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Readme3.3
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1997-01-05
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WANDERER Version 3.3
WANDERER is a nice boulder dash program which
I downloaded from the atari ftp site. It comes
with its own editor and sources and it is public
domain. A lot of work went into making the
different levels. (See credits in the screens
directory.) Though the game is almost 10 years
old and has a rather old fashion user interface,
I decided to revive it by converting it to
run on a PC. It runs on my PC under Windows 95
and I think it should run under NT. In any
cases the sources are included with this
distribution.
I was not able to find the WANDERER game on
the Web (except for atari.archive.umich.edu).
I have modified it to run on the PC in protected
mode using the DJGPP (GNU) C compiler (which is
free). I have taken the liberty to make it more
user friendly. It still uses the curses-termcap
user interface, but in view of improving the
graphics, I have divided the screen into separate
windows.
Some of the main changes which increase the user
friendliness are listed below.
(1) The program no longer terminates when you die.
(2) The program now allows use to restart the same
level if you made a mistake or get stuck (r key).
(3) The save and restore options are now unrestricted.
(If you do a restore, the file you read back is no
longer deleted. This allows you to save your state
and come back to it again as many times as you wish.)
(4) The option to record and playback your path
which is in the screen editor is now also available
in the non-editor mode when you are playing a level.
You can even write or read these paths to disk using
the cntl-r and cntl-w commands.
(5) Playback speed and animation speed (for falling
objects) is now adjustable using <,>,m,n keys.
(6) Playback is now interruptable by hitting any
keyboard key.
(7) You do not need to know the master password
to zero out the hiscores file.
(8) The program also responds to the arrow keys
besides the hjkl keys.
Note the program reads and writes three different
file formats: (1) the screen, (2) the screen and
state of the game and (3) the path. Presently, you
are responsible for keeping these files straight.
There is quite a lot of remaining work that would
be nice to be done -- for example, replace the
curses-termcap graphics with VGA graphics and mouse
sensitive menus. I doubt, if I will get around to
doing this shortly but this is a nice project using
one of the free game support software such as
Allegro or Jlib which are in the DJGPP ftp
sites (eg. x2ftp.oulu.fi in msdos/programming/djgpp2).
To rebuild this program, you now must have the
pdcurses library which can also be found in the
x2ftp.oulu.fi site in the dgjpp/v2tk directory. The
version that I used was called pdcurs22.
The sources probably need modification if they
are to be recompiled on another operating system
despite all the conditional compilation code.
Seymour Shlien
624 Courtenay Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K2A 3B5
seymour.shlien@crc.doc.ca
2 January 1997