48K Disk
by Larry G. Hearin
48K Disk
by Larry G. Hearin
Hey, all you Micro-Painter owners! Have you ever wondered what you could do with all those beautiful screens you created, other than just look at them? Well, now there's Micro-Puzzler! This program will load a Micro-Painter screen file, divide it into 120 pieces, mix and rotate them, and then let you try to put it back together again -- much like a jigsaw puzzle. As you may have guessed, the difficulty will be (mostly) determined by the complexity of the picture, so you can choose your own level by the screen you use.
When you run the program, there will be a few seconds of initialization, after which you will be prompted by the words ENTER SCREEN FILENAME. You may now enter the name of the Micro-Painter screen file that you want to use with Micro-Puzzler. If no device specification is given, disk drive 1 is assumed. If an error is encountered in trying to access this file, the program will return to the prompt for the screen filename. Instead of entering the screen filename, you may get a disk directory listing by hitting CTRL-D and then entering the drive number for which you want the directory. After listing the disk directory, the program will return to the prompt for the screen filename.
Once a valid screen filename is entered, the screen will be loaded, and the puzzle pieces will be shuffled and rotated. Then the new, mixed-up screen will be displayed, along with a rectangular cursor in the upper left of the screen. Puzzle pieces are moved by exchanging positions of two pieces at a time. To do this, move the cursor (using the arrow keys) to one of the pieces you want to exchange and hit RETURN. Then move the cursor to the other piece to be exchanged and hit RETURN. While you're moving from the first to the second piece, a secondary cursor will be left at the first position to mark the piece to be exchanged. After the exchange is made, the secondary cursor will disappear.
The only other type of puzzle piece manipulation that may be done is rotation. This may be done at any time by pressing the R key. This will always rotate the piece within the primary cursor. An interesting and sometimes helpful phenomenon to note is that some of the colors of a puzzle piece may change when the piece is rotated. So, if you see a color that isn't on the original picture, chances are that piece is upside-down.
For those of you who don't remember exactly what the original picture looked like, you may press the Atari key to toggle between the original and the mixed-up screen.
Once the picture is correct, you will be congratulated and may then press the ESC key to run again. To quit, you must hit SYSTEM RESET.
If you get tired of puzzling before you complete the picture, you may save your current status on disk, if desired. To do this, press the OPTION key, and then enter a disk filename to which the status will be saved. Warning: this file has to be saved to the same disk containing the original screen file. Otherwise, when you try to reload your status, it will not work. To reload, just enter this status filename instead of the original Micro-Painter filename when prompted with ENTER SCREEN FILENAME.
Datasoft's Micro-Painter is an excellent graphics program for the Atari. And, by using Micro-Puzzler, you can get even more enjoyment out of your Micro-Painter.
10 DATA 134,525,257,210,914,214,367,35
7,897,678,975,146,514,268,965,7421
150 DATA 939,3,42,902,458,467,215,203,
494,644,114,929,85,845,700,7040
250 DATA 942,667,155,22,679,339,512,46
5,198,608,558,91,787,442,42,6507
395 DATA 731,364,787,573,457,845,470,8
49,713,866,730,705,152,96,512,8850
540 DATA 731,452,502,736,422,131,244,5
39,727,828,414,818,819,383,209,7955
690 DATA 839,236,194,816,686,364,545,6
80,669,844,245,477,193,815,382,7985
870 DATA 684,169,175,402,669,743,839,6
99,667,615,207,302,624,947,921,8663
1011 DATA 782,562,783,351,147,664,167,
796,870,541,126,40,332,822,744,7727
1050 DATA 693,774,786,294,93,959,917,6
28,456,694,971,670,715,326,408,9384
1200 DATA 275,369,935,316,683,950,103,
3631