WARBIRDS is (c) Copyright 1994 Ambient Software, Apostelstr. 8, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium (Europe). It was written by Roy Dictus using THINK Pascal 4 and Ingemar Ragnemalm's excellent Sprite Animation Toolkit.
GAME PLAY
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Warbirds is reminiscent of the old Phoenix game found in the arcades. It has always been one of my personal favorites, along with Galaxians and Pac-Man.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Phoenix machine anymore, so I could not determine the exact features of the game except from memory. Luckily, some people have suggested ways to make it look and play more like the original.
The aim is to kill the Master Alien in wave 5. You do this by shooting the mother ship's lower defenses and by shooting holes in its moving defense belt, so that your fire can reach the Master Alien. Beware! The mother ship is guarded by small warbirds...
Before reaching wave five, of course you'll have to get past the protective warbirds (great and small ones) in waves 1-4! If you're quick, you can shoot the eggs in waves 3 and 4 before they come out -- it will save you a lot of trouble.
Move left using the 4 key on the Numeric keypad, the left-arrow cursor key or Control.
Move right using the 6 key on the Numeric keypad, the right-arrow cursor key or Option.
Fire your laser by using the 0 key on the Numeric keypad or Space.
Press Shift to use the barrier. This protects you from the birds or their fire. Of course, barrier use is limited!
You may also move and shoot by using the mouse (however, there is no mouse equivalent for the barrier -- you'll have to use Shift).
STARRY BACKGROUND
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You can turn the starry background on and off as you please in the main screen (that is, not during gameplay). Press S to turn the stars on and off.
If you play on a B&W screen or you have a slow Mac, you'll probably want the stars off.
HIGH SCORES
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These are kept in a separate file, which should be kept in the same folder as the Warbirds program. If this program can't find a high-score file there, it will create a new one -- i.e., you can "clear the high-score table" by simply removing this file. The program will create a new, empty one the next time you play.
COMPATIBILITY
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Ñ Warbirds requires a Mac with at least System 6, 640K available memory and a B&W or 16/256-color (or gray-scale) monitor. You should run it on a 68030 or more powerful processor -- it really is sslooowwwwww on 68000- and 68020-based systems. You can always improve speed by restarting without extensions (restart your Mac while pressing Shift until the Mac says its extensions are off), play in B&W (by setting your monitor to B&W before starting Warbirds) etc. The reason Warbirds does not check your processor is b/c the Powermacs emulate the 68000. While they are clearly fast enough to run Warbirds, the program would deny a Powermac user to play :-(
Ñ For reasons of speed, Warbirds always paints its sprites directly to the screen. This may be incompatible with your system. It seems to work fine on Powermacs though.
Ñ Warbirds "takes over" your Mac until you quit it (by pressing Q). That is, all background apps are SUSPENDED until you quit Warbirds -- your Mac does no background/event processing while you're playing.
Ñ Sound is better when you are running System 7 with Sound Manager 3.0 or higher. Sound Manager 3 is available from many ftp sites, including Apple's.
DISTRIBUTION
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Warbirds may be freely copied. It may be supplied on CD-ROM if and only if a copy of the CD in question is sent to the author at the address below; it may also be included in shareware catalogs if the author receives a copy of the catalog.
SHAREWARE
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As Warbirds is shareware, this means you must consider your copy a "trial". If you've played it for a while (say, a week) and decide to keep it, you are expected to send US$ 10 to the address below. This will encourage the author to write more games. If you don't like it, and henceforth don't play it :-), you are expected to either give it to someone else or to delete it.
I have, of course, no control over who keeps it and who doesn't, and there are bound to be people dishonest enough to keep playing without supporting, but I'll hunt these down after I die and make the rest of their lives -- or deaths -- as miserable as I can }:-)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Special thanks go to all beta testers and people who have commented, hinted and suggested improvements, including Sigurdur Petursson, Victor Steinbok and David Wareing
.
IDEAS, SUGGESTIONS
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If you have any ideas, suggestions, criticisms concerning this or any other Ambient games, please send them to
Roy Dictus, Ambient Software, Apostelstr. 8, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium (Europe)
or
royd@igwe1.vub.ac.be
Thank you for supporting shareware and enjoy WARBIRDS!!!
