Windows PlayBook Help (Ridiculous Rhymes)

About Windows PlayBook

Installation and running

Mouse Controls

PlayBook Menu

Saving Your Options

Problems


About Windows PlayBook

Windows PlayBook (c) 1995 Sherston Software Ltd

Windows PlayBook is a valuable way to give children individual reading practice.

Each story features features human speech, amusing animations and sound effects.


Installation and  Running

Each book can be run individually. Place the desired disk in the drive, then from the Program Manager FILE menu, choose RUN and type

A:\GO

as the command line.

You may also install some or all of the books to your hard disk. Place the SETUP disk in the drive, then from the Program Manager FILE menu, choose RUN and type

A:\SETUP

as the command line.


Mouse Controls

Click on the EAR button to hear a complete sentence.

Click on the EYE button to animate the page.

Click on the ARROW buttons to move between pages.

To make PlayBook fill the whole screen, click on the maximize button on the window title bar. This hides the rest of the desktop, thus preventing a child from accidentally switching to another application by clicking outside the PlayBook window.


PlayBook Menu

The menu is accessed via the Control Menu or by pressing F10.

Index

You may switch to any poem from the index page.

Print

You may print the current page. We recommend that Windows Print Manager is loaded before attempting to print.

Options

This invokes an options screen. From this screen the sound volume and highlight colour can be specified and the playing of whole sentences can be switched on or off.

Grab Screen

You may save the current screen as a BMP file, which can be loaded into Paintbrush or other painting programs.


Saving Your Options

When you install the software to your hard disk, PlayBook looks for  a file called PLAYBOOK.INI in your Windows directory. If it is not there then PlayBook creates the file, otherwise it adds a new section to it. This file contains the options settings for various types of PlayBook. Using a text editor (such as NOTEPAD) you can edit this file to change the default settings for PlayBook.

For the Ridiculous Rhymes, the settings immediately follow the line

[Ridic]

These are the lines which you may want to change:-

volume=15

This is the sound volume setting.

(valid values are 0 to 15)

highlight=red

This is the highlight setting.

(valid values are red, dark green, dark blue, light green, light blue, orange)

sentences=off

This is the sentences on/off setting.

(valid values are on, off)


Problems

Sound is played too quickly or too slowly

This may be due to the fact that your sound card cannot cope with the non-CD sound rates that PlayBook uses. In this case, change the line

srates=acorn

to

srates=CD

in the [Ridic] section of your PLAYBOOK.INI file.

PlayBook freezes when clicking very quickly on a page

A very small number of Windows sound drivers may freeze if sound is repeatedly stopped and restarted in quick succession. To overcome this, change the line

stopfastclicks=off

to

stopfastclicks=on

in the [Ridic] section of your PLAYBOOK.INI file.

This will stop a new sound playing if it is less than half a second since a previous sound started playing. You should not notice the difference in normal use.

In case of difficulty please contact:

Sherston Software

Angel House

Sherston

Malmesbury

Wiltshire SN16 0LH

England

Tel: +44 (0)1666 840433

e-mail: support@sherston.co.uk