Paul Robson's ECricket Beta
                       ===========================

Type "ECricket" to run it. Then watch, and bat, and listen to my
opposite-to-Lawry commentary, recorded at night when I didn't want
to wake anyone up.

The game "ends" when you run out of overs, or get all out. Select the
game length and your teams from the menus.. You can't bowl yet ; that's
coming soon. (really, not in the Micro$oft sense).

The directions are shown below. They are reversed if the batsman is
left handed. It is quite intuitive once you've played it a bit, and
completely impossible if you haven't. But it does work. I highly
recommend when you start play front or back defence for a bit, play
spinners and trundlers off the front foot and pacemen off the back
foot.

                                Back Defense
                                     !
                         Cut         !       Hook/Pull
                              \      !    /
           Cover Drive   -----  Fwd Defense  -----  Leg Clip
                              /      !    \
                      Off Drive      !       On Drive
                                     !
                                Fwd Defense

There are 3 levels of stroke. [A] only (normal) [B] only (push) [C]
(slog). You can play the game without using [B] or [C] if you want it
simpler. On the keyboard the [A] key is "A" or Space, and [B] is "S",
and the [C] key is "D". On a joystick they are buttons [A] & [B] of
course. To get button [C] on a joystick at the moment you have to
press [A] and [B] at the same time (this happens on the keyboard too).

This will sound odd. The bat width is not the width of the bat shown. It
varies. So if you are Bradman you have a wider bat than (say) McGrath.
(this would explain a lot, of course). If you play off the back foot,
you have a wider bat because you have more "time to play".

The middle of the bat though is exactly where shown. This carries through
the whole game ; graphics are representations of internal values, *not*
things in their own right. So collisions between ball and stumps are
calculated, not done by sprite collision. For horizontal bat shots the
effective middle is, of course, not down the middle line of the stance.

The timing is not important. You can select a stroke in the run up
if you want. The problem is that once you have selected it you can't
change it, or move, unless its a defensive stroke, so it is best to
"play late" if you can. Of course, if you play too late bye-bye
off stump.

To use a PC Joystick, set BETATEST_BATCTRL=10 (this is the internal
code for "controlled by joystick"), this is in the file ECricket.Ini,
which will appear once you have run the program once. If you use this
and do not have sprung centred joysticks the sticks need to be centred
at start up (unless you have calibrated them with the Allegro
calibration program).

The batsman will run automatically for easy runs ; if it doesn't it is
a "quick single" if you want to risk it. [A] starts a run and [B] cancels
it.

The game requires a PC set up to run Allegro games ; just about any
modern PC will work fine, and most old ones as well :). It's been
mostly written on a 300Mhz M2, which handles everything reasonably
at 640x480x16 but struggles at 1024x768x32. The game won't actually
slow down, the frame rate will drop. You can run it in 320x200x8
as a last resort if you want, but it looks ugly.

It is, of course, a DOS program. It probably shouldn't be too hard
to port to DirectX or Linux. It's written using the DJGPP suite,
and all the hardware I/O is in one file. There isn't any C++ in it,
or any fancy C either really.

It is running on the late Beta of Allegro 4. (3.933 at the moment).
This has worked perfectly on my machine, but it may cause problems
on an odd machine ; let me know if anything odd happens.

You may find on exit that you need to press CTRL SHIFT or ALT to get
the keyboard to work properly. This appears to be the Allegro library
not me. It something to do with installing a new keyboard driver.

.TEM files are team data files. It should be fairly obvious what's going
if you look at Aus2001.Tem which has an explantory note. These files are
read in to produce the teams so you can more or less do what you like
with the,. Add more, change em, do what you like. If you have any nice
teams I will add them to the releases if you so wish. Everything is
tweakable ; there are six characteristics for bowlers (type,hand,accuracy,
speed,out,in), two for batmen (offence and defence). Thanks to Scott Hodges
for providing an enormous collection of teams, there are now over 25 to
choose from.

It isn't heavily error checked incidentally, so if you put 10 or 12
players in it won't like it :) About the only important things you must have
are a wicket keeper, and 6 bowlers (for one day games), ideally 7.
Multi-purpose bowlers such as Colin Miller are not supported, you pick
one or the other. Nor are ambidextrous bowlers (there is one in the U19s)
supported.

There are also global bowling,batting,speed parameters and pitch settings
for seam, spin and bounce (the game does not at the moment support swing
bowlers). This will allow you to make the game much easier or much harder.
Of course, you can't change them at present. To change them, press the [B]
button on the scoreboard, on the keyboard this will be the key "S", then
change it with your control device.

There is also (or will be after you've run the game once) a file called
ECRICKET.INI which allows you to do all sorts of things to the game, there
are currently an absurd number of settings here. If you muck it up,
either delete it, or add a parameter (any!) to the command line. It is
possible to tweak the program almost endlessly ; and I plan to do so :)
However, you can just ignore it completely. If you wish to tweak a list
of the parameters is included. Some of them are not very sensible, but
I couldn't resist it (e.g. Colin.Miller=1 gives everyone blue hair).
My personal favourite is Hansie.Cronje

You can set the resolution (normal is 640x480,16 bit). I've only tried it
up to 1024x768x32. The main difference is that it requires a faster PC as
you up the resolution. It does work in 320x200x8 but the text is squashed
up ; it is readable but only just :). If it can't select your suggested
resolution it will try 640x480x8 then 320x200x8 as a backup, as some older
machines don't support the 16 bit depth without a Vesa Driver.

If you want to use high resolution check your hardware can support it
first ; basically if you can select it in Windows it should work.

This game will be voluntary-donation-ware. Very voluntary, and to a
charity (preferably Cystic Fibrosis or Cancer). But only when it's
done and if you like it ;-)

Paul Robson.

Send all comments, bugs, suggestions to me at autismuk@aol.com.