Chocoletters is a puzzle game. You have to find how the computer mixed up 36 letters and figures in a 6 by 6 grid. To succeed you may ask for paths leading from one letter to another. With several paths you can deduce the positions of the letters. The score depends on the number of paths and the time spent to finish.
What is a path ?
It’s the series of tiles that you follow vertically or horizontally. It’s always one of the shortest. It never turns back nor does it go diagonally.
Here is an example. Imagine the computer has hidden this configuration:
Z G M 9 ..
R 7 2 H ..
3 P Y D ..
..........
If you ask for ZY, you can get one of the following paths:
Z G M 2 Y
or Z G 7 2 Y
or Z G 7 P Y
or Z R 7 2 Y
or Z R 7 P Y
or Z R 3 P Y
all paths from a given letter to another are always the same number of tiles long.
You'll never get:
Z 7 Y diagonal
Z G M 9 H D Y not the shortest way
If you ask for YZ instead of ZY, you will get the same paths but in reverse order and preceded by a red number. So you know that the path doesn’t just go towards right and bottom but also towards top and/or left.
How to get a path ?
Click on the New Path bar and then click on two letters of the "keyboard" at the bottom.
If "Auto Paths" is enabled in the Preferences Dialog you may click on the Auto Paths bar and get several paths at once. You choose the number of paths per click in the same dialog.
Auto Paths option is available in all three difficulty modes.
Only 20 paths can be displayed on the board. If you need more, you must erase some of them by clicking on them.
Placing tiles
Drag the tile from the palette at the bottom and release it in the grid. The New Path bar must not be pressed down.
Learner level
In this mode you are given the top left letter. It's a good idea to ask for paths beginning with it. If this first letter is T and you get these two paths: TA8... and TF8... you can start filling in the grid. Due to a diagonal symmetry, it doesn't matter if you swap A and F in this example. The longest way is 11 tiles long: when you get it you know the bottom right letter.
This mode is called Learner Mode because each time you drop a tile at a good location you'll hear a sound. On the contrary you won't hear anything and the wrong letter will refuse to stay in the grid.
Easy level
This mode is nearly the same except that there is no success sound and every dropped tile stays in the grid even at a wrong position.
Hard level
You start with an empty grid. The hint is to use the length of the path, the color of the leading number (remember: black->bottom/right red->top/left), there are perhaps other tricks to find...
Harder level
You must well know Chocoletters and you'll have to manage on your own. Practise the other levels before!
End of the round
When you are finished you hear a drums sound and the two solutions are shown. If the grid is full and you don't hear the sound or see the solutions it's because two or more tiles are wrong.
Hardware
Chocoletters should run on all of the 68020 Macintoshes (at least System 7 + Quicktime) and later with a 14' color screen or larger. But animations should be quite slow on old machines.
You need Quicktime 3.0 or more with QT Instruments to hear good music (Midi files).
You need Quicktime 4.0 to hear mp3 files.
Since it was written with a French keyboard, US keyboard users may need to type Cmd-A instead of Cmd-Q to Quit. I'll try to find it out.
Registration
Chocoletters is a $10 shareware. If you like Chocoletters and play it a lot, you should register it.
When you register Chocoletters, I will send you a code which removes the annoying dialogs and displays your name listed as the registered owner of your copy of Chocoletters.
Much more important, you will feel happy and proud to be supporting shareware !
Paying for Chocoletters is fairly simple. Kagi handles my payment processing.
They offer a secure World-Wide Web registration form. To register Chocoletters over the web, go to:
http://order.kagi.com/?QYJ
It's the fastest and the easiest way to register with a Credit Card and an access to the Web.
Or you can use the Register program that accompanies Chocoletters.
Save or Copy or Print the data from the Register program and send the data and payment to Kagi.
If paying with Credit Card or First Virtual, you can email or fax the data to Kagi. Their email address is sales@kagi.com and their fax number is +1 510 652-6589. You can either Copy the data from Register and paste into the body of an email message or you can Save the data to a file and you can attach that file to an email message. If you have a fax modem, just Print the data to the Kagi fax number.
Payments sent via email are processed within 3 to 4 days. You will receive an email acknowledgement when it is processed. Payments sent via fax take up to 10 days and if you provide a correct internet email address you will receive an email acknowledgement.
If you are paying with Cash or USD Check you should print the data using the Register application and send it to the address shown on the form, which is:
Kagi
1442-A Walnut Street #392-QYJ
Berkeley, California 94709-1405
USA
You can pay with a wide variety of cash from different countries but at present if you pay via check, it must be a check drawn in US Dollars. Kagi cannot accept checks in other currencies, the conversion rate for non-USD checks is around USD 15 per check and that is just not practical.
Please do not fax or email payment forms that indicate Cash, Check or Invoice as the payment method because the form cannot be processed without the payment.
Payments sent via postal mail take time to reach Kagi and then up to 10 days for processing. Again, if you include a correct email address, you will hear from Kagi when the form is processed.
When you pay, I will tell you how to indicate to Chocoletters that you have paid the registration fee. If you do not have an email address, please enter your complete postal address and please remember, I do not know what country you live in so please enter that into the postal address also. It would be too a good idea to add a $1 US bonus for postal mail fee.
License agreement
The first release of Chocoletters was written by Pierre Durand in 1998-1999.
Chocoletters may be included in a collection or distribution such as a floppy disk, CD-ROM, FTP sites or WWW archives as long as all of the accompanying files and the registration program are included and the software is not modified in any way.
The software and related documentation are provided “AS IS” and without warranty of any kind even if Chocoletters melts down your main screen (Don't worry, fortunately it can't do that).
