Hi. Well, I've decided to let this bird fly. I've put it out on the net for a number of reasons, perhaps you'll find them interesting.
First of all, clearly, Glypha is not the most original idea. It was my second program though and a self-test to see if I had learned enough about the Mac to create something comparable to an already-established game. It was more of a technical exercise. Sure, I had already done Glider, but in many ways that game was tailored to my limitations in programming the Mac. In fact, you are probably aware that the Mac itself imposes limitations (like fast scrolling) on game programmers too. The 'rules' for Glypha were already laid down - the challenge was in writing Glypha on my Mac Plus and still maintain the feel of the source-game (and I had some fun creating a new feel through the graphics I used as well).
Another reason I'm spreading the source so widely, is because there is clearly a lot of questions facing new programmers and a clear shortage of source code available to help answer those questions. Games stand in a sort of class by themselves. Sorting algorithms etc. are all well known. It's the offscreen bitmaps, graphics, sounds etc. that differ from platform to platform that tend to come up short availability-wise. I'm hoping (optimistically) that many more people will breeze past the initial hurdles of Mac programming and start adding to the shallow pool of shareware games for the Mac. Along similar lines, I see a lot of shareware games where I say to myself, "Wow, if only they had used something other than beeps for sounds," or "If only they had something other than a plain white background," or "I wish they hadn't used Quickdraw rectangles - bitmaps would have been much more visually interesting." These things aren't hard to do, they're just under-documented.
Finally, I suppose I'm paying back the Mac community for one hell of a year. It's been a fast ride and full of surprises. I'm still asking for $15 shareware for the code, but as shareware, you can download it immediately, and if it's not really of your programming caliber, you can trash it (this also coincidentally saves me from having to run to the post office with an armful of disks every couple weeks).
I'll still send you Glider for another $15, but, frankly, the games are very similar in structure.
If you print this out, be forewarned - the thing comes to about 1/2 inch of paper. It's not small.
Please feel free to distribute this to CompuServe, sumex.aim, or any other dark corner you think people go in search of source code. I ask that you don't modify and recompile the code for distribution unless you have my permission. If you wanted to add color or something, we can talk. Otherwise I don't see why the Mac world needs a Glypha-clone :).
Have fun, write some games, and let me know if it has helped you or if you want to use portions of it.
The code was written with THINK's Lightspeed Pascal version 2.0. I have rebuilt the project with LSP 3.0. The project has no object code in it and serves mainly to show you the build order and memory settings. Those using MPW Pascal will need to add the standard initialization code to the beginning of the main program.
