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Precision Software Appli…tions Silver Collection 1
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Precision Software Applications Silver Collection Volume One (PSM) (1993).iso
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rommaz.exe
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READ.ME
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1990-05-25
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SYNOPSIS
Romaz is a highly advanced maze game that provides "cat and
mouse" chase fun with infinite variety. Standard features
include one-hand direction controls, four to ten "cats" (called
mazzlers), protection shields, land mines, five different maze
layouts and a transporter room. By registering your copy of this
product with the authors, you will receive five additional maze
layouts, a maze editor that lets you create your own mazes and
printed instructions.
The following files are included on the PBS distribution disk:
INVOICE 1157 - invoice to register with and receive
the enhanced features listed above
ROBUXES RMZ 2527 - robuxes maze layout
ORIGINAL RMZ 2503 - original maze layout
HARD RMZ 1492 - expert level maze layout
ROADS RMZ 4327 - maze that resembles highways
ZONES RMZ 2830 - maze that has unique zones
ROMAZ HLP 2267 - on-line help file
ROMAZ TUN 158 - default sound generation file
EXTRA TUN 158 - extra sound generation file
CONFIG EXE 26517 - program to configure your game
REVIEW EXE 13596 - program to review high score history
ROMAZ EXE 52428 - the actual game program
ROMAZ PLAYING INSTRUCTIONS
Romaz is a maze game of skill, patience and coordination. It us
unlike other maze games in many respects, one of which is how you
maneuver through the maze by pressing direction keys exactly when
going by an opening. You steer through all passageways and can
even stop and wait. Another distinguishing feature is the
ability to use one of the many provided maze layouts or, by using
our high quality maze editor, you can create your own layouts.
Another fine distinction is the strategy required. In most maze
games, several hunters chase the hunted through paths and
tunnels, always following close behind and tracking the hunted's
every move. This game differs in that the hunters seem to wander
without any real conviction. They tend to have a mind of their
own and don't always follow where the hunted goes. The hunted
has to develop a different strategy. One that works to clear the
maze while also waiting for hunters to gather so that the hunted
can reprise and gather many points and extra lives. The hunted
can stop and wait for hunters to gather and can even invoke
shields that temporarily protects it from oncoming hunters.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
INSTALLATION
Romaz can be played directly off of the diskette supplied (if the
write-protect tab is removed) or copied to your hard disk or a
back-up floppy disk. If you plan to run it off of the original
diskette, make a backup copy to protect yourself from the usual
diskette problems.
To install Romaz on our hard disk, make yourself a new directory,
place the supplied diskette into your floppy drive, a:, then
enter the command:
copy a:*.*<CR> <CR> depicts your return key.
HELP AND INSTRUCTION
The three interactive programs supplied with Romaz are: romaz
(the actual game program), config (the configuration and setup
program) and editb (the maze editor provided with registration
fee). romaz and editb provide on-line help at any time by just
pressing function-key nine (F9). The help provided indicates
what keys produce what actions.
config shows what commands can be used in the lower-right
quadrant of the screen. For example, the tab key moves the
action arrow to the next option and function-key one requests a
change in that option. If a function can take on several values,
the values are either scanned with each pressing of F1, or a
choice line is presented at the bottom of the screen.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
GETTING STARTED
Before playing the game for the first time, you should run the
configuration program by entering:
config<CR>
in the directory that the game was loaded into. The config
program sets up your game defaults, including keyboard mapping,
colors and character representations (icons). Config also lets
you choose any one of the supplied playing mazes to play with.
Once your have configured your game, you simply enter:
romaz<CR>
at your MS-DOS prompt. There are several options that you can
exercise as arguments to the command line (see VARIATIONS).
These options override the defaults set up in the configuration.
KEYBOARD
The default keyboard layout is designed to permit one-handed
operation by either a right-handed or left-handed person. The
following keys control the direction of your playing piece:
PRIMARY ALTERNATE RESULTING
KEY KEY DIRECTION
, <- go left
. |^ go up
/ -> go right
<space> |v go down
h H halt movement
o O turn shields on
p P turn shields off
With the primary layout, you can position three fingers over the
left, up and right keys and use your thumb to press the space
bar. Your other hand is now free to press the shield-on key (o)
or shield-off key (p) when needed. The alternate keys are
provided in case you are more comfortable using the keyboard keys
that are already marked with directional arrows. Since you can
stop junior at any time by just changing direction to walk into a
wall, the halt key will be of limited use until you play on a
maze that has large spaces without walls.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
Four other keys are used to start or stop play as follows:
KEY ACTION
s stop game
<esc> exit game, save current maze(s)
F1 stop game, clear screen
c continue from a stopped game
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
OBJECTIVES The playing field consists of a maze with walls and
paths, point dots, bonus pieces, mazzlers (the hunters) and
junior (the hunted). The goal of romaz is to gather as many
points as possible before losing all of your lives. Points are
gathered by eating maze- dots, bonus pieces, mazzlers, or, (in
timed games), by clearing the maze. Points are lost when junior
steps on a mine (in later stages of the game), or when you use
your protection shields. You start with three lives and can earn
additional lives by eating mazzlers.
In general, you move through the maze in the direction determined
by the direction keys you press while the mazzlers move in their
own direction, determined by chance and able to change at any
instance.
PLAYING ROMAZ
Romaz is started by enering the command:
romaz
at the MS-DOS command line prompt. It displays an opening
message, then waits for you to choose how many players will be
playing and what there names are. If you don't enter a name
within the allotted time, it defaults to one player with no name.
To enter a name (up to 10 characters), type the name then press
enter. If there is more than one player, press the function key
for that number of players (F2 for two, F3 for three, etc). Up
to eight players can play at one time. After pressing one of
these function keys, enter a name for each player as above.
After the last player's name is entered, the game will start with
the first player entered.
If there is a previously saved partial game present, a message
will appear on the next to last line indicating such. If you
wish to continue that game, press function key F10. Otherwise,
the saved game will be replaced by the current game if saved.
YOU NOW KNOW ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO PLAY ROMAZ WITH ANY OF THE
MAZES PROVIDED. CONTINUE READING FOR FURTHER DETAIL AFTER TRYING
A FEW GAMES.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
PHILOSOPHY
As you become an experienced player, you will notice that the
majority of points comes from two actions: capturing Mazzlers or
capturing the bonus.
To capture Mazzlers, you must first grab a power pill, which
changes junior's form [and color]. After consuming the pill, you
have a limited amount of time to capture Mazzlers. The first one
you capture is worth 100 points, the second is 200, the third is
400 and each subsequent value is double. If you capture six
Mazzlers in a row, you not only earn 6300 points
(100+200+400+800+1600+3200), but you may earn an additional life.
You can only earn that life if you have less than four lives
already (you start with three lives). You can earn five lives by
capturing seven monsters in a row, but you have to be very good
to achieve this.
The bonus appears on every maze after the first. It is worth 100
on the first maze, 200 on the second, then 400, 700, 1100, 1600,
2200, ... You can see how the value of capturing the bonus
becomes more valuable with each one you capture. The bonus
appears randomly in any column of the third row from the bottom
shortly after each new maze is started. It remains out for a
short period of time. If you reach it before it disappears, you
are rewarded its current value and its value is increased for the
next time it appears (on the next maze level). If you don't
reach it in time, its value is not increased and you will have to
wait for the next maze to get it. If you lose a life, all
mazzlers go back to their home and you will have another chance
to capture the bonus. In higher level mazes, the bonus can
appear on any row.
DIFFICULTY
With each maze you clear, the difficulty level increases.
Several operations occur. First, the number of Mazzlers change.
There can be as many as ten Mazzlers wandering in the maze.
Second, the construction of the maze changes - walls disappear
and paths are rearranged. Third, energy pills can move or
disappear, giving you less of an ability to capture Mazzlers.
Fourth, land mines appear (if you step on one, you lose 50
points). Fifth, a transport room appears at the second column of
the second row. Any object moving into the transporter gets
randomly placed on the maze. Finally, the ability of the
Mazzlers to change direction and move toward your playing piece
increases.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
LIFE
You can obtain extra lives by capturing enough Mazzlers to score
3200 points or 6400 points. This will extend your number of
lives by one or two, but you will never reach never more than
four lives (if 3200 scored) or five lives (if 6400 scored). Note
that the first four Mazzlers that leave their cave will return to
the cave after they are captured. All others disappear (unless
junior is captured), resulting in the a slight increase of speed
of the remaining mazzlers.
Also, there is a slight possibility of obtaining an additional
life when moving through the transporter, but this is risky since
you never know where you will land.
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
DEATH
Death occurs when a Mazzler captures your playing piece or, in a
timed game, when your time runs out. When you run out of lives,
your game is over.
SETTING DIFFICULTY LEVELS
You can vary the skill level and type of game through command
line options or configuration settings. Command line options
always override configuration defaults. The following command
line flags are available:
OPTION MEANING
/b Beginner Starting Grade
/n Novice Starting Grade
/i Intermediate Starting Grade
/e Expert Starting Grade
/t Timed games
Additionally, if you start romaz with the name of a maze file, it
will let you play with that maze. For example, the following
command starts romaz using the hard (see description of mazes
later on in this document) at the intermediate starting level:
romaz /i hard
You can also vary the game by selecting different initial mazes
using the config program. The game comes with the default maze
selected.
NOW YOU KNOW ALL THE VARIATIONS. IF YOU WANT TO DESIGN YOUR OWN
MAZE, CONTINUE READING. OTHERWISE, PLAY ON!
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
MAZE EDITOR
Romaz comes with a powerful maze editor that lets you create
totally new maze layouts, or change those provided. The editor,
called "editb," will edit any valid maze file or create one from
scratch. To run Editb, simply enter the following command in the
game directory:
editb maze-name<CR>
Editb will operate on the specified maze (or create a blank one
the specified maze doesn't exist) and present you with a screen
that looks much like the game itself. Your current cell location
is indicated by the characters "[ ]" and you can move to any cell
using either the default direction keys or the PC's cursor
movement keys (arrows).
Once started, editb loads the requested maze then positions its
cursor at the top left coordinate. In each cell, you can, erect
or dismantle walls to the left, right, up or down, using the
letters: l, r, u or d. If a wall is left of the current position
and you press l, the wall is taken away. If there was no wall, a
wall is erected. You can toggle a point in the current cell
using the '+' or '=' key (toggle means to turn it off if it was
on, or turn it on if it was off). You can toggle the energy pill
using the '@' key.
To move to another position, use the cursor movement keys on your
numeric keypad.
To save the maze, press the 'w' key. To exit, press the ESC key.
When you create a new maze, you have the ability to also add
automatic maze changes that occur each time the player clears
another maze (up to 11 modified mazes allowed). To do this,
editb maintains eleven maze instances that can be addressed
starting at level one and going up to level 11. The Home key
always gets you to level one while the END key always gets you to
level 11. The PgUp key gets you to the next higher level while
the PgDn key gets you to the next lower level.
At each level, you can change the number of Mazzlers present by
pressing a number from four to nine or zero, where 0 represents
10 Mazzlers.
To aid in creating subsequent maze levels, there is a command
that transfers one maze level to all maze levels beyond it. To
do this, press the 't' key and editb prompts with the question:
"do you want all higher levels of alterations to match this
level?" If you answer 'y', all levels beyond the current level
get set to match the current level that you are at. An example
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
of how to use this is:
+o Create your main theme maze at level one
+o press 't' and answer 'y' (this makes all levels match level
one)
+o Press PgUp to get to level one (it should look like level 0)
+o Press a number from 4 to 0 to set the number of Mazzlers
+o Make all wall, point and pill changes desired
+o Press 't' again and answer 'y' again
+o Repeat these steps until you complete all levels
A word of caution, once you have made modifications at all
levels, you should be careful not to use the 't' operation
because it will destroy all the work you have done. If you
decide to make changes to a low level maze, you must manually
propagate those changes through all maze levels.
For your convenience, the ^F (ctrl-F) key will set all point dots
on the current maze (since mazes are usually created with most of
the possible point dots selected).
When your maze is ready to save, press the 'w' key to write it
then the ESC key to exit. If you press the ESC key before you
save a new or changed maze, editb announces that fact and gives
you a chance to write the maze before exiting. To exit without
updating the maze on disk, press ESC again.
MAZE EDITING CAUTIONS
Editb provides a means to test, create and review newly created
mazes. It lets you see all maze levels, without having to
capture a single Mazzler.
Make sure that all point dots can be reached. If one is
programmed in an unreachable area, the maze can never be cleared.
AUDIO OPTIONS
You can create a completely unique game from Romaz by creating a
tune file that contains tunes that are played when certain key
events occur during the game (capturing Mazzlers, etc.).
Romaz looks in the file "romaz.tun" for its music. One such tune
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
is provided for you as an example. To try it, copy "extra.tun"
to "romaz.tun" (copy romaz.tun extra.tun).
If you want to experiment with your own tunes, the format of the
tune file ("romaz.tun") is:
:tune-name
tone duration
+o +o
+o +o
+o +o
:tune-name
+o +o
etc etc
where, tune-name can be:
bonus mine monster free-life transporter
In the above, tone is a number representing the note to be played
in Hz and the duration is the number of 16th beats for that note.
If the tone is less than 50, then a quiet pause equal to the
duration is played. You can program up to thirty notes or rests
per tune.
ACCOUNTING
Each time you compete a game, a short summary is written to the
accounting file "/romaz.act" and, if you beat the high score in
your starting grade, your score is written to "/romaz.hig".
While the high score is visible during play, you must run a
review program to see the detailed accounting information. The
program, review, shows you the accounting information then asks
you if you want to delete the accounting file or not, and to
delete the high score file or not.
By default, you get accounting information for all players, but
you can get information for a single player by running review
with a username argument:
review /uJohn
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
ADDITIONAL MAZES SUPPLIED WITH ROMAZ
Ten unique mazes are supplied on the game disk. Each one is
different from the next. Some are harder than others. The
following are some of the mazes either provided with the game or
available when you register with the authors.
ROADS Somewhat easy maze, especially the first few screens. This
maze resembles highways with dotted lines.
ROBUXES Reasonably difficulty level.
QUICK (Short Cuts) Reasonably difficult version of the original
maze (ORIGINAL) with additional short cuts from the top to
the bottom rows. [available with registration]
SHORTY Medium difficulty, lots of short passages. [available
with registration]
ORIGINAL The original maze layout used when Romaz was initially
conceived. Not too easy but not too hard.
HARD Semi-difficult, lots of long trails to get trapped in.
LONGY This one is tough with very long and windy trails that are
very easy to get trapped in. Be prepared to turn on your
shields! [available with registration]
ZONES (Zone Troopers) This one can get nerve racking. As you
progress through levels of the game, large sections
(quarters) of the maze have only one entrance and exit. If
you take too long, some sections get filled with Mazzlers.
LEFTY (Clear Left First) An appropriate name for this very
difficult maze. After a point in the game, the left side of
the maze becomes segregated from the right side and the
transporter opens. Since there is no transporter on the
right side of the maze, you must clear all points from the
left side, then take your chances at going through the
transporter to reach the right side. Good Luck! [available
with registration]
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
GRID (All Boxed In) A builder maze that cannot be played, but can
serve as an excellent starting maze for use with Editb. All
possible walls are present so you can create mazes by taking
out walls to create passageways. [available with
registration]
As new mazes are added, our valued customers will get the
opportunity to purchase them at a nominal price.
ONLINE HELP
Two text files provide online help, romaz.hlp and editb.hlp. If
you change certain configuration options such as keyboard
mappings, you may want to change the online help files (romaz.hlp
and editb.hlp). These files can be modified using any plain-text
editor (such as EDLIN). Characters that are surrounded by
double-quotes appear highlighted. To enter binary codes for
characters, use an backward quote (`) followed by exactly two
hexadecimal digits (see the existing help files for an example).
Copyright 1989 Results Oriented
