Wombat Manual Page: 1 THE GOLDEN WOMBAT OF DESTINY by Huw Collingbourne * * * IMPORTANT * * * ... a brief guide to starting the game ... FILES NEEDED ON THE DISC: << NECESSARY FILES >> Your copy of the game disc MUST include all of the following files. If any of them are missing, the game won't work! WOMBAT.COM ( the main game file ) NEW_ADV.000...etc. ( the Overlay files which the game calls when running. See the file: 'Read.Txt' for full details of all the Overlay files which are necessary to the current version ) R.DAT O.DAT T.DAT REC.DAT ( Data files ) << OPTIONAL FILES >> There are several optional files which you may wish to use such 'Setup.Com', 'Colours.Alt' and 'Read.Com'. None of these is essential to the game but you should read the file 'Read.txt' before deleting any file from your game disc. To do this, simply enter the word READ at the Dos prompt. You should make a complete backup of the disc BEFORE altering or deleting anything. STARTING THE GAME: "The Golden Wombat of Destiny" is an all text adventure game. To get it started, you should type: Wombat at the Dos prompt. Thereafter, you are on your own! NOTES ON THIS MANUAL: You are not expected to wade through this lot if you don't want to. You may find it handy to refer to the accepted vocabulary and the editing commands which you may use. The rest is for reference only ( e.g. if you want to change the colours ). However, you should at least read the notes on SAVING A GAME and also the notes about MEMORY RESIDENT PROGRAMS. * * * * * * * * * * * Wombat Manual Page: 2 VOCABULARY: THE WORDS YOU CAN USE: The parser is not one of the most sophisticated the world has ever known ( nor, to be truthful, is it one of the least sophisticated the computer adventure game has ever known! ). It understands a fairly rigidly fixed grammar and doesn't have a lot of time for unnecessary adjectives. It rarely accepts plurals. Although 'trees' would be OK, 'wombats' and 'mice' most definitely are not! Also, you may only use one complete command at a time. "Put the small bottle on the ground" is fine, but "Put the small bottle on the ground and open it." isn't. This goes for taking and dropping things too. Get everything one at a time and don't try the old trick "take all" (often used by sneaky adventurers to fool a game into generating a list of significant objects - 'You can't take the axe, you can't take the sword' etc.), because this game doesn't let you get away with that! If you don't care for all these restrictions, there are, nevertheless, some positive points too. Unlike many other games, The Golden Wombat will rarely reject an input command simply because there are one or two words that it does not understand. If possible, it will always try to make some sense of input although this may mean that it has to check that you really did mean to say what it thinks you meant. For example, you might type in: "Listen to the acrobatic little wombat." The game will politely(ish) inform you that it didn't understand all the words you used, but: "Do you want to listen to the wombat? ...Y/N" If you type 'Y', then the noises the wombat is making will be revealed in all their wonderment. If you type 'N', then you will be free to go on and do something more boring. If you type in "I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vale and hill," you are likely to generate a less sympathetic response! Wombat Manual Page: 3 This is a list of some of the verbs which The Golden Wombat of Destiny currently understands: break, drink, drop, eat, examine, feed, feel, get, give, go, hit, kick, kill, listen, look, open, pick up, press, pull, push, put, read, shout, shut, smash, smell, take, taste, throw, touch, wake. These commands may be used in various forms. All of the following examples would be quite acceptable (though few of them would actually be useful!): "Throw the lamp at the door." "Put the mud in the keyhole." "Give the vegetation to the mouse." "Look inside the box" "Listen to the tree." "Kill the wombat with the sign." Some of the words mentioned in the text may not be understood when you type them in. In particular, the room names and various locations are not in the usable vocabulary. Thus, although you may be told that there is a 'turret' or a 'tower' near the 'Ruined Area', none of these descriptions will be understood. Any semblance of intelligence in this game (artificial or otherwise) is purely accidental! You may type commands in upper or lower case. Punctuation is ignored, as are all numerals and extra spaces between words. "PUt the Mo2USe Into the Box!", although inelegant and also rather silly, would be OK. Wombat Manual Page: 4 ABBREVIATED COMMANDS: Abbreviations which the game understands are all outlined in the Instruction window which you should view at the start of the game (Type 'Y' when asked if you want instructions). Here is a brief summary of the most important ones: 'Q' : quit the game. 'L' : look. 'I' : Print an inventory (the things you are carrying). 'N','S','E','W','U','D' : Compass directions, plus 'U' for 'Go Up' and 'D' for 'Go Down'. They get you around the game. 'Save', 'Restore' : saves a game or returns to the point at which you saved it. ( see notes which follow ). SAVING or RESTORING A GAME: You may Save a game at any time by typing the word 'save'. You will then be prompted for a save file name. You may restore a previously saved game by typing 'restore'. The game is saved on the default save drive. This will be the same drive that your game disc is in unless you specify another drive when you first load the game this may be done in the 'Help Window' which may be entered by typing 'Y' when asked if you'd like to read the Help notes or change the save drive in the opening screen. Alternatively, it is possible to specify the save drive when first loading the game. This is done with a single parameter which must be a letter between A and D. For example, 'Wombat b' will set 'B' as the save drive. The opening screen will be bypassed when the game is loaded in this way. The extension '.Sav' is automatically added to the file name which you specify when saving. If you experience any problems with the save/restore feature, you should carefully read the notes on Memory Resident Programs and on 'What To Do In case Of Problems' in this manual. Wombat Manual Page: 5 INPUT FOR LAZY TYPISTS: In addition to the abbreviated commands, there are several other ways in which you may reduce the amount of typing you have to do in The Golden Wombat. ^R: To repeat your last command, type Control-R. (hold down the control button and the R). The entire command is repeated and may then be edited in the usual way. ^D: You may also repeat (and edit) a command by typing Control-D. In this case, your previous command will be brought up one letter at a time, which allows you to alter it. For example, you say "Take the wombat". You are told "The wombat isn't here." You hold down Control-D. One letter a time "Take the " appears on screen once more. At this point you stop holding Control-D and enter some other word in place of "wombat". EDITING COMMANDS: To edit a command that you've typed in ( or retrieved with ^D or ^R ), use the delete-backspace key |<--| rather than the cursor movement arrows. TECHNICAL STUFF: ( which is not very technical really because neither am I! ) 'The Golden Wombat' was written in Pascal. Because of limitations of program size, I have had to make fairly free use of overlays. If you are running the game from a floppy disc, you will hear a whirring and clanking every so often as one of these overlay files is loaded into memory. On a hard disc you'll hear a slightly more pleasant chirruping noise when this happens. If you are running the game from a RAM disc, you'll miss out on these simple pleasures. I strongly recommend running from hard disc or RAM disc (a software program or hardware device which you may or may not have - if you don't know what a RAM disc is then it's probably safe to assume that you haven't got one!) in order to reduce the amount of time taken by accesses to disc. SCORE: Much as in life, there is no scoring in The Golden Wombat. THE POINT: The point of The Golden Wombat is Destiny itself. Obviously. You'll know when you've found it. Possibly. Wombat Manual Page: 6 SCREEN COLOURS: I wrote and tested this game on a well-known Italian brand of computer with a colour graphics adaptor and a monochrome screen. As a result, the default colours are set to look OK on a mono screen with colour graphics card. Since the default colours may look pretty yuck! on other computer systems, I have allowed the colours to be configured to your own tastes. There are two ways to do this. The easiest and prettiest way is to use the SETUP program. THE SETUP PROGRAM: To start this program, enter: SetUp at the Dos prompt. The program allows you to define new colours for The Golden Wombat. SetUp shows you just what all the chosen colours will look like as you actually choose them. When you are satisfied, it writes a special Colour definition file called 'Colours.txt' which will re-define all the colours in the game itself. You may quit Setup at any time by pressing Control-C or Control-Break. COLOURS.TXT: Colours.txt is a purely optional file. If it's not there the game will work anyway but it will use the default colours. If you'd like to change the colours but don't want to bother defining your own colour scheme, you could try out some alternative colour files included on the disc. They are: Colours.Alt, Colours2.Alt and Colours3.Alt. Whichever one you'd like to try, you will first have to rename it: Colours.txt. For example, if you'd like to try out the colours set by Colours.Alt, you will need to enter at the dos prompt ( > ) REN COLOURS.ALT COLOURS.TXT Colours.Alt is just another colour scheme; Colours2.Alt is a fairly average adventure game colour scheme in monochrome with the top status window in reverse highlight. Colours3.Alt prints a pretty frame around the top status line. Wombat Manual Page: 7 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! * * * WARNING * * * !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MEMORY RESIDENT PROGRAMS: The saving and restoring of games may not work if memory resident programs are loaded. Some common examples of such programs are 'friendly interfaces' to DOS and utilities which may be called up on top of other programs. These include : SideKick, Windows, SuperKey, ProKey, Spoolers, RamDisks, Networking software. This does not mean that Save and Restore will never work when using these programs. In fact, they should not affect saving and restoring done in any one game session. However, because The Wombat saves using absolute memory locations, Memory Resident Programs may screw up restores done at earlier sessions. This is because the resident program may load itself into a bit of memory where The Wombat expects to find the things it has saved. If you absolutely cannot bear to be without resident proggies, then at least be consistent. If you always load the programs in exactly the same order and don't make any alterations to their previous configurations, then your saves should restore without problem. To ensure that this is the case, you might like to create a Batch file using an ordinary text editor. An example of such a file might be: superdrv b: sk wombat The batch file must then be saved with a '.Bat' extension Then, instead of loading the programs separately, you need only enter the name of the batch file at the Dos prompt (for example, you would enter 'Wom' for a file called 'Wom.Bat'). If you are unsure whether resident programs are likely to affect your saves then << Always save your current position BEFORE restoring a game saved from an earlier session >>. If the restore fails you should be able to restore your more recently saved game without problem. If a restore has failed, you should get an error message to tell you so. You will then be given the opportunity to restore a different file ( the one you just saved! ), to restart the game or to quit. If you restart the game, the Golden Wombat is reloaded just as though you'd started it up for the first time. Wombat Manual Page: 8 WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF PROBLEMS... * If the program crashes for any reason, check - a) that all required files are on the current disk and directory. These include all the data files with a '.dat' extension and all the overlays with a '.00' extension. The required files are listed at the beginning of the manual. If the program crashes because one of these is missing, it should give a message to say so. b) are all the files valid? An invalid file is one with the same name as one of the required file but which isn't the one the program expects. A 'O.Dat' from an earlier version of the Wombat would be an invalid file, for example. In this case, the Wombat will try to use this file even though its contents are not what it's expecting. The Wombat's responses to errors of this type are unpredictable...! c) have you read the warnings about memory resident programs? Take heed. d) you may have a dodgy disc! e) you've found a bug. Turn off the machine. Swear very loudly at me. Try again. << CHANGES TO PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THE GOLDEN WOMBAT >> Version 1.1 * Bug fix done to improve save/restore. You still need to be cautious about memory resident programs, however. * It is now possible to load the game with a parameter to specify the drive on which you'd like to save the game. The parameter should be in the form of a single letter between A and D. For example, entering: 'Wombat C' at the Dos prompt sets the save drive to 'C'. The opening screen of the game is bypassed when it is loaded in this way. * In case of a bad restore you are now given three choices - restore another file, restart the game, quit. * The SetUp program: you can now break out of SetUp using Control-C or Control-Break. No file will be written. Wombat Manual Page: 9 NOTES FOR NOVICE ADVENTURERS: * Make a map. * When you enter somewhere for the first time, you'll be given a full description of your surroundings. If you enter the same place later on, you'll only get the name of the place. The full description may be recalled if you type 'l' or 'look'. * 'i' is a very useful command. It prints a list of all the things you are carrying. * All of the puzzles may be solved from information given in the game itself. Often you'll need to find a clue in order to solve a problem. Have fun....