-
-Some recommendations for more fun playing Rocks'n'Diamonds:
-===========================================================
-
-About sound
------------
-It is highly recommended to have a decent sound interface for playing
-this game (although it only comes with bad-quality 8000-Hz-samples to
-save memory and to be compatible with /dev/audio).
-
-The best sound platform is an actual Linux system with (at least) kernel
-1.2.x, because it offers some nice real-time sound features which are
-needed to have background music loops in the game.
-
-On all other systems you don't have music loops, but you still have all
-the other sounds.
-
-
-About game speed
-----------------
-You should have a relatively fast hardware.
-
-The game was developed on a i486/33 (which is three years old now),
-and you should probably better not try to run it on a slower system.
-
-You should have an accelerated graphic card; I have found out that it
-starts being playable on my 486/33 with an old ISA cirrus logic 5426
-graphic card, which has a blitter that is supported by XFree86[tm],
-but that it was nearly unplayable on a 486/66 with old, unaccelerated
-ET4000.
-
-If all works fine, you should have something around 30 frames per second.
-
-If you think that the game is to slow to play, you should try out the
-following things:
-
-- Set "Buffered Gfx" to "off" in the setup menu. Normally (on a fast
- enough system) you should use buffered graphics, which means that
- all graphics is drawn into an invisible Pixmap and is then copied
- to the X11 window to avoid flickering. If you disable this double
- buffering, the graphic is directly drawn into the window. This can
- cause some slight flickering, but makes graphic operations roughly
- twice as fast compared to double buffering.
-
-- Set "Game Music" to "off" in the setup menu (and maybe "sound loops"
- too). Where disabling buffered graphics may be required with slow
- graphics hardware, disabling sound is especially recommended on slow
- CPU systems (486/33 and slower), because the sound server eats up a
- significant amount of CPU time when playing long sounds.
-
-You might also notice that bigger levels tend to be slower on slow
-systems.
-
-About the option "Fading" in the setup menu: It gives a nice looking
-fading when switching to a new screen, but you should really only try
-this out if you think that you have a very fast graphics hardware.
-
-
-About music
------------
-The background music loops are ripped out from several nice music albums.
-Just have a look at the info screen to find out from which album each
-sound loop came from -- they are all very well done pieces of music, but
-unfortunately they don't sound better after converting them to 8 kHz
-samples (to conform to standard SUN /dev/audio). Maybe I change this to
-a better quality in the future, but at the moment, where the sounds
-directory has a size of nearly a megabyte, I'll stay with 8 kHz samples.
-
-So, if you have a non-Linux system (which cannot play sound loops) or
-don't like the "telephone quality" of the music loops, just get some of
-these CDs and play them while your playing the game! ;-)
-
-
-About game-play
----------------
-It is *strongly recommended* to play this game with a high-quality joystick.
-That means, throw your $10 joystick out of the window and buy a decent
-Competition-Pro Digital PC joystick or a high-quality CH Products Analog
-joystick. Believe me, it doubles the fun of playing the game.
-
-If you only have a normal Unix system (and no fine Linux system), you
-are forced to play with the keyboard. It works, but is not only less fun,
-but also more difficult with some levels, because you cannot move in
-diagonal directions with keyboard control at the moment. Another bad thing
-is that you will have some problems when pressing many keys at the same
-time. This might change in the future, when I implement a better keyboard
-handling which not only solves these problems but allows diagonal directions,
-too.
-
projects / rocksndiamonds.git / commitdiff