Tinadel v1.0 - Copyright (c) 2003 MachiSoft

Welcome to the world of Tinadel – another totally original arcade game from MachiSoft. Tinadel places you in the role of a steadfast droid, pitted against giant slavering insects intent upon destruction of the valuable Narg crop. But enough of your problems …

Quick Start

As you will see when you read the Help screens in the game (and who doesn’t, hmmmm?), Tinadel is conceptually very straight forward – giant worms and beetles come and smash into the eggs that you are guarding, and you must zap them by building traps with your plasma nodes that, hopefully, the monsters will blunder into.

These traps are hexagonal cages. You deposit the vertices (the pointy bits) by pointing and clicking with your mouse. When you click the 6^th vertex, the trap closes. If the head of the worm or beetle is enclosed by the trap, the cage closes upon them and the plasma nodes zap in, burning the insect to a satisfying crisp.

It’s easier to do than to describe – sort of anyway.

The Help screens give you information about scoring and other stuff, so please read them before you play.

Special Tips and Other stuff that you might need to know

These things might not be obvious from the Help screens:

* The hexagon can be any six sided shape. It doesn’t have to be a regular (circular) hexagon but can be any squished and distorted shape with six sides.

* The plasma cage times out if you don’t close it. The cage lasts longer as your plasma nodes are upgraded at special levels throughout the game.

* You can’t place the plasma nodes too close to each other, or too far away either. As noted above, the plasma nodes will be upgraded as you progress through the game. This means that you are also able to place them further apart, making the cage bigger. The droid will turn red if he is in a position where he can’t deposit a plasma node.

* Because the plasma nodes zap in to destroy the insect, only one insect at a time can be killed by the cage. If you have both a beetle and a worm in the cage then the worm will always be selected to be zapped first.

* The whole purpose of each level is to ensure that at least a certain number of Narg insects hatch out of the eggs. These eggs will hatch out eventually, even if they are damaged but still alive. If either YOU or the worms or beetles collide with the eggs then they are damaged and hatching slows down. If they are damaged too much then they die.

* Among other things, the score box shows the number of worms that you must kill in order to finish the level. The level will continue until either this number of worms is killed, or until there are no more live eggs (they are all either hatched or dead). If there are any live eggs left at the end of the level, then you have a “mass hatch” and all of the remaining live eggs hatch simultaneously (at the same time).

* As the game progresses into the more difficult levels, you must sometimes make risk management decisions about whether to damage an egg or risk letting the worm escape. In general, it is better to end the level as quickly as possible.

* You must kill the beetles as quickly as possible, because they will decimate the egg population if left alive.

* You must register to play beyond the 5th level. It’s only $US 8.50 to register – incredibly cheap. You can pay using credit cards or an existing Pay Pal account at this Pay Pal link.

Minimum Required System Configuration

Well probably a 550Mhz G3. It really will play on somewhat slower systems, but higher levels probably need around this configuration.

This game is a Carbon program that will run in "native" mode under MacOS 8.6 through OSX 10.2.x - and probably beyond - with the caveat that earlier operating systems may need the appropriate Carbonlib (available from Apple's download sites) installed. The unlock program provided should also run under both OSX and OS9.

Performance, graphics, sound and the general user experience are better under OSX, essentially because that's where we developed the game. As always, the more memory your computer has, the happier it will be.

And did we mention the attractive price – Tinadel is now only $US8.50. You can pay using credit cards at this Pay Pal link.

Issues, comments and known bugs

* There are no known bugs at the date of release, and, as always we have tested just as thoroughly as our resources allow. Let us know if you find any bugs through support@machisoft.com. If you feel compelled to flame us because of a bug, please make sure that you also provide enough information for us to be able to do something about it.

Make sure that you give your registration code when you are reporting a bug. Unregistered users are also welcome to report bugs, but will probably not get a fixed version made directly available to them.

* One of the suggestions from Beta testers has been to include a key to “kill” a plasma cage rather than having to close it or wait for it to time out. Likewise, a facility to quit and save a game in progress have been requested. The reason that these have not been included is because of an Apple issue with “Getkeys” under OS X. We have decided to wait until either Apple or the great bunch of guys at TNT Basic provide a fix for this problem.

* While the game, as such, has no known bugs, there are a couple of Apple sound related issues that can entertain from time to time.

1) The sounds break up a little under OS 9 and sometimes give a very nice “crackle and pop” – not much we can do about this apart from recommending that you use OS X or play while you are eating your breakfast cereal.

2) This program has been developed using Quicktime 6.1.1 - If you are having any significant trouble with the sound, it may be that you are using an older version of Quicktime. Apple, in their infinite loop wisdom, appear to have made changes to the later version of Quicktime that may produce problems when using older versions.

* The program may not start up on some OS 9 systems if the “Maximum Memory” setting on the “Get Info” for the program is set to a value greater than the largest unused memory block (shown in “About this Computer” under the “Apple” menu). Setting the Maximum value to slightly smaller than the largest unused block size, or freeing up more memory by exiting other programs or re-starting your system will fix this issue. We don’t know why this happens, the operating system is supposed to take care of this sort of thing but of course if you use OS X then it is not even a potential problem.

* Only 1024 * 768 is currently supported. If there is any interest, then we will produce a version that supports multiple resolutions.

Registration

* Tinadel uses a simple little registration process. You pay the money (not much of it at that) through this link (or by linking through from www.machisoft.com). And we email you back a registration code within 48 hours. Normally within 8 hours, but let’s be conservative.

* Our policy is “register once, enjoy forever” so that the registration code for any version of Tinadel will enable any subsequent version of Tinadel forever. (Our policy is also “give up designing games if no-one pays”, so you can have a direct impact upon what happens next.)

* When you receive your registration code, simply enter it, together with the email address that the code was sent to, into the little Machisoft_Unlock_Tinadel program that was included in the archive with the Tinadel application.

* Please note, this program must remain in the same folder as the Tinadel application, otherwise Tinadel won’t know where to look for your registration details.

The Machisoft_Unlock_Tinadel program doesn’t do anything very secret, it simply writes your registration details back to a little text file so that they are in a format and a place that Tinadel can always read them, it doesn’t actually do any real code validation

Credits

All rights to this program, with the exception of resources used under license, remain with the author.

Programming:

Programmed completely in TNT Basic by

Mark Mancq based upon an original concept

by Mark Mancq

Graphic Design:

Mark Mancq

Trevor L. Masinelli, Masinelli Design Studio www.masinellidesign.com

Sound & Music:

Original sounds by Mark Mancq

Additional sounds from the iDevGames archives used under the iDevGames License www.idevgames.com

MIDI tracks from Microsoft

Testing:

Thanks to the following for their assistance in testing and in tuning the gameplay.

Naomi Mancq

Trevor Masinelli

Robert Lincolne

Peter Beentje

Thanks Also To …

Again, thanks to my wife and daughter and to all those friends whose encouragement has meant so much. Special thanks to Trevor Masinelli for the great logos and graphic design work. Thanks as well to the developers of TNT Basic www.tntbasic.com for giving me the tools with which I can create.

Version History

* v1.0 Released 24th April 2003

Feedback and Support

Email support issues to support@machisoft.com

Email registration issues to registration@machisoft.com

Email any other questions or suggestions to contact@machisoft.com (Really, many of the suggestions in Beta have made this a much better game.)

Check for new versions and our other games at http://www.machisoft.com

Warranty and User Agreement

* Warranty

There is no warranty. We do not warrant that this program will work or that you will enjoy it or that it will coexist happily with your other software or that it won’t crash your system. However, this program is being issued in good faith, with the intent that it be used, so we hope that the good stuff will be true and the bad stuff won’t. But there are no guarantees, either implied or explicit.

* User Agreement

You are free to use the software if you have read and understood the Warranty paragraph above. You may copy the software and distribute through any channel as long as this Read Me document always accompanies the software. The software may not be changed in any form, including the substitution of icons and other resources. All rights to the program, embedded graphics and attached Read Me document remain with the author.