If you thought last month's amazing Blitter was a bit short on gameplay, try Bouncers. It's a version of the classic 'Breakout', sent in by Justin Hedden of Andover. The idea, for anyone who missed the dawn of the computer age, is to break through the wall at the top of the screen by bouncing a ball against it. You can move your bat left or right to hit the ball, but if you miss it you lose a life. You can define your own keys, and there's a high-score table. Bob Wade's tip: wait until the ball is level with the centre of the bat, and then start moving the bat to keep pace with it. Persevere and you'll soon get the congratulatory tune, and the next level. Be warned - it's very addictive indeed! _____________________________________________________ | | | | | | | | | | | B | O | U | N | C | E | R | S | ! | |_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____| _____________________________________________________________________________ | | | OOPS! | | | | In last month's Type-ins I said there were two versions of Cat£8, one for | | the 464 and one for the 664/6128. As disc-owning 464 users will already be | | aware, we only printed the 664/6128 version. This wasn't part of the | | international anti-464 conspiracy - we just forgot! Anyway, we're printing | | the 464 version here. Sorry you had to wait a month. | | While we're at it, there are a few more mistakes and misunderstandings | | to be cleared up. For starters, we had a few queries about Rotating Sphere | | in our May issue. Because it started at line 320, some people assumed that | | we had carelessly missed out lines 10-310. We hadn't - indeed, there | | weren't any lines 10-310 for us to miss out. There's no particular reason | | for a program to start at line 10 rather than any other number. Rest | | assured, Rotating Sphere was complete in every respect - and the same goes | | for Bouncers this month. | | Next, we have a genuine foul-up. In the June issue there was a mistake | | in line 10 of Unerase. The 'l=430' bit of it should have read 'l=450'. This | | means that the 'Checksum error in line...' message would have been two | | lines out if you made a mistake in one of the data statements. If you typed | | the whole program in exactly as it was written, however, it worked fine. | | Lastly, a rich source of type-in problems - printers. Not printers as | | in the people who print AA, God bless 'em, but printers as in mechanical | | devices for producing hard copy. Sometimes they refuse to print symbols as | | they would appear on screen. In particular, they tend to maul the 'hash' | | sign (shift and 3) and the 'up-arrow' sign (on the same key as the pound | | sign). Hash often comes out as a pound sign, and up-arrow prints out | | without its stem - like a circumflex, or the roof of a house. | | We try to catch these signs and correct them, but sometimes they do | | slip through. A case in point is Music Composer, from way back in issue 5. | | Lines 1310 and 1330 both have mauled up-arrows in them, just after ':du=2'. | | To confuse matters still further, this listing also has several 'tilda' | | signs in line 1670. These printed fine, but a lot of people didn't know how | | to type them in. The answer is to hold down the control key and type the | | number 2 - not at all obvious, I'm sure you'll agree. | | __________________________ | | | | | | | [Listing - CAT#8464.BAS] | | | |__________________________| | |_____________________________________________________________________________| __________________________ | | | [Listing - BOUNCERS.BAS] | |__________________________|