Power Grid 1.0 Documentation Congratulations! You have just been put in charge of connecting the power plants to the towns by your local power board. The only problem is that the power connections come in many different shapes and disappear after providing power to the towns. How long can you provide power? Should you accept this challenge, place the file "Power.Grid" in your */System/Desk.Accs folder and reboot, or use a NDA installer to install it. Then, select "Power Grid" from the Apple menu in any IIGS Desktop application that supports NDAs. Playing the Game When you first select Power Grid, you are presented with an empty field, some help instructions, and the starting level. Press open-apple-? for some further instructions, use the up/down arrows to change the starting level, press "H" to view the high scores, or press return to start a game. Once the game is started, new pieces fall from the top of the screen, and you must fit them into a complete path from right to left without making a path into the water at the bottom of the screen (it is generally not safe to put electricity into water anywhere!) or into fried connectors, which look like nuclear explosions. Once a complete, safe, path is made, it is removed and anything above it is move down. If a unsafe path is made, all of the connectors in it are fried. Right now, already electrified paths will not fall after a path is completed below them, so be careful. This will be fixed sometime soon. As a path is made from the right, it is colored red in order to show that it has power in it. This is to help show you where power is going in the field. Two special pieces can appear at the top of the screen, hammers and "zaps." When dropped, a hammer will clear all fried pieces and unelectrified pieces in the column it was in. A zap, when dropped on a piece that has a connection facing up will electrify the field from that point. If this electricity runs into a town, the path is removed as normal; if it goes into the water it will fry the path; otherwise it will simply "blink" the path as the electricity is spent. For every five paths that you make to the towns the level goes up. Each level is faster than the one before, and the pieces are bigger every even level. The number of connectors in a piece is the level divided by two (rounding down) and adding one. The highest starting level that you can set is 10, and there the pieces fall quite rapidly! When you start a game, you are initially given 50 points. Each part of a piece costs one point from your score. If you score reaches zero, or if a new piece cannot be fitted in at the top of the screen, the game is over. When a path is made, you are given two points per piece in the path per level. Thus a path length of 10 on level 1 (the shortest path possible) will get you 20 points, and a path of 40 pieces (not hard to do with the large pieces) on level 10 will bag 800 points. Keys: Power Grid is very accommodating in its taste for keys, as it allows right-hand, left-hand, and numeric keypad input. The S, J, and 4 keys all move the current piece one column to the left (if possible); the F, L and 6 keys move the piece right. The D, K and 5 keys rotate the current piece 90 degrees counterclockwise. The E, I and 8 keys flip the current piece from right to left. Space and 0 both drop the current piece. In a game, the clear key on the keypad (also ctrl-x) will cancel the current game. Strategies: Since the lower levels don't give very good scores, start at a medium-difficult level (5-7), which will get you higher scores. I make paths from left to right, connecting them at the end, but if you have a problem with putting power into the water, make the paths from right to left so you can see the effects of your action and only fry what you have completed so far. To pause the game, click in another window. To continue the game, click in Power Grid's window. This works most of the time, but once in a while the game is stopped completely. This bug should be fixed by now, but since it is so rare, if it does show up, tell me so I can really crunch it. High Scores: Should you be lucky enough to complete a game with a score higher than your predecessors, you will have a chance to record your name in the High Score list. Immediately after a game, a dialog box will pop up, reminding you that this is a shareware program and that you should send me money, disks, letters, or programs that you deem are of equivalent value. You can type in your name, up to 19 characters. Power Grid saves the high scores in a file called "Pwr.Grid.Scores" in the System/Desk.Accs folder of your boot disk. If Power Grid cannot find this disk when it is first opened, it will create a new High Scores file with 10 scores of 50 (the starting score) and the names of the programmer and his girlfriend. No error checking is done, so if you have only 1 3.5" disk, make sure the boot disk is online when it is first opened and the scores are saved, otherwise your achievements will be lost! I'll probably put the scores and all in a resource in a bit. (I just got dox on resources, etc.-- shows how far out in the boondocks I was!) Pitfalls: Power Grid uses the Quickdraw Auxiliary toolset to draw its graphics. To date, the only program I know that Power Grid won't work with is Soundsmith. Other than that, Power Grid will work with all other IIGS applications that support other NDAs. Copyright, etc: Power Grid was conceptualized, written, produced, directed, and programmed by Nathan Mates. Additional graphics by Jeremy Mates. Any similarity to any type of game is purely a coincidence, and should be ignored. Icons were initially drawn with IconED1.3 by Paul Elseth. Power Grid was written in 100% 65816 Assembly Language using ORCA/M assembler by Nathan Mates. This program can only be distributed at no cost save the cost of disks and mailing. This program is shareware: if you like it, send something, such as a letter, disks (blank or with your programs on them), or MONEY!!!! to me so I know you're out there! I warrant this software for nothing, and since college work comes first, I may not be able to provide immediate technical support. Nathan Mates About the programmer: Starting September 1992, I, Nathan Mates, will be a freshman at Caltech university. As Caltech is a phenomenal university, it also costs a bit, so any donations ($, Disks, other programs) to help defray the costs of my time helping the Apple II community from within this prestigious university. My mailing address (good all year): Nathan Mates MSC #850, Caltech Pasadena, CA 91126-0001 Apple II Infinitum!!! (For those of you who don't know Latin, "Apple II Forever")