QUICK START: 1. BOOT THE UMSII DISK. (BUT YOU REALLY SHOULD MAKE BACKUPS FIRST) 2. STAY OUT OF THE BACKUPS DRAWER!!! If you double clicked on ReadMe, hit ctrl-C if you want to skip the rest of this file. USING THE SCENARIO PERMANENTLY ALTERS THEM. Make backups! If you played one of the scenarios before reading this, there is ONLY one more copy in the drawer called Backups. You may want to copy the 4 scenario files (IND,DAT,MCP and GEN) to a ram disk when playing the game and do a "Save As" occasionally to a permanent disk. Since the Amiga is multi-tasking machine, you can boot your own system, open 2 cli windows, and in one of them type: more udisk:readme Then you can look at this readme file in one window, and use the other window to type commands. A last minute report from England said that invoking UMSII from a shell rather than an plain cli window caused trouble after a Close, Save, or Quit, but not a Save As. The files were correctly saved, but UMSII crashed afterwards. Invoking UMSII from a CLI or from its WorkBench icon solved the problem. UMSII worked fine from a CLI window in America. If you have a trouble running from a shell, open a new window with: newcli and run UMSII from the new window. On page 1.2 of the manual are instructions for installing UMSII on your harddisk. In step 4, the following line is wrong: makedir hd:pictures It should be: makedir hd:udisk/pictures The instructions also imply that the pictures drawer is only used for Intro. Actually, the master control panel is in there too, so you'll want the pictures drawer regardless of Intro. You can just skip the manual's installation instructions and run InstallUMSII. It will install UMSII where you tell it to. Boot your system disk, then double-click on InstallUMSII. From a CLI, type InstallUMSII (not run InstallUMSII!). Read the following before using it. The install program will copy all fonts from the UMSII disk into your fonts directory. It will also copy the iff and arp libraries to your boot disk. You may have newer versions of these libraries, in which case you probably should not use InstallUMSII. Use the instructions in the manual. UMSII must have diskfont.library version 34.37 or higher. This is included on the UMSII disk. It is not installed when you run InstallUMSII because you may have a newer version, and I don't want to write over that. To find what version you have, boot your system disk and type: version diskfont.library If the diskfont library on your hard disk is older than mine, boot your system disk, open a cli and type: copy udisk:libs/diskfont.library libs: NOTE: The version program is quirky. If you run it for 2 different libraries with the SAME NAME, you may only get the number of the FIRST library (until you reboot). The scenarios can be put anywhere on you hard disk, even in the same drawer as UMSII. Just be sure that the name "udata:" is assigned to the location. Here's one way of doing it. Make sure that you have booted your own system. If you want the scenarios on dh2:, open a cli and type: makedir dh2:udisk Put a scenario disk in df0 (the drive that you use to boot the workbench disk), open a cli and type: copy df0: dh2:udisk all You can copy more than one scenario disk to the same drawer. If you have an editor, add the following line to your startup sequence (it's probably called s:startup-sequence): assign udata: dh2:udisk If you don't want to change your startup sequence, before playing UMSII you can type the following 2 commands to tell UMSII where everything is: assign udata: dh2:udisk assign udisk: dh2:udisk If you forget to do this, UMSII will ask you to locate the files it cannot find. UDisk is the name of the UMSII game disk, and UData is the name of each scenario disk. I'll explain some files using Napoleon. The root contains the four files for each scenario. The Pictures drawer contains three images. UMS2end is displayed at the end of a scenario. The same image exists on Udisk. NapPic and UkPic are the images used for the stationary that is displayed when Show Reports is turned on and enough memory exists. The Music drawer contains the SMUS file for the music and the Instruments drawer contains digitized sounds for the music. This is used in the animated introduction and by UMSII if Fancy Open is checked and 1 meg of ram is free. UMSII can run without these drawers. Fonts contains the typeface for unit reports, and the images of the units. These can be edited with a font editor like Fed. Note that the IND and DAT files are binary files, while the MCP and GEN files are ASCII. I use "Dos-2-Dos" when transferring data from an Atari to an Amiga, and add the "-a" parameter for ASCII files. The menu contains some items unique to the Amiga version of UMSII. If "Fancy Open" is checked, UMSII will play music during the game. Specifically, if enough ram is free, UMSII executes the following command: "run Play UData:Music/UMSIIsong.SMUS UData:Instruments L" On all scenario disks, the file UMSIIsong.SMUS is just a copy of the other song on the disk. It only exists so that Intro can find some opening music quickly. When a scenario is loaded, if "Fancy Open" is checked, the song named after the scenario will be played. For example, if the scenario name is OVERLORD.DAT, the music played will be OVERLORD.SMUS. Playing music will fragment memory so much that some images may not load. You will need more than 1 meg for music; the exact size varies according to the song. If "Stop and Unload Music" is selected, any music playing will stop and its memory will be freed. If "Less Map Refreshes" is checked, UMSII will update the maps less often during the movement phase. Some units may appear at both their start and end points, and others may seem to disappear after moving until the map is updated. On the Master Control screen, the boxes in the right column must be clicked first to hilight them before their values can be changed. If "One Press to Change Master Control" is checked, the values will start changing right away. If "Fast Map" is checked, multitasking will be forbidden while the map is being updated. The Amiga will appear to lock up for several seconds while the map is being drawn, but the map is drawn faster. If "Freeze Weather" is checked, some tasks dealing with pressure zone movement will be skipped. This speeds up the game. Choosing "Save Config File" will save the values of the above menu toggles in the file "Devs:UMSIIconfig", which gets read when UMSII starts up. The Intro also reads the file, and if Fancy Open is off, the music will be skipped. The "Display" menu has 2 extra choices. "Nothing" will turn off all boundary lines on the map. "Grid" gives the fastest display. It shows a grid for all terrain except the 3 sea levels. The intersections of the grid represent only the top left corners of the terrain tiles. This is why there is a space along the right and bottom portion of the screen. Note that units move into the centers of the grid squares. If the northwest corner of a square is elevated, it means that the whole square is elevated. Production points invested in projects that are not yet finished are counted towards a nation's total production points. "Play" is a stand alone SMUS file player (originally called "LU") written for Intergalactic Development by Mike Sheldon. It can be executed in less than a meg of ram. The first 2 parameters are the song and the instrument path. The last parameters are "L" for looped music and "X" to prevent music from being played until a ctrl-D is sent to the process. If "Play" is loaded, run "status" to find the process number, then type: break n D where n is the process number. This can be used as a toggle to start and end music. Use break n C to quit the program. UMSII sends a ctrl-C when "Stop and Unload Music" is selected. If "Play" is run without parameters, it will open its own interface. If you want scenarios on hard disk you can make a subdirectory and put all of the scenario files there, as well as a pictures drawer with its images. Add an assign command in your startup-sequence that assigns udata: to the subdirectory. You could also put the scenarios in with your UMSII game. The pictures drawer could be used for UMSII as well as scenario images. You could assign both udata: and udisk: to the same UMSII drawer. A final note: Ezra, the president of Intergalactic, once showed me an Amiga emulator he had just downloaded for his Atari. When he ran it, the Atari cursor turned into a little cloud. A few seconds later, the screen displayed a Guru Meditation error. The point is clear: the Amiga has a reputation for being touchy. Every other bug found by the beta testers has been stomped out. If you find a new one (a bug, not a beta tester) please drop me a note describing what happened and how you got to it, so I can fix it. Registered users get free upgrades. Ed Isenberg Intergalactic Development, Inc. 1427 Washington St. Davenport, IA 52804 U.S.A. P.S. Please register your game! See the message at the end of the manual. TRADEMARKS Amiga: Commodore-Amiga, Inc. Atari: Atari Corporation