Eight Ball Deluxe additional notes
----------------------------------

Although the manual covers most of the details, there are some additional
you should be aware of when first running Eight Ball Deluxe.


Important note for ATI and possibly other SoundBlaster compatible cards
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The ATI Stereo VGA/FX video/sound card which is SoundBlaster compatible has a
special feature called Buffering. This is to improve sound quality, but
unfortunately, it requires close attention of the CPU, which has to wait for
the card to accept new sample data. This feature dramatically slows down
game play. You can check this when running the game and turning off and on
the sound using the 'A' key.
In the setup program of the card (usually \vgautil\vinstall.exe) is an option
to turn this feature off. The sound will still work but may be a bit 'clicky'.
This may also improve performance of some of your other software, which may
suffer from this problem as well.

Sometimes ATI Stereo VGA/FX card and possibly other cards as well hang up
internally. You have to reset the card using a program that should come with
your sound card. In the case of the ATI card it usually is c:\sfx\reset.exe.


Error Messages
--------------

If the installation is incomplete, or after installation one or more
files are accidentally deleted, the program will exit and a message will
appear. If the first message is a filename, you should reinstall
Eight Ball Deluxe. Simply install Eight Ball Deluxe on top of the directory
where it was installed before.

Other messages:

Not enough XMS available for Soundblaster to run:

    Eight Ball Deluxe stores all the samples in Extended memory. Therefore,
    you need to make sure that enough Extended Memory (XMS) is available.
    Make sure that an extended memory manager is present. Himem.sys should do.
    Find out where your himem.sys is on your harddrive, it usually lives in
    the C:\DOS directory, or when you have windows installed, then try the
    C:\WINDOWS directory. If you have more than one partition or have more 
    than one harddrive, try finding it in all of the partions.
    Make sure the config.sys contains: DEVICE = C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS

    Some drivers in config.sys and autoexec.bat take all XMS away for their
    own use, such as emm386.exe, which converts all XMS into EMS
    (Exp(!)anded Memory). If you wish to have EMS available as well, what you
    could do is tell the driver (such as emm386.exe) to only take a portion of
    the memory, so that after running the driver, at least 800Kb XMS is
    available.  Refer to your DOS manual for instructions on using EMM386 or
    product documentation for third party software.

Not enough memory available:

    Eight Ball Deluxe needs about 580Kb of conventional memory to run.
    Some drivers or tsr's which are loaded in config.sys/autoexec.bat take 
    away too much conventional memory. If you have DOS 5 or higher and are 
    not familiar with loading devices and tsr's into upper memory, please 
    refer to your DOS manual to help you set up your system more efficiently. 
    Take a look at the system setup example at the end of this file.
    If you still can't run Eight Ball Deluxe, take out some of the device
    drivers and tsr's until you can run successfully.

Allocation failure:

    There are several memory allocation failure messages. Most of the time 
    this is a result of not having enough conventional memory available.


VGA Problems
------------

On some older VGA boards connected to a monochrome VGA monitor the screen may
appear black and stays black when starting up Eight Ball Deluxe. In that case,
try typing 'mode co80' before you run Eight Ball Deluxe again, which should
switch your VGA card into color mode.  Press 'ESC' several times to return
to DOS.  Your screen should return to normal.

Some VGA cards do this even when it's connected to a color monitor.

Some really old VGA cards won't work at all, these are not 100% VGA compatible.
Refer to your VGA manual for switches/jumpers, try every possible setting as
long as your VGA manual indicates that what you're doing is safe! Also, turn
your computer OFF and UNPLUG it BEFORE you open your computer to look for
jumpers!

There were some problems with fading the graphics on some VGA cards. Although
they have all been fixed, there's still a special command line option that
tells the program not to use any fading. See the Special Options paragraph.

VGA boards are usually normal AT boards that go into an AT slot. Because of 
this all VGA graphic changes slow down the system. This in combination with a 
slower computer such as a 386 SX/16, may sometimes result in choppy animated
graphics.  This may show up when you flip the flippers. What the program does 
in that case is cut the frame rate to a lower rate so that the actual 
gamespeed remains the same.

Make sure the memory caches and the wait states of your system are set up
properly, refer to the manual of your motherboard. This is important if you 
want your system to run at its fastest.


Special Options
---------------

You can start 8BALLDLX using extra parameters, in any order as many as 
you like:

help      - summary
nosb      - Tells the game to ignore the SoundBlaster all together.
nosound   - No sound at all, PC-Speaker can be re-enabled inside the game.
notitles  - Go directly to the pinball cafe.
nomouse   - Ignore mouse
pause     - Pauses the game after execution. Usefull fo reading error messages
            after running it inside Windows.
ball1     - Use default ball
ball2     - Use slightly smaller ball
ball3     - Use huge ball
nofading  - Don't use fading, see the VGA Problems paragraph.
nudgeXXXX - Configure the Nudge keys. (Default is "nudgezZ/?" - with no spaces)
-nxxx     - Change the amount of near space the game will use (Default is -n24)
-fxxx     - Change the amount of far space the game will use (Default is -f330)


System Setup Example (DOS 5 or higher)
--------------------

config.sys:

    DOS = HIGH, UMB
    Device = c:\dos\himem.sys
    Device = c:\dos\emm386.exe noems
    DeviceHigh = c:\dos\smartdrv.exe

autoexec.bat:

    LoadHigh doskey /insert

The important part is the 'DOS = HIGH, UMB' which tells the system to load
DOS in high memory and to use Upper Memory for DeviceHigh and LoadHigh.
In this case himem.sys provides XMS and High Memory, and emm386.exe provides 
Upper Memory.

Windows Installation
--------------------

!@#!@#!@#!@#


Programmers' note
-----------------

Eight Ball Deluxe is written in C++ and assembler, and uses advanced 
techniques, such as extreme modularity, Mode-X graphics mode, on-the-fly 
sample calculation to sound 3 samples simultaniously, special backup-restore 
blitting techniques, special Vertical Retrace handler, timer interrupt controlled multiple program
flow, automatic frame rate control, and much more!

My thanks go out to Mark Vange for helping me save some time by doing the
game-rules, PC-Speaker sounds and the Install program.
Also thanks to Bjarne Stroustrup for making C++ the way it is.

Mike Pot, programmer

