Welcome to the Help section for National Parks of America. You can click on the "?" button whenever you need assistance in reviewing text, video, photographic, or other information about any of the national parks included on the disc.
Main Screen - This screen will appear at the beginning of each session every time you load the CD-ROM program.
From this outlay of the United States, you can obtain specific park information by selecting a geographical region, or by clicking on the Travel Plan or Index control buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Travel Plan (compass icon) - This option brings you to a "Search" screen. In this area, you can choose criteria depending on your travel suggestions or requirements. For example, click on the "camping' and "hiking" buttons, then the select a region and state. Add or delete park names in the list, then click the search button. The window at the bottom of the screen will show all of the parks that have camping and hiking available.
Clicking on the "Clear" button will remove all the selected information on the screen.
Index (index card icon) - A quick way to access all the available parks, photographs and videos. The index includes a complete listing of all the national parks by region, state, and alphabet. To speed up a search, type the first letter of a park or state once the list appears in the search window. The first location that begins with that letter will be highlighted. You can also use the buttons in the index box to bring up lists of photographs or videos for viewing. To do this, double-click the park's name on the list when you have selected "photo" or "video".
Back Track (creature footprint icon) - Takes you to the previous screen. Keeps a record (up to 10 parks) of your travels from park to park; click on this button to bring you straight back to the last park visited.
Help (? icon) - Provides an overview and assistance in running this program.
Exit - Exits the National Parks of America program.
Region Level - From this screen, you have several options. You can click right on the state name in the region just selected to bring you to a more detailed state map with all of its parks indicated. You can still click on Travel Plan, Index, and the other control buttons, which now include a Main control button to access the Start-up screen. The green region icons surrounding the region you selected bring you to that region, its states, and their parks.
State Level - From this screen you can quickly and simply click on the name of the park of your choice. Surrounding the state displayed on your screen are green icons of the other surrounding states. Click on any of these icons to bring you to a detailed map of that state's national parks.
Control buttons on the bottom of the screen still include Main, as well as Region, which returns you to the current state's region.
Park Level - Now that you have arrived at the national park of your choice, you have access to much more useful information about the park. This list below describes each new control button on the screen at the Park level.
Text - Provides the park's hours, facilities, directions, mailing address, etc.
Print - Allows you to print to file or a printer the text information found in the Text option.
Slides - Exhibits a full screen slide show of the park photographs. This automated slide show will have either a music soundtrack or narration accompanying.
Press the letter C to view the caption for each image. To remove the caption press the letter C again. Use your space bar or right arrow key to advance ahead, and the left arrow key to go back through the slide show.
Please note that not all parks have photos. For the parks with no photos, the Slides icon will not appear and the Main screen will display in place of a photo.
Single click directly over the photo to magnify to a full-screen image. To return to the original slide, click anywhere on the full-screen photo.
Arrow keys allow you to click to advance or go back through the series.
Video (video camera icon) - Runs a video that features sights of the park. You have the choice of playing the video on the small monitor pictured, or view in a larger version by clicking on the video monitor's lower right magnifying glass button.
Please note that not all parks have video.
Climate (thermometer icon)- Offers all-season climate information in an easy-to-read animated table.
Next/Previous Arrows - Allows you to move to the previous park or the next park in your selected state.
State - Indicates the state location of the current park. Click on it to bring the complete state map on the screen.
We hope you enjoy your journey through the natural wonders of the United States!
What to do if you have problems:
Audio - Use a sound mixer program (normally supplied with your audio card) to check that your system's audio is set correctly. For this program to function correctly, you need to enable both Wave Audio and MIDI sounds on your system.
Video - We recommend you view this title using 640x480 screen resolution with 256 colors. Viewing this title at higher resolutions can produce disconcerting shifts in the background bitmap when the images are displayed.
For best results, we suggest you use the small window to play video. Users with older hardware may experience difficulty when playing video in the large window. Also, please check that your CD-ROM player's installation is correct. You should install your CD-ROM player so that it uses the full width (16-bit) Direct Memory Access for data transfer.
