Shanghai Manual

Contents
Home
Status & Licence
Intro
Usage
Application Options
Main Choices
Unregistering
Choices Window
Miscellaneous
History
Contact Me

Shanghai

Welcome to Shanghai

Purpose

Entertainment! Simple really.
Remove all the tiles from the board.

Version

1.04 (2nd Dec 2002)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank J.David Barrow for the 'dacha' tile set. This was hand-crafted by him and he has kindly given me his permission to include it.
For more interesting goodies, visit his web site at http://www.dacha.freeuk.com/

Rules

There are 144 tiles, consisting of four each of the following tiles;
- Nine 'stick' (suozi or tìao) suit of pieces numbered 1 to 9
- Nine 'wheel' (tongzi) suit of pieces numbered 1 to 9
- Nine 'number' (wànzi) suit of pieces numbered 1 to 9
- Four 'wind' tiles, representing the four compass directions; east/south/west/north
- Three 'dragon' files (red, green and white)
- Four 'flower' (huapái) tiles (Plum, Orchid, Chrysanthemum and Bamboo)
- Four 'season' tiles (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter)

The pieces are arranged at random on a rectangular grid, some placed on top of others forming a shallow pyramid.
You must remove two matching tiles at a time, with the aim being to remove all tiles from the board.
A piece can only be removed if it is not overlapped by another and has a free space either to the left or right of it.

The RISC OS version can tell you how many moves are possible at any time (depending upon the level) and optionally give you a hint.

However, asking for a hint will add a ten second penalty to your score.
Once you have removed two tiles you cannot generally replace them. However, this version includes an unlimited undo feature, if you decide that you really didn't want to remove the tiles you did. For each undo, you get a twenty second penalty.

If you succeed in removing all tiles, you will make it to the high score table if your time is quick enough.

Main Menu

The main menu consists of the following options:-

Info	Move the pointer right to see application info and version number.
Undo	Undo the last move you made. However, this will encur a penaltyof 20 seconds onto your score.
New Game	This will restart a new game. Hold SHIFT down to restart with the same tile layout.
Choices	Open the choices submenu (see below)
High Scores	View the top ten high scores.

Choices

This will open a submenu containing the following customisation options:-

Difficulty:
Easy	Display of how many moves are possible at any one time.
Medium	No display of moves, but you can click on 'Clue' for a clue.
Hard	No display of moves and no clues available.
Spacing:
Smallest	0 pixel gap between adjacent tiles
Small	4 pixels gap between adjacent tiles
Medium	8 pixels gap between adjacent tiles
Large	12 pixels gap between adjacent tiles
Largest	16 pixels gap between adjacent tiles
Colour: Select the colour of the playing board. N.B. Colour 1 has a special property in that it allows you to select a board style. (see 'additional files', below)
Tile set: Allows you to choose from a range of different tile sets. N.B. See 'additonal files', below for more info.
Save: Save the choices to disc.

Hints

At any point when you have the choice to restart the game, if you hold the SHIFT key down when restarting, the same order and layout of tiles will be used again. This allows you to restart the game with the same tile layout so that you can try a different strategy.

Additional Files

From version 1.02 onwards you can add your own fancy background and custom sets of tiles.
If you want to add your own background, create a sprite called "tile_1" and save it in the !Shanghai.Boards directory. Make sure it is less than 32K (32768 bytes) long and that there are no more than 10 different files (max limitation).
If you wish to create your own sets of tiles, this is slightly more tricky, as the actual sprite names MUST match the existing format (if in doubt, check the 'dacha' file). Save them inside !Shanghai.Tiles. Again you can have up to 10 different files.
The maximum file size must not exceed 288K (294912 bytes).
There are additional 'safety' features build into !Shanghai in that any files that are too long won't appear on the relevant menu, and more than 10 files will be ignored after the 10th.
If in doubt email me for more information.

Copyright and Application Status

Written by Paul Vigay, Mar 2000. This program is freeware, on the condition that it is copied in it's entirety without any files being changed.

However, any donations will be gratefully accepted and will help inspire me to do further development and support the RISC OS/Acorn software market.
A fiver would be nice, to cover some of the electricity used whilst coding and to buy more packets of tea or Hobnobs for all those late nights.

The copyright remains with me, the author (Paul Vigay) at all times.

Contacting me

You can contact me in several ways:-

Email me at pvigay@interalpha.co.uk
Go my Acorn Shareware page on the internet at http://www.vigay.com/shareware
Write to me at 104 Manners Road, Southsea, Hampshire, PO4 0BG

History

The following is a list of changes between the different release versions of Shanghai.
The latest version is always listed first. Check my web site above for any new versions.

v1.03b (12th Apr 2000)

Amended templates file so that window backgrounds can't be clicked upon.
Modified some of the messages to be more uniform. Restart is now New Game.

v1.03a (11th Apr 2000)

Minor bug fix which stopped you from selecting the first background tile design.

v1.03 (5th Apr 2000)

Fixed memory leakage bug which caused the game to 'crash' after 20 consecutive restarts.
Added option to restart using the same tile layout.

v1.02 (31st Mar 2000)

Made control icons 3D (thanks to Weiss Niklaus for the suggestion)
Added choices menu (and moved background color from 'Messages' file to menu option.)

v1.01 (30th Mar 2000)

Added the facility to adjust the tile spacing. This value is stored within the !Shanghai.Resources.Messages file. Edit the line that starts 'spacing:' so that the value is between 0 (no spaces) and 16 (maximum spacing)
N.B. Anything outside this range will default to 0.

v1.00 (27th Mar 2000)

First release version - pretty much bug free! :-)