Tubular Worlds™ requires a fast Macintosh (with a 68020, 68030, 68040 or PowerPC), System 7 and a monitor with at least 256 colors or 256 gray levels.
To hear the sound effects you must have installed Sound Manager 3.0 (or higher) in your system (it's included in System 7.5 and in System Update 3.0). If you have an older version installed and try to activate Sound FX, you'll get an error message (the music does not need the new version of Sound Manager, only FX do).
New Macintosh computers (PowerMacs, 630 series and others)
With new Macintosh computers that are released since early 1994, you may have trouble controlling the space ship with the mouse, because even smallest mouse movements result in fast ship movements.
In this case you must disable the mouse pointer's acceleration manually before you play the game. Open the mouse control panel and set the tracking to very slow.
Special key commands during the game play
Start: Return or Enter.
Pause: Command-P or Tab.
Stop: Esc or command-period.
Menus & basics
Tubular Worlds needs all available CPU power. Even the fastest Macintosh machines could be even faster for this game. Besides the screen update routines, that consume the largest amount of the available CPU time, sounds, background tasks and the window double size decrease the quality of the animations. Depending on the power of your machine, you might set the following options as desired:
Maximum Speed! Choose this menu item in order to get all options set for maximum display speed. Sound and background tasks are disabled and the window size is set to normal.
Important: If you have more than one monitor connected to your Mac, try to play the game on each of them. Usually, display on monitors connected to NuBus cards on fast machines may be slower than internal video! Accelerated graphic cards are currently not supported.
Double Window Size displays the game window in a larger size. In this mode, the video hardware is directly accessed in contrary to normal size, where the operating system (CopyBits) is used for displaying the game's screen. Direct access might not work with certain accelerated graphic cards. Use normal size or a different monitor then, if you have more than one connected to the Mac.
Black Screen just hides all other background windows when playing. Just cosmetical, has no effect on the game's speed.
Background Tasks: When they're not checked, no CPU time is given to the operating system and its drivers as long as you are playing: AppleTalk will be offline for this time, a printer spooler would be pausing, the harddisk of a PowerBook would not get into sleep mode. On the other side, the game will not be interrupted if someone wants to access your hard disk from the network and the game will run more steady. If the game is over, meaning that the mouse cursor is visible again, background tasks are enabled again.
Sound FX and Music: Sounds consume a lot of CPU time, too. try to turn them off and see the difference while playing. You can use the keyboard commands from the menu also while the game is running: Command-M and Command-F.
