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Whooo- Settle back with your snake, it's the MY BALLS HAVE DROPPED readme.txt
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            My Balls have Dropped is (c) 1996 by Happi Llama Realtech
                        TOTAL FREEWARE- NO CHARGE PERMITTED
                     PART OF THE "SHAREWARE IS STUPID" CAMPAIGN

                contact:       llama-on-acid@msn.com

Right, first things first- My Balls have Dropped is not even a faintly
amusing title and anyone who thinks it is funny or rude is just silly and
needs a punch in the shtummy.


IMPORTANT POINT- This game is total freeware which means anyone can give
it away to anyone else or their pet gecko, whether you the giver are a PC
magazine with a cover disk, a PD library, an internet site or just a plain
old person. What you must not do is change the game in any way, claim to have
created the game, sounds or graphics yourself or charge for the game beyond
the bare minimum cover charge for postage, packing and storage media.
If anyone wishes to thank me for creating this game then they should SPREAD
the game as much as possible, especially on the INTERNET as I had to come off
it, as my webbing ran the phone bill up by œ200...


CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE:
1) Written in DJGPP the DOS port of GNU C which is free and dead good.
2) Using the ALLEGRO extension for graphics and sound routines.
3) Picture of a llama is heavily edited photograph of "Knickers", a llama
   owned by the people who have a llama farm and do the LLAMA WEB page, the
   coolest site on the www.
4) Some of the textures on the balls came from somewhere on the web
   advertising themselves as the place for "one-stop texture shopping", also
   the picture of a skull is off the web someplace, and the hieroglyphics are
   from a shareware set by some people who also do a commercial Egyptology
   program. The background picture is from the Book of the Dead of Ani, circa
   1500 BC, discovered on a 5 1/4 inch disk in an 18th Dynasty tomb near
   Luxor.




 Technical gibberish:

 Recommended System: Oooh, I'd recommend a Pentium Pro 200 with 128 MEG RAM,
 a 3d accelerator card, a SB32 sound card, ISDN card, 500 W speaker system,
 two 9 GIG hard drives, a writable CDROM.... 

 Required System: Ah, well, that's different, you see, I cannot tell, my
 friend. I have only run it on my P133 with 22 meg and awful graphics card
 from HELL. It's hard to tell how much the processor is making up for the
 graphics card... To take a guess though, I think DX4s and P75s up should
 manage it fine if they have sensible graphics cards. So- here goes..

 Memory: 8 Meg.
 Processor: DX4, P75 or better. (It might run on DX2s not too badly)
 Sound: Sound card is auto detected. 16bit stereo recommended.
        Your MIDI driver is not broken: there is no music. If you want music
        put a CD on... You may need to SET BLASTER etc for autodetect.
 VIDEO: Graphics card autodetected. VESA compatible thingy recommended. Try
        UniVBE or whatever if you need to. Though it's shareware so you have
        to register it.... I HATE SHAREWARE!
 HOP-ERATING SYSTEM: The game runs very well in a DPMI box under windows 95-
        It also works fine in DOS using CWSDPMI. If you run
        it under windows and the sound disappears it is probably because
        windows did something sound related, and you will have to re-start it.
 PLAYERS: ONE OR TWO
 CONTROL: keyboard only non redefinable WEEP MORTALS FOR I HAVE DECREED IT
        THUS! SEE! YOU SHALL LIKE MY KEYS!


KEYS ARE IN FACT:
-----------------

ON TITLE SCREEN: Space or Enter jumps to menu and selects options.
                 left and right cursor keys change options.
                 ESC jumps to DOS, or if in game to title screen.


ONE PLAYER MODE: Cursor keys Left and right= rotate arrow
                                cursor up  = fire ball
                                Control key= fine control over arrow

TWO PLAYER MODE: Player one uses Z and C for left/right, S to fire and
                 Control key for fine control.

                 Player two uses numeric keypad 4,6,8 and 0 for fine control.

                 IMPORTANT! In two player mode player two can use the cursor
                            keys, but it means player one can't move while he
                            is! So play fair and use the numeric keypad...



Plot:
There are these balls, right? And they're in your way. You play a brave young
arrow called Lipstock. Also there's this totally evil being who thinks he's
cool, and he is. He doesn't like arrows because his tortoise was shot almost
to the point of non-functionality by an dark Elf archer. The evil being lives
in space, which is, apparently, deep.

See the recognition screen and the scrolling text in the game for a more
clear explanation of how to play, or alternatively be someone who has played
Puzzle Bobble aka Bust a Move 2 on the Saturn, PS or arcade.

There are fifty extremely challenging levels in the one player game, although
you can always continue, or indeed start at certain pre-set points, which
correspond to the levels having new graphics. (There are three sets).
If you think a level is impossible, try it again, as sometimes the random
balls it gives you will make it too hard. The challenge is to get through
all the levels, not necessarily without dying lots!
Note that it is possible to make a level impossible to finish by destroying
the wrong balls etc. All levels are guaranteed possible by me, Mr. Llama.
I have solved each level on Normal mode, so therefore they are posssible
on the first three skill levels; I cannot speak for STUPID level; some
levels are probably technically impossible on this setting...

If you get stuck a lot, try the game on easy, which is just the addition of
the aiming box. You should probably use this setting until you get used to
the game's idiosyncratic ball positioning algorithms.... Ahem.


In the two player game you play someone else and try to stuff them. Note
that if you select interesting balls in two player mode you are limited by
the graphics, so eye of Horus balls are only found in the Egyptian set; key
balls are only in the Egyptian and alien sets; all sets have bombs, walls
and droppers...  If you find the game too slow on 2 player mode buy a faster
PC: It's no use moaning that I wrote it badly- I did, and that's that. It
should be possible to write this game so it flies on a DX2, so go do it.
If the game runs too FAST, then try turning your cache off, calculating how
much money Bill Gates has in the background etc. Seriously though, the
pointer movement, ball movement and appearing balls on 2 player mode are time
controlled, while explosions and dropping balls have whatever power your PC
can throw at them. By the way, if anyone gets to run my game on a pc so
powerful that the end of level screen explosion is convincing, give me a call
at the rest home for seriously old programmers. Heh.

Upcoming Happi Llama Realtech products:

The seriously deep RPG which really is non-linear and a whole world
        inside your PC.

An Ultra Violent Cyberpunk game set in a city. All 3d and stuff with 16bit
        colour.

A Sim game with decent graphics for once.

A very useful utility for typesetting sticky labels on your printer.





Previous Happi Llama Realtech Products you will have missed:

Filing Cabinet in 3d- A short film about life.
Greedy Gerald the Gem Gobbler- not at all like Boulderdash, guv.
King's Ransom- part one. Text adventure involving using a severed arm as
        a weapon long before you could do it in the excellent BIOFORGE.
Llama Island- the complete rip off of Legend of Zelda, but with llamas.
Ribbie the Robot and the SPAR COLA in 3d Spod-o-vision. Also with added
        llamas.


Sanitized excerpts from "The Diary of a F****ed-off Programmer"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--==-=-=-=--==-==-=-=-=
Argh! why the f*** won't cwsdpmi run my program properly?!?!?!?!?
Say what you like about win95 the dpmi boxes are robust as f***

No i would NOT NOT NOT like to run this program in dos mode, nor would I like
to setup a file  to run it in dos mode so stop asking me you stupid c***py
OpSys.

Trust my brother to ask me to do a 2 player mode. it's a hairy nightmare
of death! nothing runs at the right speed, there's a total bug invasion
from HELL ITSELF...

I wish I'd never used stupid global variables now, because despite the author
of Allegro saying.. ooooh only use the interrupts for short quick things like
setting flags, i had the majority of my code zooming about on interrupt, and
because i'd used global variables for counters like for(f=this for(g=something
etc and used them in several different routines running on interrupt they had
several near misses but just now they had a TOTAL DATA MEGA COLLISION and
everything picked up the wrong values from everywhere else and everything went
GPF GPF all crew and personnel abamdon ship 10 seconds to warp core breach...


If the executable gives me one more page fault in the colour flashing routine
I'm going to kick its f***ing head in! why can't i just
        set_color(0,pal[0]); and go home??????????

        and why has the author spelled "color" without a "u"?????

        I mean he went to a British university for God's sake...

               it seems to be because I used RGB *pal[256]; to create a pallete
               instead of using PALETTE pal;- just a bit of info for
               freaky ALLEGRO USERS out there....

Rewrote the game to run not on interrupts and it runs 60 zillion times faster
but still keeps going GPF GPF page fault f*** you I am a program and I don't
like you so I am going to crash


Hhahah I have conquered General PF and his evil page minions. May they rot
in hell and be forced to use MS Paint all day....

Mr. Dave Knight assures me I don't need 2 meg of data to blow the screen up.
Like I really want to chop my ints up and do binary gibbery-rubbish on them.
It's slow enough as it is! I'd like to see it running on a 386. Well, life's
too short.


Q: Why do you program?

A: Because it wasn't there.


Will you stop swapping pages out to HD you stupid f***ing machine! I didn't
buy 22 f***ing MEG so you could create stupid temp files on the drive so
f***ing stop it!


   Just played a match with my brother, Mr. Guk, and he won 10-4!!!!!!
   Perhaps it is a good sign that Puzzle Bobble skills are transferable to
         my game.... Perhaps I'm just c***.
