Yactris I. Introduction The name Yactris was coined to mean "Yet Another Clone TRIS." I'd been having the experience too many times where I start to download a file, get bored, and have to go over to my neighbors and play Tetris clones on his I*M because I had no truly multitasking games for my Amiga. From this experience, the concept of Yactris was born. Yactris is a bare bones Tetris clones. It doesn't have a lot of colors or background graphics for a simple reason. The Yactris window can be opened on any public screen, and uses the pen definitions of that screen to determine how it draws the shapes. This means that you can begin a download using, say, Term. Open Yactris on the Term window, and play a game while you're waiting for your download to finish. Yactris is entirely system friendly. It steals nothing, checks everything, and at the very least will exit cleanly on a system error. It multitasks execellently, and with almost no sluggishness. It is, IMHO, a good example of how Amiga games should be coded in order to be system friendly. Enjoy Yactris. II. System Requirements. Yactris should run on any Amiga with OS v2.04 and above. It has been tested on Amiga 3000s running v2.04 and v2.1 without difficulty, and I can foresee no reason why it should not work with other hardware. III. Playing Yactris Yactris can be executed from either Workbench or the CLI. Simply double-click the icon or type YacTris once you have opened its directory to begin. Yactris will take several command line arguments or tooltypes. They are: STARTLEVEL=n Begin play at Level n. (Default 0) LINESTOINC=n Increase the level one after each n lines are removed. (Default 10) PUBSCREEN=scr Open Yactris on the Public Screen named scr. (If the option is omitted or scr does not exist, Yactris opens on the default public screen.) When you first begin Yactris, you will see one window which contains the play area, a box displaying the next piece to fall, and an area displaying the score, number of lines cleared, and current level. If you don't know what the object of Tetris is, go find a 6- year-old to tell you. To start the game, select Start from the Game menu. Pieces will begin falling. Pieces are controlled with the numeric keypad: '4' moves a piece left, '6' moves it right, '5' rotates it, and '2' drops it a line. Simply hold '2' down to drop a piece to the bottom of the playfield. If you wish to pause Yactris, either select Halt from the Game menu or activate another window. Reset in the Game menu will clear the play area and the scores. If you're a purist who doesn't like to know what's coming next, you can toggle the display of the next piece under the Settings menu. If don't believe me when I say that piece selection is totally random, toggle on Piece Count Display (again under Settings) and see for yourself. You can check out the About menu item under Game, but I don't know why you'd want to. And Quit is self expanatory. Last, but not least, if you want to move Yactris to another screen, select New Public Screen from the Settings menu. This will bring up a requester window which will allow you to choose a new public screen. Yactris will then move to that screen, pause play, and wait. Please Note: Yactris will WORK on all Public Screens, but it will not necessarily look good. How good Yactris looks depends entirely on how well whatever program it was that opened the public screen chose its pen values. Prowrite makes Yactris look extremely ugly, and two-color screens aren't that great, either. IV. Scoring Yactris's scoring system is biased toward those of us who play suicidally, piling things up and preying for a line. For every piece dropped, the player receives one point. If a single drop clears one line, the player receives ten points. Two lines cleared yields 100, while three gives 1000. If you can clear four lines at one (a Tetris), you receive a whopping 10000 points. The number of lines cleared is also recorded, for those who take a more meticulous and foresightful approach to Yactris. V. Distribution notes Yactris is freeware. It can be freely redistributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 1 or later. A copy of the GNU GPL should have been included with this distribution. If not, a copy can be obtained by writing to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. You don't have to send anything to anyone if you use Yactris (although I'm not so stupid that I didn't include my address :] ). VI. Programmers' notes Under the terms of the GNU GPL you are allowed to modify Yactris so long as credit is given where credit is due. In order to keep this program from becoming a total kludge, I'd like to ask a few favors. The easiest way to modify Yactris is by sending a suggestion to me and letting me do it. If you must modify Yactris yourself, please send a copy to me. In addition, do not change the number of the version you modified, simply postpend it with a modification version number and your initials. For example, if Paul Strong were to modify v0.0 he would number 0.0.1PS. If Sam Boothe were to modify that, the version would become 0.0.1PS.1SB. I'm hoping that the mess won't get that bad, but this method should allow easier tracing of the program's evolution. The easiest way is still sending suggestions to me. I'll be sure to give all suggestions full consideration, and give the people who made suggestions that were implemented credit in the distribution. Yactris was programmed on Matt Dillon's DICE compiler, about which I have only a few gripes, all of which should be fixed as soon as I get my hands on the soon-to-be-released new version. I also used Fred Fish's public domain DBUG package. Since Fred has abandoned the copyright on DBUG, I'm including my DICE-modified dbug.c and dbug.h source with the distribution. The entire DBUG package can be found on Fish Disk 232. VII. To do o Add a player routine that will optionally play selected mods during a game. o Option to iconify in the middle of a game. VIII. Revision History 0.0 Initial Release IX. The Author While my college is in session, I can be reached by e-mail at "springjp@screech.alfred.edu" or "springjp@ceramics.bitnet". Snail- mail will always reach me through this address: Jonathan Springer 360 W. Main St. Dallastown, PA 17313-2014 USA Enjoy Yactris!