Port of Apricots to the GCW Zero gaming handheld.

Changes introduced in this port:

• the game was modified to run in 320x240
• introduced a menu system
• $HOME directory support
• autogenerating apricots.cfg if none is present
• minor GCW Zero related changes

To do:

• joystick support

Port maintainer:

• Artur Rojek (Zear)

Apricots-0.2.6

Overview

    Apricots is a game I've been writing in my spare time.
    Despite the name, it has nothing to do with apricots.
    It's a game where you fly a little plane around the
    screen and shoot things and drop bombs on enemy targets,
    and it's meant to be quick and fun.

History

    The original version of the game dates back to around
    1991. The very first version of the game was written on
    an Amiga, using the AMOS language, and the game was
    called 'Planegame'. This was a very simple affair with
    simplistic landscapes, no guns or shrapnel, and very
    limited computer AI. It was also dreadfully slow. The
    AMOS compiler improved things somewhat at a later date. A
    couple of years later I obtained the BLITZ language for
    the Amiga, and ported 'Planegame' carefully over to that,
    resulting in a huge speedup. Impressed by the capabilites
    of BLITZ, in 1995 I proceeded to rewrite the game
    entirely from scratch, even using completely new graphics
    and sound. The result was 'Planegame2', which, for
    various reasons also got dubbed 'Apricots'. This new
    version of the game added anti-aircraft guns, shrapnel,
    trees, towers, water, better airbases and a huge
    improvement on graphics, sound, and intelligent computer
    AI. Slightly later, in 1996, the Draks were added as a
    bit of amusement. The result was a highly playable game,
    which I distributed to a few of my friends. A few years
    later and I now use a PC, which can run Linux. Having
    learnt C++ by this time, at the beginning of 2002 I felt
    ready enough to port 'Apricots' cross platform from BLITZ
    on the Amiga to C++ on a Linux PC. What you see here is
    work in progress on that port. The game has been tweaked
    slightly while being ported over, so is not identical to
    the Amiga version.

Authors

    Project Leader: Mark Snellgrove (Original concept and game
                    coding)
    Co-author: Mark Harman (First Windows port and SDL conversion)
    Additional contributor: Judebert (Configuration file)

Status The game is still under development. Apricots-0.2.6 is a beta release using the SDL library. Despite this, it is highly playable. Please mail apricots@fishies.org.uk any bug reports, upgrades or comments.

C++ Compilers

    Apricots is known to successfully build under the following
    OS/Compiler configurations
    
    Linux - gcc (reported by Mark Snellgrove)
    OpenBSD - gcc (reported by Johan Luff)
    Windows - Borland (reported by Mark Harman)
    Windows - Visual C++ 6.0 (reported by Mark Snellgrove)
    Windows/Cygwin - gcc (reported by Judebert)
    
    It may build successfuly on other platforms, but this has
    not been tested. Let me know!

Requirements

        SDL > 1.2.0, download from www.libsdl.org
        OpenAL, download from www.openal.org [optional]

Compilation options

    -DAP_PATH="datadir" Set directory where apricots looks for
                        its data files. Defaults to current directory
                        if unset.
    -DAP_AUDIO_OPENAL   Turns on audio, using OpenAL. Off by default.

Instructions

    CONTROLS                      PLAYER 1             PLAYER 2
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    ROTATE LEFT                   CURSOR LEFT          Z
    ROTATE RIGHT                  CURSOR RIGHT         C
    ACCELERATE / STEALTH          CURSOR UP            S
    DROP BOMB                     CURSOR DOWN          X
    FIRE SHOT                     RETURN               LEFT CTRL
    
    Gameplay is fairly common sense to work out.
    Stay alive, and shooting enemy targets gains you points,
    whereas being shot down or shooting the wrong things lose
    you points. You have infinite planes, and are competing
    against the other computer planes (or other player!).
    First to a certain score wins once they land at base.
    Simple!

Play Options

    At present there is no option screen. Options can be changed by
    editing the configuration file apricots.cfg (on UNIX systems this
    will probably require root access, user configuration files will
    be added soon in a future release). The number and type of planes
    can be varied, along with the airbases, as can 1/2 player game
    be chosen. The number of anti aircraft guns and scenery
    can be selected. Draks can be turned on or off, and a
    different condition for winning the game can be chosen.

License

    Apricots falls under the GPL. Please read the file COPYING included
    in this distrubution. The sourcecode of apricots-0.2.6 will either
    be included in the distrubution, or can otherwise be downloaded
    from the apricots webpage (see below)

Webpage

    For updates, bugfixes, binaries, sourcecode and more info please
    visit the apricots webpage at
    http://www.fishies.org.uk/apricots.html