Here are some notes on Maniac, in two sections. The first section contains points of interest on some of the technical features and game aspects of Maniac. The second section is a troubleshooting section which you can refer to if things "don't go as they should"...
Points of interest
• Holding down the Command key immediately after you open Maniac brings up a special options screen. Descriptions are given with each of the options. Basically, you shouldn't need to fiddle with these unless you have a special Mac configuration or wish to optimise the speed for a slower Mac.
• Maniac has the (so far) unique feature among arcade games in that you can quickly and easily choose the music you'd like to hear during the game. Just drop your favourite music files into the "Maniac game music" folder, and Maniac will pick one of the files at random. However, one of the files must be called "Default music".
See the "About the music" file for more information.
• If you're using a Mac without stereo speakers and you can only hear half of the instruments in the music, make sure you switch the music option in the preferences section to "Mono". This applies to most Macs where you're using the internal Mac speaker.
• Sound Manager 3 is an Apple extension which requires System 7.1 or later (or a previous version of System 7 with the QuickTime extension). Low-end 68030 Macs (such as the LC, IIsi and IIvi) without this extension may have inferior quality sound in Maniac. Whatever Mac you have, Maniac takes advantage of Sound Manager 3 (if available) by improving the sound capabilities of the game which in turn makes the animation smoother.
The Sound Manager 3 extension is made by Apple, and may be available from your local Apple dealer, or perhaps from your favourite software source (such as ftp.austin.apple.com on the Internet). It's built into most recent Macs (AV Macs and Power Macs, for instance), and it's also part of System Update 2 or 3 from Apple. Don't let Apple charge you for it!
• I know that some of the graphics may have a few 'artifacts' (stray pixels, or 'bitty' areas). This is because when I was making the graphics, I wasn't using the right colour table (bummer, eh?). Anyway, if the next version ever materialises, I'll fix this. Right now, I just want to get 2.1 out! Of course, you wouldn't have noticed the artifacts if I hadn't mentioned them. Oh well.
• In case any of you were wondering, the help sections in the game haven't changed since 2.0. All that information is correct, it's just that I haven't mentioned two features that much! Such is life.
The first is the bonus level: every two levels there is a bonus level where you have a short time to catch as many ghosts as you can. You get large amounts of points for each one caught, and an extra life for catching all four. Harder than it sounds, as you'll see...
The second is the bonus bar down the side. For every certain number of dots you eat the pointer on the bonus bar goes up. At any time you can press the bonus key (as defined in the Preferences section) to activate the bonus the pointer is pointing at. The higher the pointer, the better the bonus, the ultimate bonus being the mystery 'question mark' which is usually good but sometimes has side effects! Most of the bonuses are cryptically described in the help section.
How to avoid problems (or fix them if you get them!)
• If you attempt to play a game of Maniac (by pressing "N"), the "Get Ready" message appears and disappears, and then:
- Your Mac crashes, or
- The graphics come out completely wrong
Then your graphics card or monitor may be incompatible with Maniac's fast drawing code, ManiacDraw. Hold down the Command key immediately after opening Maniac until a dialog box appears. In this dialog box you can switch the "drawing mode" to QuickDraw, which should be compatible with your screen. However, Maniac may not play at full speed if using QuickDraw on a 68020 or 68030 Mac.
• Maniac assumes that your startup monitor ("Welcome to Mac" monitor) is the same monitor as your menu bar monitor. If you have changed this (by holding down the option key in the Monitors control panel) then Maniac may not hide the menu bar correctly. I'm working on it, don't worry...
• If you have one of those cool new multi-resolution monitors which you can switch "on the fly", I suggest you don't change resolutions when Maniac is open. The same goes for the Radius pivot: resist the temptation to swing it round in the middle of an exciting game. Maniac only checks the screen size once, and that's when it's opened. If you change the size, Maniac might try drawing Pac Man all over another program's memory. Remember Ghostbusters: "Crossing the streams would be bad."
• If Maniac doesn't work correctly, the first thing you should try is increasing its memory allocation. The minimum is 2500k; try increasing it to 2800 or 3000k. If you still encounter problems, try restarting your Mac with extensions off (hold down shift key) and try again. If the problem doesn't appear then one of your extensions is incompatible with Maniac. Let me know if you find this: I haven't found any extensions (yet) which are incompatible.
