| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ LETTER PUZZLER (c) AMSTRAD ACTION ★ |
Amstrad Action |
Two very nifty and very different programs this time to keep your type-in fingers nimble. Letter Puzzler is an interesting variation on a very old game that can keep you puzzling through to the next issue, while Manuscript could save any musicians a lot of money! Keep them coming, but don't forget our new form. LETTER PUZZLER Another game this month, but you'll need to use your brains a bit more on this one. You know those little plastic puzzles where you slide little lettered tiles around to make words? Well, this brain-taxing type-in gives you the same kind of puzzle on Arnold only bigger. Its author, Simon Watson from St. Austell in Cornwall, wasn't satisfied with the usual 4x4 or 5x5 grid. He went for a huge 8x8 grid, and that means 63 tiles to get in the right order. The program scrambles the tiles in a different order each time you play. You then have to unscramble them using either the cursor keys or a joystick. 'Up' will move a tile up into the empty space, 'left' will move one left, and so on. The screen display shows you not only the order the tiles are in now, but also the order you have to get them into and the time you've taken so far. When typing the listing in be sure that you finish line 460 properly. It ends with a comma, a space and then a second comma. That's about all you need to know for you to use the program. Now, the sooner you get typing the sooner you can get puzzling. What are you waiting for? MODIFYING THE PROGRAM If you've played the program for a little while, you might like to try making a few modifications to it. The nice thing about type-ins is that you can usually alter them without having to be an out-and-out hacker. The lines 390-460 hold the data for the words formed by the puzzle. If you decide to change them, bear in mind that they must all have eight letters and the last letter of the last word must be a blank. Using numbers, lower case letters and other symbols, you could make all the tiles different. If you think this would make the game a lot harder, you're quite right - in fact it would make the thing impossible roughly half the time. Because of the way the thing works, you should always duplicate a few of the tiles. If you make the last two identical, this'll do the trick. You may have noticed that you always get the same sequence of puzzles the first time you use the program after resetting the machine. If you've saved the program to disk, you'll be able to check this out rather quicker than cassette users could. This repetition happens because the game doesn't seed the random number generator - it doesn't have a statement of the form variable =RND(negative number) anywhere in it, in other words. You'll probably have to experiment a bit to get this one to work the way you want, though. The most obvious modification would be to enlarge the grid -to 12x12, say. To do this you'll really have to modify the program quite considerably. Aside from some cosmetic alterations to the graphics, for the most part you'll just need to replace 8 with 12 throughout. Obviously, not every occurence of the number 8 is a reference to the grid size - the reference in line 100, for example, shouldn't be changed. Similarly, there are some references to the grid size that don't involve the number 8. In line 380, 'X% = 7' should be changed to 'X% = 11' for a 12x12 grid. You'll just have to look through the program carefully for this sort of thing. AA#12 |
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Page créée en 224 millisecondes et consultée 1003 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko. |
