Welcome to Deco! The main instructions to Deco are available within the program itself, under the Apple menu. This document will serve to fill in a few additional points.
"Allow Background Events" under the Options menu:
When this is checked, Deco allows other programs that you might have running in the background to take little bits of time to do whatever it is they do. When it's unchecked, Deco takes all the time for itself (unless the game is paused or not playing). Because Deco isn't a very "demanding" application, this is on (checked) by default. If you find there are slight pauses in Deco's response to your key presses, turning this option off will fix that.
Load Time & Music:
Most of the time it takes Deco to load is actually spent loading the music files. If you don't want background music, you can make Deco load faster by throwing away the music files in the "Deco Data" folder.
Music:
The background music option in Deco requires that you have QuickTime™ 2.0 or later installed. Although the songs will play, they won't sound their best unless you have the "QuickTime™ Musical Instruments" extension installed as well. The "Sound" dialog shows you which song is currently playing in a Deco game. If you don't like a particular song, just find the file with the song's title in the Deco Data folder and throw it away. Deco will function with any number of music files in Deco Data.
Updating:
If you're updating from an earlier version of Deco, you can just drop the program file "Deco" into your old Deco folder. That way you won't lose your old high scores or preferences.
Distribution:
Deco may be freely distributed, provided the usual guidelines for distributing shareware are followed: don't modify it or charge an unreasonable sum for it. Magazines, shareware vendors and others are welcome to include Deco on their CD-ROMs, Disks of the Month, catalogs, BBS's, etc. Moreover, I encourage private individuals to share Deco. (That's why they call it shareware!) I see Deco as being a perfect "office workers game" -- ideal for those occasional breaks in the workday we all need to stay productive and sane. If you work in an office with other Mac-users, PLEASE give everyone there a copy of Deco.
Tip:
And here's a tip for playing Deco in an office environment: If you have the WindowShade Control Panel (available with System 7.5 and later) turned on, double-clicking in the Deco window's title bar will not only collapse the window (hiding the fact that you were playing a game), but also pause a game in progress.
Plug:
I've written several other pieces of highly acclaimed and award-winning Macintosh shareware and freeware. You can read about and download all my programs from my Web site at:
http://users.aol.com/karlbunker/
Foreign customers:
Mailing U.S. currency is best; second best is mailing the equivalent of $20.00 in your native currency -- the extra five dollars will cover the fee my bank charges for exchanging currency.
Deco requires System 7.0 or later. It will look its best with 256 colors, but also has a 16 color mode.
