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- BananaTron 1.1 Copyright (c) 1989 Thomas G. Hanlin III
-
-
-
- This game is protected by copyright, but may be distributed under the
- following conditions:
-
- 1) All files must be included (BANATRON.DOC and BANATRON.EXE) and must be
- in their original, unaltered state.
-
- 2) No fee of over $6 may be charged. Note that online service charges for
- telecommunications exchanges (BBSes, Bix, CompuServe, GEnie, etc) are
- not considered as being fees in this case.
-
-
- You will need the following to run BananaTron:
-
- 1) A PC-compatible computer. B'Tron is designed to run at about the same
- speed regardless of whether you're using an old IBM PC, a PC/AT, or a
- shiny new PC/AT-386 computer.
-
- 2) A color monitor. B'Tron supports CGA, EGA, and VGA displays, and will
- take advantage of the features of whatever display is installed.
-
- 3) A friend or two. B'Tron is a multi-player game. Two players can play
- using the keyboard and, if you have a mouse, a third player can use
- that.
-
-
- What's it all about? Here's how the game works...
-
- Each player is in control of a moving dot which leaves a trail behind it.
- The dot may be turned left or right from the direction in which it's
- moving, using a pair of keys or mouse buttons that is assigned when the
- game begins. Each player is represented by a dot and trail of a different
- color.
-
- "It's simple." The idea is to avoid crashing into anything. If you ram
- your dot into another player or your own trail, you've lost the round. If
- you have chosen to have a border around the screen, you will have to avoid
- that too (otherwise, you can go across one edge of the screen and come out
- the other side). If there are three players and one of them crashes, the
- other two will continue the round until only one (or none) survives. There
- are ten rounds to the game. At the end, the players are ranked in order
- of how well they've done.
-
- Offensive strategy involves trying to limit the room in which the other
- player(s) have to manuever. If you can box them into a corner, you're
- home free. If there is no screen border, leaving a trail along part of
- the edge of one screen can annihilate someone abruptly if they try to
- cross from the other edge without paying enough attention. There are
- quite a few possibilities, actually, but I'll leave them for you to work
- out...
-
- Defensive strategy, especially if there are three players, has its own
- quirks. It might occasionally be fun to box yourself into a reasonably
- large area and leave your opponents to hack up the rest of the screen, for
- instance!
-
- Sound effects can be turned off or on when you start the game. Another
- option is speed-- "slow" is suited to the less dextrous, "medium" for
- normal use, and "fast" if you enjoy a good burst of adrenaline. If you
- select "autospeed", the game will start fairly slow and gradually get
- faster.
-
-
- Miscellaneous Notes:
-
- BananaTron was written for no particularly good reason... largely because
- I noticed that each improvement in display adapters (CGA -> EGA -> VGA)
- brought about a new 320x200 screen mode with more colors, and decided that
- it would be possible to write a game to exploit this with a minimum of
- effort. This version of BananaTron is a bit rough in some spots, but I'll
- improve it by'n'by. I've got another game option planned that should be
- fun, as well as cleaning up the user interface...
-
-
- Miscellaneous Credits:
-
- BananaTron derives from TRON3, an earlier game I wrote. The idea for the
- game is based on an old Atari 2600 cartridge, "Surround". BananaTron is
- BASIC code, compiled with Microsoft's BASCOM 6.0 and Hammerly Computer
- Services, Inc.'s, ProBas library (a large part of which I also wrote). The
- ProBas code was assembled using SLR's excellent OPTASM assembler, and it
- ALL was put together using the EDWIN editor by Kim Kokkonen of TurboPower
- Software. Everybody should have a copy of EDWIN!
-
- Whew.
-