FUNBALL Copyright 1995, Jeffrey Belt All rights reserved. Published by Impulse Games Welcome to Funball! Funball contains a complete online help system, as well as an extensive help balloon system, both in several languages. Help balloons are turned on automatically the first time you run the game. Once you know your way around, you can disable them in the Control panel. That's really all you need to know to get started. To get help within the game, simply press a Help button (with a large H on it), or press H or F1 on your keyboard. The rest of this documentation is mainly trouble-shooting. WELCOME SCREEN HOW TO GET HELP You can press a "Help" button (the one with a large H), or press F1 or H on your keyboard, anytime. To exit a help page, press the button at the top right. It's an "Exit" or "Cancel" button. HELP BALLOONS give a short description of whatever the mouse arrow points at. You can turn them off in the Control Panel. Hint: even when they're off, you can display them by pointing at something and clicking the right mouse button. TO PLAY THE GAME, click on "Start a new game" (or press on your keyboard). HOW TO QUIT FUNBALL Click on the "Exit" button until the game asks you if you really want to quit, and click Yes. STARTUP SCREEN Choose the board on which the game will be played. You can choose either a built-in board, or one you create using the Board Editor. Choose which color you want to play - either red or green. You can play against a human or robot (computer) opponent of varying difficulty. Don't be afraid to say "Yes" for the spider. It won't bite. Then press the button with a ball (bottom middle) to start playing! GAME RULES OBJECTIVE: reach the enemy base (or destroy all the enemy balls). THE BASIC IDEA The balls are of different sizes, the bigger the better. When one ball jumps on another one, both balls usually merge into one. Its color is determined by the bigger ball. Hint: hold down the Shift key to display ball sizes. Detailed rules are as follows: JUMPING: Balls jump from base to base. To move a ball, you pick it up with the mouse, and click on the destination base. MERGING: Jumping on a friendly ball merges the two balls. If the resulting ball is too big, it will split in two, and bounce back if it reaches the edge. ATTACKING: Jumping on a smaller enemy ball absorbs it, and your ball gets bigger! If it becomes too big, it can overflow. DEFECTING: Jumping on a bigger enemy ball is suicide! It makes the enemy ball bigger. Unless it makes it grow until it explodes! CANCELING: Finally, two enemy balls of identical size simply cancel each other out. Some bases have special powers. Use them to your advantage! PUMP: The gold base pumps balls full of energy. A ball leaving keeps on bouncing until it reaches something other than a normal empty base. ARMOR: Here your ball is safe. The enemy cannot attack it. TELEPORTER: A ball landing there is transported to the next empty teleporter towards the colored enemy goal. SLIDE: The slide sends your ball slamming into the next slot, pushing whatever is there out of the way. SMALL: A small base can only hold balls up to a certain size. Big balls will shrink to fit. DRAIN: The drain is very dangerous. A ball landing there flows into it and disappears! SPRING: The spring makes your ball bounce off to the next slot, and normal merging rules apply. SOAP: This transforms your ball into a very fragile bubble which can float very far. But the slightest contact with anything other than a smooth, empty base makes it burst. MAGNET: A ball on a magnet slot cannot be attacked by the enemy, and can merge with friends. But the magnet attracts it so strongly that half of it will stay when you try to leave it. CANNON: With the cannon, you can destroy any kind of base, except armored bases. The bigger the ball, the longer the barrel, and the longer the range. MINE: Be careful! They blow up so violently, all surrounding balls shrink a little, except those on armored bases. Watch out for chain reactions! SPIDER The spider goes around the board, laying small eggs. Landing on an egg makes your ball bigger! HOW TO PLAY The mouse arrow is either red or green, depending on whose turn it is. Click on a ball to select it, and on the target base to move it. If you change your mind, click again on the ball you selected. You will then be able to choose another one. ROBOT There are four different robots. The dumbest would get lost in a corridor, and the most intelligent is almost impossible to beat. Pressing any key or mouse button while a robot is thinking stops it and brings the player back to human. OVERVIEW There is an overview of the game board in the lower left corder of the game screen (you can press to jump directly to it). Clicking somewhere on the reduced board will bring you to the same spot on the main board. OTHER BUTTONS You can surrender, or exit back to the title screen, where you can for instance save your game. You can also undo your last move, and access the Control Panel. CONTROL PANEL ANIMATION BETWEEN TURNS If scrolling is jerky, turn down the number of animations between turns. The slower your computer, the less animations it can support and still scroll smoothly. SOUND EFFECTS If you have a SoundBlaster compatible card and can't hear sound effects on it, and it isn't something obvious like the volume being turned all the way down, then Funball doesn't detect it properly. Type under DOS: SET BLASTER=AXXX IX AXXX is the port (usually A220), and IX the interrupt (usually I7). Then run Funball again. HOW TO SAVE Click on the small button next to a saved game slot. You can overwrite a previously saved game, or save in an empty slot. Next, type the name under which you wish the game to be saved (for instance: "The red are winning!" OR "Let's go to the beach"), and press . That's it! HOW TO LOAD Just click on the small button next to the name of the game you want to restore. BOARD EDITOR You can customize up to nine game boards, which you will then be able to choose from the Startup screen. MODIFYING A BOARD Select the ball or base you want to put on the board, and click on the corresponding slot(s). Little digits tell you how big balls are. MIRROR IMAGE This function divides the board according to the diagonal that does not include the red and green bases. It then copies the upper left half into the lower right, inverting the ball colors. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Required: - 286 or better processor. - VGA compatible display card. - Microsoft(TM) compatible mouse (the driver must be loaded). - 640 KB conventional RAM, with at least 550 KB free from the DOS prompt. Highly recommended: - SoundBlaster(TM) or compatible sound card. - The game will be significantly faster if you have one of the following: + more than 1.5 MB free XMS memory, or + more than 1.5 MB free EMS memory, or + disk cache such as SMARTDRV.EXE (see below). COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS If Funball doesn't work properly on your system, you can try using one or both of the following switches: FUNBALL /NOMUSIC prevents Funball from trying to play music. FUNBALL /NOXMS prevents Funball from loading data in EMS or XMS memory. WHAT'S A DISK CACHE? A disk cache is a resident program that can remember the latest information read from the disk, and which holds it in memory. If that same information is needed at a later time, it is simply read from memory instead of being loaded from the disk again. Disk caches usually do more than this but that's the basic idea. Funball needs huge amounts of memory and barely fits into the low 640 KB. It does so by forgetting information as soon as it is not needed. The drawback is that it may often refer to the same information over and over again, so may need to load it multiple times. This is where the disk cache comes in. A typical example of disk cache is SMARTDRV.EXE. Usually your AUTOEXEC.BAT file contains a line with the name SMARTDRV on it. If it doesn't, then try inserting in your AUTOEXEC.BAT: LH SMARTDRV A B C (and more drive letters if needed). This will activate the disk cache every time your computer reboots. Note that it will be used by all your programs (and not just Funball), so it will make life much easier for your hard disk. However, disk caches can sometimes (though rarely if used in read-only as shown here) lead to problems with disk tools such as PC Tools Compress, or Microsoft Windows. Please refer to the other programs' documentation for more information. SOUND BITS Funball can play background music and digitized sound on your SoundBlaster compatible card. If your sound card is not compatible with the original SoundBlaster, then you won't hear any sounds at all. Funball will play digitized sounds only if it can detect your card properly. In most cases it will, but sometimes it might not, depending on your system configuration. If you cannot enable digitized sounds in the control panel, then you have to tell Funball where your sound card is. Type at the DOS prompt (or even better, include in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file) a statement similar to the following: SET BLASTER=A220 I7 A220 is the port address (220 is hexadecimal), possible values are A210, A220, A230, A240, A250 and A260. I7 is the interrupt (IRQ), possible values are I3, I4, I5 and I7. A220 I7 is the default factory value of the standard SoundBlaster. Funball assumes the card is a standard SoundBlaster on DMA 1. SoundBlaster is a trademark of Creative Labs, Inc. Other trademarks mentioned in this documentation or in Funball appear for identification or illustration purposes only and are the property of their respective owners.