BATTLE FOR THE THRONE: ABOUT THE PROGRAM

     The program was written in Personal Pascal version 1.11.  The
game could not have been written without the useful routines and all
around neat stuff availiable on the OSS BBS, especially the Copy_Rect
routine which allows you to copy a raster image from the screen to an
area of memory and back again.  These routines are also availiable
from them on disk.

     The program is laid out in three sections, with the general
purpose routines first.  These procedures and functions could be used
in any program.  Next is the game itself and last is the outside
framework containing the title page, save game, credits and other
functions to give the game a more professional appearance.

     The first part of the program, right after the variable
declarations, contains Init_Form, a procedure that initializes the
screen variables and sets them up so that they can be found by
Copy_Rect.  Next are procedures for setting the height of characters
printed with Draw_String and some conversion functions for converting
between strings and integers.

     The title page and the map information are stored as .NEO picture
files, so there are procedures for reading .NEO files and setting the
color pallet to match the pictures.  The procedures, appropriately
named Set_Color_Registers and Read_Color_Registers are also used to
save and restore the desktop colors so your desktop has the same
colors when the program is finished as when you started.

     Another useful procedure is Fade_Color, used to gradually change
from one pallet to another.

     Once all of the general purpose stuff is out of the way there is
Initialize, a procedure that loads the screens, sets up the menu bar,
the build troops dialog box and initializes the variables and sets
things up for playing the game.

     The next section of the program contains the map generation.
This was one of the hardest sections to get right.  If the map was too
random, too often one player had an advantage because of the
surrounding terrain.  On the other hand, if the map is too regular,
every game looks the same.

     Next is the section for actually drawing the map.  A pair of For
loops scan across the terrain array and grab 'tiles' out of the stored
picture file and put them on the appropriate place on the screen.  The
areas for each terrain type in the picture file is larger than the
actual square on the map, so I added a little offset to each one as it
is drawn.  This makes it so that the villages, swamps, etc.  don't all
look the same.

     The procedure Play_Game handles each player's turn.

     There seems to be a bug in GEM or Personal Pascal that mangles
the text in dialog boxes if you are using the small font and try to
change the text.  I got around this problem by writing procedures to
draw my own dialog boxes and use TE_Height and Draw_String to get text
in any size I wanted.  I would have just used the large font and saved
myself a lot of trouble but I could not make everything fit on the
screen in low-res with the large font.

     The economic section contains the tax collection, buy troops and
all of the nasty things that happen (plagues, curses, etc).  It starts
by calling Find_Castle to make sure you have a castle.

     The Move_Bandits section controls the movement of Crobvar's
bandits.  It works by scanning the map to find the place where the
biggest pile of bandits is and moving them toward the place with the
highest population and the least defense; underdefended villages and
castles will attract the bandits.

     The Fate procedure controls the various plagues, unusual weather,
population increases and curses that spice up the game from time to
time.

     The Winner function checks to see if one player is the only one
left with any troops.  If it discovers this to be true then it puts up
a dialog box proclaiming the new king and ends the game.

     The next section contains the dialog boxes that come up when you
use the various pull-downs at the beginning of the game: the score,
save game, 'About Battle for the Throne' box, instructions and
playtester box.  The playtester box contains credits given to all of
the people who played the game and made suggestions that were used in
the program.

     Lastly there is the main program that ties everything together
and keeps you from running the program from the wrong resolution.

COMPILING THE PROGRAM

     To compile the program you will need to edit the path names of
the include files to conform with the way your system is set up.  Then
set the 'Additional Link Files' to include Addrstuf.o.