Phantasie is a project that I’ve been working on for roughly 15 years. It hasn’t been until recently that I’ve had the time or resources I needed to actually finish it.
In this read me file, I just wanted to mention all of the most important stuff concerning Phantasie--mainly, all of the things that will make Phantasie crash or work improperly.
Here’s the list of everything I’m aware of:
1) Don’t move or rename any of the folders inside the main Phantasie folder. If those folders do not remain inside the main Phantasie folder, Phantasie won’t even open completely. You’ll just get to the screen that has the big hairy mean guy looking at you. You won’t be able to get anywhere else. If this happens just hold down the apple key and type a Q. You’ll be able to quit the program.
2) If you have opened a text file to look at it with software other than Phantasie, close it before you do anything else. If Phantasie happens to need that information, it will try to open it. If it’s already open somewhere else your computer won’t allow Phantasie to open it. It will result in an error message that says that you should come and talk to me. Please don’t come and talk to me. Instead, just close the file and try again.
3) If the memory allocated to Phantasie is insufficient, you will get an error message saying that a certain card couldn’t be found. To change the memory allocation of Phantasie, first, quit Phantasie by holding down the apple key and typing a Q. Then find the phantasie icon. Click on it once (not twice!). This will highlight the icon. Then hold down the apple key and type the letter I. This will bring up the icon’s Information window. At the bottom will be a small area called “Memory Requirements.” The Suggested size of Phantasie is 1050. Ignore this. It’s incorrect. I suggest using 4000. If you don’t have this much, try a smaller amount, but, don’t go below 2000. Type the number you choose into both the “Minimum Size” and the “Preferred Size” boxes. Then close the Information window and try opening Phantasie again.
4) Large numbers will make Phantasie work improperly. You may want to experiment to see how large of a number you can use on your machine until things start to work strange. On my machine, this tends to be about 5 billion. That’s why I set the limit of the date range available in Phantasie from 5 billion years BC to 5 billion years AD.
5) This is a hypercard standalone application. Hypercard has viruses that are undetectable by most popular anti-virus programs. These viruses only affect hypercard stacks and applications. Whatever you are using to protect yourself, won’t protect you here. Don’t worry. If things start to act strange, erase your old copy of Phantasie (the program, not your data files!) and install a new copy. If you have any other hypercard applications or stacks, you should probably reinstall them also. It is also a wonderful idea to backup all of your data from time to time to be safe.
6) Lastly, if you choose to edit your text files with a word processor such as SimpleText, or WordPerfect, you’re on your own. Phantasie’s editors will write text files that are readable by Phantasie. You can also write them, but you risk writing files that Phantasie doesn’t understand, or worse yet, understands mostly. Phantasie will then work with the data that is understandable and may make mistakes with the data that is incorrect. For those of you wishing to cheat, this is probably the best way to do it.
For those of you who find bugs in Phantasie, please tell me about them. My e-mail address is songe@shikoku.or.jp. I’ll fix all of the problems and make newer versions of Phantasie available. If you help me, you help everybody. I appreciate advice and criticism also.
For those of you who need technical support, I’ll do what I can. If I get 50 messages a day, I doubt I’ll be able to afford the time to do it. If people start using Phantasie, I hope that a newsgroup and ftp sites will become available. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources available to sponsor these on my own. If you are interested in helping me out, please contact me. Of course, technical support is only available to registered users of Phantasie.
If you have registered your copy of Phantasie, thank you. It means a lot to me. If you haven’t, please send a $25 registration fee to:
