find this program to be a blast, you ought to send along a $10.00 registration fee to: BSX International 806 Park Ridge Rd. Apt. A8 Durham, NC 27713 Make checks payable to Robert Roberds. Thanx! Pre-Documentation "Don't Panic" Reassurance Look, it's real easy. These dox are nice, and you oughtta skim them. But we gotta tell you: It's a true gut to use DARNIT!. DARNIT!: THE BSX SOLITAIRE DOODAD 0. Facts and Stats This system contains the following files: DARNIT.EXE -The executable program. DARNIT.DAT -A graphic image file. DARNIT.DOC -This documentation file. BSXCAT.DOC -The BSX International catalog. ORDER.DOC -BSX Order form. System requirements: IBM PC,XT,AT,PS/2 or compatible. 256K RAM at the very least. EGA or VGA card with 256K of memory. NO MOUSE IS REQUIRED, but it IS supported. I. That Darn Solitaire I don't really know the official name of this type of solitaire card game, but I have opted to call it DARNIT! because I seem to say that an awful lot while playing it. I learned it from a college roomie, who had himself learned it from an obviously sadomasochistic kid at the summer camp where he worked. And it goes something...like...this: You shuffle the deck and, one at a time, take cards from it and lay them out in a 4x4 grid. The goal is to get the face cards in this pattern here: K | Q | Q | K ------------- J | | | J ------------- J | | | J ------------- K | Q | Q | K When you have filled the grid, you can then discard all the tens and all the pairs of non-face cards whose values add up to ten (aces count as ones). Then you fill the grid again, and discard, and fill, ad nauseum, until the face cards are all out in the above pattern. But you lose if you can't place a face card, or if you fill the grid and it has no tens or pairs that add to ten. It's rough; it's tough; it's in the buff. Be prepared to get yer butt kicked a lot. But the thrill of victory makes all the agony of defeat worthwhile. Variations: some people like to wimp out and play by the rules that let you not only eliminate tens and pairs that add to ten, but also to eliminate ANY groups that add to ten; say a six, a three and an ace. This is an unbelievably weenie thing to do, but DARNIT now offers it as an option. II. Using DARNIT! To run DARNIT!, just put DARNIT.EXE and DARNIT.DAT into a directory. Now you can run DARNIT! from that directory any time. And, if that directory is in yer path, you can run DARNIT! from anywhere, anytime. Now, just type: darnit at the DOS prompt. You'll see the opening screen and cruise on to an all- nighter of solitaire madness. Now to explain a few fundamentals. First off, if you have a Microsoft Mouse of any compatible device, you move around with the mouse and click with the left button. If you don't have a mouse, you move around with the arrow keys and with PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End; also, any command button onscreen can be envoked with the first letter of the command; for example, hitting 'H' calls up the Help screen. You take cards from the deck by clicking on it. You put the now face-up deck card in a grid square by clicking in the square. Note that face cards will only go into their appropriate positions, and that the cursor becomes a hand there. Other cards may go into any empty square. Starting with version 5.0, DARNIT! has had the "oh jeez I didn't mean to put it there" option. If you put a card in a grid square and then realize that that wasn't what you wanted, you can hit the right button (or Escape, if you don't have a mouse) to put it back on the top of the deck and place it over again. But after turning over the next card, there ain't no such option. That ain't allowed in the card game, and it ain't allowed here. Once the grid is filled you can eliminate tens by clicking on them, and you can eliminate pairs by first clicking on one card to high- light it, then clicking the other. If you change your mind after high- lighting a card, just hit the right mouse button (or Escape) to unselect it. Click on the deck to start filling again. Rule varations: Starting with DARNIT! 6.0, you have had the option to choose to play by the wimpy rules; that is, allowing the elimination of not just tens and pairs that add to ten, but of all groups that add to ten. 'Tis wimpy, but 'tis offered, because BSX International has only YER best interests at heart. If you want DARNIT! to start off with wimpiness as the default, you can use the -w command-line paramter; that is: start the game with the line darnit -w at the DOS prompt. But you can always choose what rule to use by click- ing on the Rules button while playing the game. DARNIT! is truly idiot-proof; I know because I've tested it myself a million times, doing all sorts of idiotic stuff. Lose the .DAT file, or forget the rules of the game, or try to run on a system w/o EGA: NO sweat! DARNIT! WILL NOT crash. Nothing's more annoying than a game that crashes. Also, it's VERY user-friendly; mousers never need touch the keyboard, and non-mousers never need use any hand but the one on the numeric keypad. Note to mousers: You might want to disable any mouse-ignorant screen savers, or the screen may blank and scare the very bejeebers outta you, until you remember that all you gotta do is hit a key. Happens to me a lot when using mouse-only applications. One nifty option is the silent playing mode. This lets you play without any of the cute music playing on startup and after winning or losing. So you can play without bosses/and or parents and/or your roommate(s) kicking yer hiney. To run DARNIT! in silent mode, just use the parameter -s (or -S) on the command line, as in C>darnit -s. Silent mode is also accessible from the playing screen. But this comes AFTER the initial startup tune. So if you don't even want that, use -s. This brings us to the Boss option. Say you got a real dull, pointless job, kind of like mine, and you decide to kill some time with a nice game of DARNIT! But yer neo-facist employer would not take a shine to that if he was to catch you at it. Yer boss, the Master of the Universe with his heroic Yale chin, would toss you in the shredder if he caught you goofing on this GAME instead of making him money. (An aside: I'm using the male pronoun for simplicity. I know there are plenty of horrible *female* bosses, too.) What to do? Well, just hit the Boss button on the playing screen, and -POW!- up comes a fake DOS screen. Yer boss walks by, none the wiser. You may type "exit" or "darnit" at the bogus DOS prompt to return to yer game. Cool, huh? This is a convincing Boss screen, not a lame EGA "C>" like in F19 Stealth Fighter. It has been brought to my attention that only bosses play games at work. So be it. Then you bosses may think of the BOSS option as an EMPLOYEE option. The song remains the same. III. Technical Info DARNIT! was written over a weekend of serious beer-drinking and hard- core Chinese food-eating. It was done in Turbo Pascal 5.5 on an IBM PC with an Intel Inboard 386, an Atasi 40Mb hard drive, a Vega EGA card, and a Microsoft bus mouse. The mouse routines used were those in the Public Domain TP4 unit known as EGAMOUSE, by Eduardo Martins. This is a fine, simple-to-use unit that comes with source, allowing for easy modification. I modified it to make the vertical arrow shape in DARNIT!, along with a bunch more. The unbelievably buggy background music routines were adapted and de- bugged from a REAL old TP3 include file dating from the Pleistocene (1985). Think about that. 1985. Before the Challenger disaster, back during the TWA 847 crisis when the dollar and the pound were almost equal. Scary. IV. Acknowledgements Thanks to all you who've sent donations to BSX International and its predecessor, Bigsoft Industries. Even the letter from the guy in Kuwait was appreciated, although he CLAIMED he didn't have any American money to send. I would have liked a couple oil wells, but you know how it is. Additional thanx are due to Vernon Huang, Donna Brown, and a bunch of other folks who have made a point of telling me how badly my programs suck. Still more gracias to Ken Gutierrez for inspiring the improvement of the card graphics. Bigtime thanx to all those shareware distributors who have included BSX products in their libraries. V. Version Info Version 10.0 released 3 Feb. 90. Total redesign. Non-mouse play made available. Color scheme, opening screen, and mouse button designs changed. Need for only one DARNIT.DAT implemented. Total package gets a big-time reduction in size. Code cleanup and speedup. Wimpy-default command-line parameter added. Startup tune changed to "O Canada" for the hell of it. Version 9.7 released 14 Jan. 90. Return from boss bug w/ relation to hilighting fixed. Version 9.6 released 9 Jan. 90. Win / Loss restore from Boss bug fixed. Help tune microbug eliminated. Version 9.5 released 7 Jan. 90. Much-overdue tidying of code and very much-overdue addition of wins/losses stats added to remind players of all their dismal failures. Version 9.0 released 29 Nov. 89. Background sound feature added. Need to set environment variable eliminated, big time. Version 8.0 released 4 Nov. 89. Mouse buttons moved out of harm's way. Silent restoration from Boss. General rearrangement of stuff. Version 7.1 released 23 Oct. 89. Name changed. Opening screen made spacelike. E-variable option made so you can always run the game from its directory even if you've screwed up the variable real hard. Version 7.0 released 9 Oct. 89. Boss and Sound options added. Card graphics improved by several orders of magnitude. Buzzes and beeps put in to increase "neato factor". Mouse bugs annihilated. Environment variable option added. Version 6.0 released 15 Aug. 89. Rules option added. Version 5.1 released 25 Jul. 89. Cursor changed so it's a vertical arrow when placing a non-face card in an empty square. Version 5.0 released 24 Jul. 89. Graphics of card backs and card grid changed. "Didn't mean to do that" option added. Hilite color changed to light cyan for added coolness. Exiting whine for money added. Version 4.0 released 10 Jun. 89. Graphics speeded up for you 4.77 Mhz losers. Silent mode added. Version 3.0 released 9 Jun. 89. Card graphics improved even more. Version 2.0 released 8 Jun. 89. Card graphics improved immensely, in particular, the face cards. To Win! song improved. Copyright notice put into opening screen. Various enhancements and bug fixes. Version 1.0 released 6 Jun. 89. Initial release. Decision made to use The Internationale for opening screen music to show support for the Beijing massacre victims and their fellow pro-democracy activists. VI. What Shareware Is Shareware is a software distribution scheme wherein the user tries the program, then registers it if the product is found to be useful or enjoyable. Thus, users get cheap software which they have evaluated before buying, and authors get recompense for their efforts without the expense and hassle of advertising for a commercial release. The flaw in the shareware idea is obvious: Pinheads out there may use shareware programs without registering. These people rip off hard-working authors, and stultify the otherwise rich shareware environment. THIS IS MAJOR UNCOOL. Shareware authors have come up with a few ideas for dealing with the lack-of-registrants problem. One is to cripple the software, so that only registered users can take full advantage of the product. This is real, real stupid, for all it does is tee off EVERYONE, IMMEDIATELY, the second they try it. They ain't gonna register a program that makes them mad. Another is to instill odious "Don't forget to register!" mess- ages in the program, interrupting the user at inopportune times. This is also counterproductive, for the users get mad, blow the program off, and don't send the author Jack Diddley. No, 'tis nobler in the mind for an author to offer SERVICES to the registered users, not to simply promise to stop torturing them. That's why we at BSX International offer all our products completely crippleless and full-featured. What registration gets you is: A quartely BSX International catalog, and 1/2 price discounts on upgrades from the moment of registration until the minute you DIE! Included in this file are BSXCAT.DOC, the latest BSX International catalog, and ORDER.DOC, the form that makes it true easy to register or purchase BSX products. Look them over, then fill out ORDER.DOC, drop in your check/MO and keep shareware alive. Have fun! ----- Bob Roberds BSX International "The Ayatollah of Rock 'n' Rollah" Durham, North Carolina February 1990 "So why do you wish to marry my daughter." "Argh, I 'aven't 'ad any for weeks!" PS: Quit whining and just wear yer (expletive deleted)ing seatbelt.