China Challenge III ------------------- written 1991 by Dirk Hoffmann rewritten 1993 by Gunther Nikl This program is Freeware ! New features of Version III: ---------------------------- This is an improved version of the game China Challenge. The original program by Dirk Hoffmann lacked some features and disturbed the mutitasking heavily. China Challenge III - short called CC3 - is a completly rewritten version of the old program. CC2 was written in 'C' but CC3 had been written in assembler for shortness. Below all changes made since release 2: Fixed: The busy wait loop for menu handling has been removed. Also the dircet hardware access to control the mouse events has been removed. Now the event handling belongs to commodores programming guidelines. It is totally multitasking friendly. Fixed: The two-screen technique has been removed. CC3 uses an invisible screen for its graphic rendering. Then the blitter moves the whole date to the real screen. New: The sound replay uses now the audio device instead of directly hitting the hardware. The sound file is NOT nessecary to play the game unlike in CC2. There exists a menu item 'Play Music' so you can switch the music on or off. If the sound stuff couldn't be initialized the item is anavailable. Music play can be controlled at startup see below. New: The intro picture has been included in the program. When CC3 starts this picture will be displayed and all other initilization stuff follows. If you don't want this picture you can switch it off at startup see below. New: CC3 supports two CLI and Workbench arguments to control the program at startup. NOMUSIC - This argument disables the music. However CC3 tries to initialize its audio stuff and to load the sample. If this fails the music is disabled during the whole game play. Otherwise only the sound output is disabled so you can switch the music on later. By default the music is on. NOINTRO - This argument disables the intro picture. By default you will see this picture and all initialization stuff is done at this time. This picture shall only show CC3 is alive while loading the sample from a floppy disk. If you don't want the picture suppress it with this argument. NOTE: When started from workbench CC3 needs the 'icon.library' to examine the tooltypes. If the library couldn't be opened it will use its internal defaults. With the kick 1.2/1.3 icon library the equation sign '=' at the end of a tooltype is nessecary !!! New: For loading and saving the filerequester of the arp.library is used now. So you need this library installed in libs: to use these option but this shouldn't cause any propblems I hope. Please note that the file structure of a saved game has changed. It is no longer an ascii file because the current game state is also saved. This was easier to do when saving an binary. Sorry about this. New: The generation of a dragon is much improved. The new algorithm requires always only 120 random numbers instead of about 500 as the old one did. So it can be estimate that it is faster than before. The random number generator has also changed. Now CC3 uses the Tausworth algorithm for creating the random numbers. The full description of this algorithm can be found in: "A Comparision of the Correlation Behavior of Random Number Generators for the IBM 360" Communication of the ACM 11/1968 page 641-644 I want to thank Dirk Hoffmann for the original program and Torsten "Stoffel" Christophel for his suggestion to improve the dragon generation to make it really random. You can reach me: gnikl@informatik.uni-rostock.de New features of Version II: --------------------------- 1) If you look at the Options Menu, you can see two new items: b) Load Dragon: With this option, you can load a saved dragon. The input window will appear. Type in the filename of the saved dragon. If this file exists, China Challenge will load the dragon into memory and displays it on the screen. b) Save Dragon: With this option, you can save the current dragon on the screen to disk. After you activate "Save Dragon", the Workbenchscreen will appear with a small window on it. Just type the name of the Dragon's data file. The Playscreen comes up again and you can continue with another game. 2) In the first Version, you can only take back one move, but the wrong pair is mostly taken many moves before. In China Challenge II, you can take back every move you did without any restrictions. 3) China Challenge II now plays a little background music during the game. Enjoy it... About China Challenge --------------------- written 1989/90 by Dirk Hoffmann Moerscherstr. 128 D - 6710 Frankenthal West Germany China Challenge is quite similar to the well known game Shanghai or Mahjong. Target of China Challenge is, to remove all parts of the pile, the so called Dragon, step by step. This dragon is composed out of 120 different pieces. You can always find four chips displaying the same picture or chinese symbols. As the pile can't be removed indiscriminately, there are certain rules allowing the removal of tiles. First, you only can remove pairs of tiles wit the same image or picture on its surfaces. Second, the chips you want to take away must not have another piece to their right or to their left. That means, both tiles have to be free and without any "neighbor". If you already have played Shanghai, you surely know the rules, because they are completely equal. After loading and starting China Challenge, the screen gets black for a short time and the first dragon appears. All 120 tiles have been shuffled and placed onto the pile. Now you can select a piece by clicking on a tile with the mouse pointer. If you have choosen a tile that was free, its counterpart is shown in the left box. Now you can select a second tile. If the second tile displays the same image or picture, it will be copied to the box at the right border of the playscreen. Doubleclicking the second icon means the removal of both tiles. If you have taken away all chips from the dragon, you can continue with a new shuffled one, perhaps with an increased difficulty level. By using the pull down menus, you can select following functions: About: A small information window appears Quit: Exit China Challenge, this means back to AmigaDos New Game: Starts current game over and builts up a new shuffled dragon Undo last move: Takes back the last move you did Undo all moves: Rebuilts the same dragon a second time Load Dragon: Loads a saved dragon from disk Save Dragon: Saves the currently displayed dragon to disk Play Music: Enables or disables the game music Enjoy this game and not your pirate copies... Dirk Hoffmann