Overview

 

This page contains information on system requirements, installation procedures and know bugs of Zooom. Installation is straight forward, and system requirements are satisfied by a rather low-ended personal computer according to todays (March 2000) standards. If, after reading through this page, you still have questions, or if Zooom is not working on your system, feel free to contact the author for further support.

 


System requirements

  Icon  Pentium II system running at 350 MHz
 Allthough Zooom may run satisfactory on slower systems, it is recommended to play the game at least on a PIII. If your framerate goes down during gameplay, reduce detail settings. Note: Performance depends mostly on your graphic card, NOT on processor performance!

 
  Icon Graphics card 800x600, 16 Bit color depth
 Zooom requires at least a screen resolution of 800x600x16, so you need a graphic card (and monitor)  which support this standard. Note: Optimum performance is achieved at 24-bit color depth. A 2D accellerator card is highly recommended: Zooom spends about 95% of its frametime in DirectX calls and consequentially is highly dependent on the performance of DirectX on your system.
 
Icon 16-Bit Sound Card, Joystick
 Zooom does not require a soundcard to be playable, but without sounds and music, game experience suffers severely. The same applies for joysticks: Especcially in an action game like Zoom, a joystick provides an invaluable increase of gaming quality.

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Icon Microsoft DirectX 7.x 
 Zooom has been developed using DirectX version 7. If you do not have DirectX 7 installed on your system, check www.microsoft.com/directx for the latest version of this great multimedia and gaming library..

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Developer requirements

  Icon  Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
 Zooom has been developed using Microsoft Visual Basic Version 6.0. Accordingly, you should have a version of this development package installed on your system to be able to work with the source code.


 
  Icon Various Editors 
 If you wish to customize levels or graphics, you will need several editors. Among the most important ones is a real good text editor for editing the level, campaign and plugin definition files. Another must is a cewl graphics suite like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint or comparables. A raytrace renderer like Lightwave, finally, is all-important to create enemy ship graphics like that provided with Zooom.
 

 

Installation

 

There are two general ways to install Zooom on your system. 
First, you can just download the runtime package. This package includes a standard setup comparable to  that used by many other applications ... run it, and follow the installation instructions that appear on the screen. The package will install to a path of your choice, and will leave all your system directories unchanged. It won't even create registry keys. After installation, you will get  a shortcut on your desktop or in your start menu that allows access to Zooom.

The second way to install Zooom is to download the development version. This version comes as a ZIP-File and contains all the source code and graphics. Unzip this file to a path of your choice. But note: There is no compiled exe in the development package, so you will need to compile once before being able to play.

 

 

Known issues

 

Fortunately, there are no known issues at the moment. No bugs have been reported, but if you experience any mal-behavior of the application, please report at once to the author at nls@inode.at, and I shall search for a solution and post your problem here.