Installation and Operation

Installation is simple: just place the two files “Poing!” and “Poing! Levels” together in the same folder. Don’t change the name of the “Poing! Levels” file.

Requirements

Poing! will run on any Macintosh that has a monitor displaying 256 or more colors. (Grayscale works too, but you may find some of the graphics hard to see in grayscale.) It requires System 6.0.5 or later, and is fully compatible with System 7 and Mac OS 8. Poing! needs 600K of memory on a 256 color display, 720K for “thousands” of colors, and 1,100K for “millions” of colors; see the chapter “Memory and Color” for details.

Some of the text will look best in 12 point Palatino. If you don’t have this font, an available font will be substituted.

Fast Monitors

The ball’s speed is controlled by your monitor’s refresh rate. Some high-performance monitors may make the ball go too fast for enjoyable play. It should take roughly one second for the ball to cross the screen once. If the ball can cross the screen twice or more in one second, you should probably select “Slow Ball” from the Preferences menu.

Slow Macs

On slower machines (for example, the old Macintosh II that most of the game’s development was done on), you may see occasional “glitches” when the ball’s normally smooth motion falters briefly. This happens when the computer can’t quite keep up with all the demands that the game makes on it. The game will try to minimize these glitches: for example, on slow machines the score is not updated until the end of each level, which reduces the load and helps to keep the animation smooth during play. The glitches should not interfere with your games; but if they bother you, turn off the sound effects by selecting “Sound” from the Preferences menu. Playing with sound puts a very big load on a slow processor. (Music is much less of a load than the sound effects, and music only plays between levels anyway, so you can always leave it on.)

Running with Other Programs

Unlike most well-behaved Mac applications, Poing! is not friendly to other programs that are running at the same time. Your other applications will not get background time while Poing! is running. This is unfortunate but it is necessary and deliberate: the game cannot manage its high-speed animation if other programs can get control of the Mac for indefinite periods of time.

Poing! will give time to applications in the background whenever you pause the game (by selecting “Pause” from the File menu). You can also switch to another application as usual while Poing! is running; when you do this, Poing! will automatically pause the game and will stop monopolizing your machine.

Interrupt-driven background processes such as networking will still get time and should function normally, even while you are playing.

Selecting “Background Friendly” from the Preferences menu will allow background processes to run whenever you’re not actually playing a level. This option makes the ball stop moving except when you’re actually playing.

Music

On some Macs, Poing! will play a variety of musical selections by Bach and Telemann. On other Macs, it will play a selection of modern vamps by John Scott. The difference is due to a problem in Apple’s system software that was introduced with the new Sound Manager 3.0, and that can result in music being played with uneven tempo. Poing! detects this problem and selects appropriate music for your system.