battalion on the Macintosh

monsters, explosions, and senseless destruction.
You've seen the movies, you know what to do.

Version 1.4 - September 1996.

please note that this game only runs well on Power Macintosh or compatible machines

legal stuff

battalion is provided free of charge. There is no registration fee.

Permission to copy and distribute battalion in its entirety, for non- commercial purposes, is hereby granted without fee provided this copyright notice appears in all copies.

If you redistribute battalion then the ENTIRE contents of this distribution must be distributed.

Note that distributing battalion in with any product is considered to be a 'commercial purpose.'

This software may be modified for your own purposes, but modified versions may not be distributed without prior consent of the author.

This software is provided 'as-is' without any express or implied warrenty. In no event shall the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use or misuse of this software.

Should you want to do something with this software that is prohibited by the above copyright, please contact the author (email please) as he is very likely willing to sell out for the almighty dollar.

a bit of history

battalion was originally writen in GL(r) on a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation. This version won 'best Indy game' in the 3rd Indizone Contest, and a slightly modified version of the game is currently shipping with all Silicon Graphics Indy and Indigo2 workstations. I then converted battalion to OpenGL(r) and ported it to other flavours of UNIX (SunOS, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX). These versions are available from the battalion home page at the link given below. battalion is now available for the Macintosh. I have tried to add a reasonable 'Mac-like' shell around the game but it is still an X-based program at heart.

Since battalion is written in OpenGL I would like to thank the following people for making the mac version possible. First off, Brian Paul for his Mesa Graphics Library; Miklos Fazekas for creating the Macintosh version of Mesa, the nice people at metrowerks who made CodeWarrior, and Preston Nevins for loaning me his copy of the CodeWarrior CDs for this project.

Should an official version of OpenGL become available for the Macintosh this program should be nicely compatible with it.

This program contains code modified from Silicon Graphics' tk library, Miklos Fazekas' AGL driver, and the Asynchronous Sound Helper written by Bryan K. Ressler and updated by Bradley D. Mohr.

While battalion will compile and run as an application for 68K macs, the game runs so slowly that it is unplayable. I will keep trying to see if I can generate a playable 68K version.

see the help screens

The original help files for battalion were created in Showcase(r) which unfortunately only runs on Silicon Graphics workstations, so I have converted those pages to GIF files which are viewable from these pages.

The Help screens

expected performance

battalion runs best with 'thousands of colors' selected from the Monitors control panel

The game requires at least 16 greyscales or 256 colours to figure out what is going on, but has run with every monitor setting I have thrown at it. Shrinking the window will speed up the game. You can enlarge the window, but will probably have to increase the memory given to the application.

battalion should run at a decent speed on any PowerMac.

things that need work

As this is first official release for the Mac I'm sure there will be a few things that still need tweaking. Here is my list so far:

allow user to choose monster with the mouse
integrate the help screens into the game itself
add more music and sound effects
make it playable on 68K Macs

Several things have been fixed since the previous betas:

application is now fat so it shouldn't crash 68K Macs
sounds now loop more properly
contol-key now works correctly to fire the weapons
user can now move the window and the mouse will work correctly without having to resize the window first
help GIF images are smaller and should fit on the screen better
the game is significantly faster, at the cost of being rather rude and hogging the processor.
can now pick the name you want for the high score list
ability to resize the window is more obvious

battalion links

The main resource for information on the game, FAQ list, and the latest downloadable versions is the battalion Home Page

Andy Johnson's Home Page

Mesa Home Page
Mac-Mesa Home Page
Metrowerks Home Page
SGIs OpenGL Home Page

3rd Indizone Contest Home Page
Japanese Monster Movie Jump Page

how to reach the author

ajohnson@eecs.uic.edu
http://www.eecs.uic.edu/~ajohnson

Andrew Johnson
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (M.C 154)
University of Illinois at Chicago
851 South Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
Chicago, IL 60607