MAZE.COM THIS GAME WORKS BOTH ON IBM PC and ON PORTFOLIO !!!! When I bought my Portfolio in 1993, I assumed there would be many sophisticated games for this computer. I knew that there were superb games for 8bit computers (ZX Spectrum, C 64, Atari XL) and I expected that for Portfolio with 128 KB RAM (twice as on 8bits) the games would be even more profound. To tell the truth I was pretty disappointed. This is one of the reasons why I wrote the MAZE. I had the idea for the game in my head for more than 1 year. This week I got some kind of programming fever and the result is here. And even more.... Maze, is the very first game, that will work both on PC and on Portfolio. With help of my friend Zdenek Broz, I wrote a Portfolio emulator routines for PC. (Zdenek made the PC screen refreshing routine.) The routines can be included into the program code and will change your PC into Portfolio. I hope that these efforts of mine will find appreciation among PF users and that the users with programming skill will be evoked to do something about Portfolio software. -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- About the game After the intro and help screens you will find yourself in a maze, and you are to get out of this maze. If you bump into the wall it will become visible. But you bump into a scorpion (smaller) or a Z-scorpion (Zombie scorpion - bigger) you will loose 1 or 2 lives respectively. You have total of 12 lives and your "candle" can been seen by pressing space. The maze is 80 x 64 squares large. You can move around by pressing the cursor keys or the Q,A,O,P keys. Pressing [space] will display your ramaining life. [S] toggles sound on/off. [X] is used to redraw the screen after returning from built-in applications. The exiting place is marked by a filled diagonal square. To help you a bit in getting around, the exiting place is in the right bottom corner. The game takes 14 KB on disk. It was compressed and requires 48KB of free system RAM. If you have free RAM of 64 KB and more, you can use the built-in applications. This means you do not have to quit the game if you need your texts, worksheets, addresses. After exiting from the built-in application press X to refresh the screen. -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- About the emulator I wanted to make a resident program to enable all PF programs to work on PC. But there was a problem with making a routine to copy the content of video RAM from 0B000:0000 (used by PF) to a new location within PC graphic video RAM (starting at 0A000:0000). The data written into 0B000:xxxx area got lost on PC in graphic mode (mode 13h, INT 10h). I traced my codes under Turbo debugger and I could not solve it. The emulator supports fast access routines to Portfolio LCD. As you will see, there is no sound support in this version. The keyboard is handled differently. Pressing a key (during the game) on PF calls a short pause and then the code returns to original task. On PC the pause is replaced by waiting on a key-press. -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- About copyright and support The game is a shareware. You can copy it, give to your friends, it can be sold on PD diskettes and loaded onto BBS. If you like the game, if you want to support Portfolio activities I am involved with, and if you want to compensate my time and work, send me 5 USD or equivalent in your currency. If you send me 30 USD, I will send you a genuine leather case for your Portfolio together with a free diskette with source code and other tools. Here is my bank info: BANK: Ceska sporitelna Jugoslavska 19 120 00 Praha 2 the Czech Republic BANK CODE: 0800 OWNER OF ACCOUNT: Jan SEDLAK - Portfolio Sarajevska 29 120 00 Praha 2 the Czech Republic NUMBER OF ACCOUNT: 720252-028/0800 Other ways to support Portfolio: * making new soft * looking for other PF users * running a local user group or club * writing texts, reviews and other info * etc. Long live the Portfolio! Jan Sedlak tel: ++ 42 2 691 11 63 tel/modem/fax tel: ++ 42 2 96 61 894 tel/answ fax: ++ 42 2 29 51 86 fax e-mail: sedlakj@dec59.ruk.cuni.cz Jan.Sedlak@pedf.cuni.cz This document was created 18:34pm VIII-10-1995.