home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Mission 3
/
Mission 3.zip
/
Mission 3.iso
/
spiele
/
clowns
/
readme.doc
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-09-18
|
9KB
|
189 lines
Monkeys and Balloons
by Frank Cohen
(c) 1988 Regent Software
This document and the program that accompanies it is owned
by Regent Software with all right reserved. Please feel free
to makes copies of the program for your local user group, Atari
ST dealer, and friends. However, under no circumstance is this
program to be sold as a commercial product.
A long, long time ago...
Once upon a time, a young college freshman found a company that
would pay him the exorbitant salary of fourteen dollars an hour
to sit in front of an Atari 800 and write a computer game. He
didn't know a thing about writing a game, but he was a trained
graphic artist, and had some experience writing music. So he
gave it a whirl. Six months later Datasoft, Inc., released one
of its first games: Clowns and Balloons.
Since then, the freshman went on to work for other companies, and
eventually founded his own computer software company that
currently offers ST products. But, the name Clowns and
Balloons haunted him as his first, and probably best known
work.
Years later, when the Atari 800 found itself put out to pasture,
the idea of writing a new version of Clowns and Balloons kept
coming up. The publishers of ST-Log magazine found with the
right amount of coaxing, that Clowns and Balloons would
finally see the light of day on the ST computer. A deal was
struck, and some work began. But it took more than a year for
the project to be completed - while the project was fun to work
on, it didn't pay the monthly bills.
When Clowns and Balloons ST was finished, the name just didn't
suit it anymore. The graphics were completely different, the
game play more difficult, the music was rewritten, and some of
the animation was changed. So, we are proud to bring you
Monkeys and Balloons.
Required Hardware
Monkeys and Balloons will run on any Atari ST computer: Atari
520ST, 1040ST, Mega 2 and Mega 4 systems. The game uses your
ST's mouse as its joystick, controlling player movement. The
program is designed to run in Low Resolution mode, so a color
monitor is required.
Starting The Game
From the GEM Desktop, open the filed titled MONKEYS.PRG. You
can open a file by clicking the program icon once, then
selecting the OPEN option from the FILE drop down menu.
You may also double-click the program icon.
Once the program is started, the title screen will appear and you
will hear some music. The music volume is controlled from your
color monitor's volume control knob.
After a few moments a demonstration of the game play will appear.
While either viewing the title screen or the demonstration,
clicking the left mouse button will start a new game.
Game Play
Welcome to the exciting world of the circus. Cotton candy,
peanuts, clowns, and balloons are all waiting for your enjoyment.
Funny clowns bounce through the air, while trained monkeys
carefully balance a trampoline close to the ground. Move the
trampoline below the clown and everything is fine. The clown
bounces higher and higher, trying to catch some of the floating
balloons. Miss the clown, and you won't get any bananas
tonight!
As the monkey trainer, you control which way the monkeys move
the trampoline by moving the ST's mouse left and right. The
monkeys can control where the clown will bounce by moving the
trampoline slightly when the clown bounces. The clown will
bounce straight up and down, if he lands right in the center of
the trampoline. The further from the center, the more of an
angle.
There are three rows of floating balloons above the monkeys. When
the clowns hat touches a balloon, it pops and you are awarded
some points. The higher the balloon, the more points are
awarded. The object of the game is to clear each row of
balloons from bottom to top. If you clear the second or third
row of balloons before clearing the bottom row, the higher rows
will fill up again with more balloons. When you clear all of the
balloons, a special bonus award will be given and the next level
will begin.
At first, the clown will not bounce very high. The longer the
clown continues to bounce, the higher he will go. The clown also
bounces faster as the game is played.
Exiting The Game
While the game is being played, pressing the SPACE bar will
terminate the program and return you to the GEM Desktop. You
may also press the UNDO key to finishing playing the game.
Hints For Game Designers
Monkeys and Balloons stores the color palette in use when the
program is first started. The program then switches the
resolution of the screen to low resolution, storing the current
resolution. When exited, Monkeys and Balloons restores the
resolution and color palette. This should be standard practice
for all games on the ST, but this is rarely the case.
The project was written using Regent Word 1 as a text editor. As a
program editor, Regent Word is superior to the other text editors
available because everything can be keyboard driven. The mouse
is useless to program developers because keyboard commands don't
force you to take your hands off the keyboard, which slows down
your development efforts.
William Robinson has developed his own home-brew 68000 Assembler
program, which was of invaluable help to completing this project
in a relatively short amount of time. William's assembler takes
standard 68000 code and turns it directly into a .PRG program
file, ready for running from the GEM Desktop. Other assemblers
have to go through two or three steps before they are finished.
Atari Corp. has released their own quick-and-easy 68000
Assembler, but I found William's to be easier to use and quicker.
William's assembler compiles the Monkeys and Balloons source
code in under eight seconds! The only problem with William's
assembler is that it has not been released to the public.
William does not want to support it, so for the moment it isn't
available. However, William is easily swayed to public opinion,
so writing him a letter might change his opinion.
All of the graphics were developed using Degas Elite. The
graphic files are stored in the normal Degas compressed
format. When the program is run, all of the graphic files are
loaded into the ST's memory and decompressed. The decompression
routine took only a few hours to write, and can easily be used in
other programs. Since the files are Degas compatible, you can
easily create your own graphics for the game. If you develop
something funny or cute, be certain to send a copy to
ST-Log.
The music routines turned out to be the most difficult part of
the project. The note and duration of the music was developed by
hand-coding the songs from their original sheet music. Certainly
other methods of capturing music data are possible with the ST,
but at the time none were known. Once the notes were entered,
the problem of how to generate sounds become a problem. Atari's
ST documentation is completely void of any information on sound
generation for the ST. Michtron's Concise Guide To the Atari
ST book showed how to create a frequency, but said nothing
about generating notes from a musical scale. Finally, a friend
found a small table of frequency to note values in the Abacus
ST Graphics and Sound book.
The entire project took less than three weeks of full-time effort
to complete. The graphics were developed in about five days,
with the balance of the effort spent on programming and
debugging.
If you have any ideas or feedback on the game, please send them
to ST-Log. There is a whole library of games like Monkeys and
Balloons that could be developed with the right encouragement!
Version 2
After the first release of Monkeys and Ballons, many Mega ST
owners reported the program bombs back to the GEM Desktop
during game play. The problems was in the DEAD routine, which
paints the crumbed Clown onto the screen. The routine
accidentally painted the Clown off the bottom of the screen.
On a Mega 4 ST, this means the Clown is painted beyond the
valid (legal) memory limits. Thus a 2 bomb, memory error, would
appear causing the program to terminate to the Desktop.
---
About the author: Frank Cohen has been writing Atari software
since Clowns and Balloons, his first 8-Bit game. He founded
Regent Software in 1985, and has recently completed
Regent Base 2: 4GL SQL Database for the ST and Mega computers.
He can be reached directly on Compuserve, Delphi and Genie. Or
by writing to him at P.O. Box 14628, Long Beach, CA 90803.