deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Ben Haller) (02/17/91)
Well, people have been posting about Solarian II again. There are a few concerns which I think I should address. First of all, the speed on the IIsi: There are a few reasons why it might be slower. The lack of a math coprocessor is not a reason: Solarian II doesn't use it (as of some version like 1.2). Assuming you have 1.3 or 1.4, this isn't the problem. One reason it would be slower is the 32 Bit QuickDraw problem discussed in previous messages. Basically, Solarian II checks for the presence of the 32 Bit QuickDraw support, and does extra work if the support is present. In many situations that extra work is unnecessary, and only slows the game down. This will be fixed eventually, in version 1.05. In the meantime, take out the 32 Bit QuickDraw INIT if you can, or suffer if it's built into your machine. Sorry. In the past I have discussed other reasons why Solarian II is slower on some machines than on others. I won't reiterate them here. Another problem is that apparently System 6.0.7 has bugs in the ROM support for sound. I've heard from a lot of people who say that the sound is really screwy on the IIsi. Some people seem to have no problems with this, though, so it may be an incompatability with a specific program, such as SoundMaster or some such thing, that only shows up on the IIsi due to the ROM bugs. My advice is to take out all INITs you have that equip your machine with funny sound effects for things. Another concern is the incompatability of Solarian II with Diamonds. Someone posted saying that they thought this was fixed with version 1.04 of Solarian. Not true. I have no idea what the problem is, but until I hear evidence to the contrary, I'll assume this is the fault of Diamonds, since no other program seems to do these things to Solarian II. Another posting mentioned that Solarian II ran on the LC monitor (the 12" color one), but was clipped to the smaller screen size. This is interesting. It should have put up an error message. I'll have to find an LC somewhere and try this...And no, support for the 12" monitor is not planned. You get what you pay for. Finally, people were asking where to find Solarian II. Look on sumex-aim.stanford.edu. I have no idea if they have version 1.03 or 1.04, but trust me - unless you have a specific problem with 1.03, you don't need to upgrade. I think I will do a version 1.05 fairly soon (next few months) to fix the 32 Bit QuickDraw problem, the After Dark 2.0 problem, and some other miscellaneous stuff. Keep your bug reports coming. I do pay attention to them. And thanks for your support, everyone. With customers like these, who needs friends? :-> -Ben Haller (deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu)