Newsletter

Spoonbill Software News

December 2008

Hi everyone! I thought I’d better compile another newsletter in time for Christmas to let you know what goodies to look out for in the New Year.

BG Chess Challenge

Since the last newsletter back in September, BG Chess Challenge has been released with great success. It is very popular among blind chess players and has features which don’t exist in other so-called accessible chess games, making it easier to play the game. This is especially attractive to newcomers to the game who have always shied away from playing chess because it all seemed too difficult. I’ve had many favourable comments about this very popular game.

BG Cribbage 1.2

For my blind and vision impaired clients, I’ve been working on a significant upgrade to Spoonbill Software’s accessible Cribbage game and it is at the moment in the advanced stages of beta testing. This means that it should be ready for release early in the New Year. Rest assured that all of my blind gamers who have previously requested BG Cribbage will be informed just as soon as the new upgrade is released. To whet your appetite, here are some of the new features:

A new option to self score your hand and crib, rather than let the computer do it for you. The Score Hand option comes in three flavours: Auto Score which lets the computer score for you (as in previous versions), Self Score which allows you to enter the score for your hand and your crib, and Self Score with Muggins which also allows you to enter your own scores but if you undervalue your hand, the computer will claim Muggins and take the extra points for itself!
You can now Save a game and Resume it later. This is especially useful if you are playing a round of games such as best of 3, best of 5, etc.
The error which some people got using certain SAPI voices which resulted in the error message “The parameter is incorrect” has been tracked down and fixed.
In line with other Blind Gamers games, you can now hit the M key to toggle between a normalized and a maximized window. This is useful for vision impaired people.

Spoonbill Jigsaw 6.0

For my sighted clients, I’ve been working on a significant upgrade to Jigsaw 4.1. It is in the beta testing stage at the moment and should be ready for release early in the New Year. All of my clients who have previously requested Jigsaw 4.1 will be notified when Spoonbill Jigsaw 6.0 is finally released. Here are the major improvements:

1. A new Group Pieces option enables you to assemble groups of pieces anywhere in the Jigsaw window. You can then drag them around as a group, and when you work out where they fit into the puzzle itself, you can drag and drop the complete group into the puzzle frame to lock the pieces into the puzzle.

2. When you load the picture you want to use to create your jigsaw puzzle, in addition to being able to reposition the picture within the Jigsaw window by dragging it with the mouse, there is now a sizing gadget in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture which allows you to resize your picture to produce a jigsaw with the desired number of pieces. While you are sizing the picture, the dimensions of the resultant jigsaw are dynamically displayed in the Status Bar.

3. Apart from Large, Medium and Small piece sizes, there are now two additional piece sizes, Huge and Giant, which are useful for creating jigsaws for younger children. Now all the family can join in the fun!

4. Version 6.0 introduces a greater variety of jigsaw piece shapes for a more realistic jigsaw.

5. The last folder you loaded an image from and the last folder you saved a jigsaw to are remembered, making it easier to navigate to your favourite image or saved jigsaw folder.

6. The box top picture can now be resized to suit your preference.

7. The background color can now be set from a color picker dialog so that you can set the background color to anything you like.

8. You can now choose to have music playing in the background. Either the MIDI files supplied or your own MIDI files.

9. The Remove Transparency tool has now been coded to work correctly. And unlike previous versions, it does not alter your original image file on disk. The new version of the tool operates on the jigsaw pieces once they are created from your original image, rather than on your original image itself.

10. A new Auto Delete option enables you to have your saved jigsaw automatically deleted once you have completely solved the puzzle. This is a convenient way of removing unwanted saved jigsaws.

Penta-a-Twist 1.0

I’ve also been working on Spoonbill Software’s computer implementation of the popular board game Pentago. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pentago, here is a brief overview.

Pentago is played on a 6 by 6 board which is divided into four 3 by 3 quadrants. It is played between two players, each player having 18 marbles. Players take turns to play a marble to the board and also twist any of the four quadrants either 90 degrees to the right or to the left. The first player to get five of his marbles in a straight line, horizontally, vertically or diagonally is the winner.

Spoonbill Software’s offering is called Pent-a-Twist and it is also almost ready for release. It features:

1. Play against the computer or another human.

2. Choose the color of your marbles.

3. Choose the computer skill level from Low, Medium or High.

4. Statistics are recorded for every combination of player name and computer name.

5. Background music from the supplied MIDI files or alternatively you can substitute your own MIDI files.

Let me know if you would like to pre-order a copy. Just email me at games@spoonbillsoftware.com.au stating your FULL NAME and your COUNTRY of residence, and I will notify you when the game is released. Remember, I cannot send games to GMAIL, GOOGLEMAIL or most corporate email addresses, so please let me know your personal email address when ordering.

Flower Power 1.0

Whew! I’ve been busy, haven’t I? The reason is that we’ve had more than the usual number of rainy and drizzly days which are ideal for writing computer programs! While the preceding games have been out for beta testing I’ve been working on Spoonbill Software’s computer implementation of the Mattel board game called “Let’s Do Lunch”. The game consists of a 7 by 7 board and three special dice, containing the numbers 1, 2, and 3 twice each. It is a game for two players and each player has 12 cannibals which they must play onto the board. Each turn consists of rolling the three dice and the total of the spots determines which column of the board you can play in. If you succeed in surrounding any of your opponent’s cannibals either horizontally, vertically or diagonally, these are “eaten” and removed from the board, and must be replayed to the board in a subsequent turn. The first player to place all his 12 cannibals on the board is the winner.

I’ve chosen a more decorous theme for the Spoonbill Software version. The board is a garden divided into 7 by 7 plots and you plant flowers instead of cannibals! When you have rolled the dice, a butterfly flies up and down the column in which you must play. Apart from this obvious change in theme, the rules are identical to “Let’s Do Lunch”.

At the moment this game is in the very early Alpha stages. This means that it still does not have all the planned functionality and therefore cannot yet be released for beta testing. But it should still be released before March next year.

A Blast From The Past – No. 3

This is the third in a series of reminiscences from the early days of computers.

Last time I mentioned that we saved the maintenance engineers from having to turn out for trivial malfunctions in our Batch Terminal equipment. When we first took charge of the new Batch Terminal, the thing which most often went wrong was the card reader. One of the cards only had to be slightly bent and it would catch in the reader and get chewed up and jammed the feeding of following cards. At first, being new to this technology we used to phone up the engineer and wait for half an hour or so for him to turn up before the problem could be fixed and we could continue running jobs. With the card jam problem, all he did was to open up the card reader, pull out the offending card, clean the card path of any torn bits of cards, and the problem was fixed. Two of us were charged with the task of running the Batch Terminal, myself and another Ian, Ian Hyde. We watched what the engineer did and decided that if it happened again, we could fix the problem ourselves. This would have two beneficial effects, it would save the engineer having to waste an hour of his time to fix a 5-second problem and it would mean that we would have much less down time because we could fix it immediately. The two Ians quickly became known as I-squared Engineering. On many occasions we were able to fix a problem without the need for calling out the maintenance guy. If we couldn’t solve a problem, often the engineer could tell us what to do over the phone and so obviate the need for him to visit our office. He was very appreciative of this assistance.

Then came the day when one of the hammers on the line printer broke and the characters in that column failed to print. For those not familiar with line printers, let me explain. A line printer is so called because it prints a line at a time, not character by character like a typewriter or teleprinter. Ours printed lines 136 characters wide. This meant that there was a print drum with the complete character set in each of the 136 columns and a printer ribbon as wide as the printed page. Above each character position was a metal hammer, 136 hammers in all, one for each column. The print drum containing the printable characters revolved at some fantastic rate and the hammers were electronically timed to hit the correct character as it whizzed past the hammer. This is why on a line printer output you would often see characters slightly out of alignment being either too high or too low due to a slight mistiming of the hammer blow. It was an amazing piece of engineering for its time and amazing that it even worked at all. It was very fast, printing out hundreds of lines per minute.

But as I said, we noticed that one character position wasn’t printing out at all and upon inspection found that this was due to a broken hammer. Closer inspection revealed that although 136 hammers were needed for printing, there were actually 140 hammers and 140 printing positions on the print drum. We concluded that as the four end hammers weren’t being used for printing, if we exchanged the broken hammer for one of the unused hammers, we could get printing again in all 136 columns without the need for calling out the maintenance engineer. We could see that the hammers were held in place by a bar which went across the full width of the printer and this was held down with a series of screws. All we had to do was to remove the screws, lift off the bar to get access to the hammers, swap the broken hammer for an unused hammer and screw the bar back into position again. Easy, hey? Once again I-squared Engineering to the rescue!

The screws came out easily enough and as we removed the last screw and lifted off the retaining bar, all hell broke loose! Unbeknown to us (we hadn’t been on an approved line printer maintenance training course – we were just flying by the seat of our pants) each hammer was associated with a tiny spring which returned the hammer to its non-striking position. When we lifted the retaining bar all 140 springs leapt into the air and rained down onto the floor and more worryingly into the depths of the printer which contained all sorts of electrical wiring and circuitry! Our hearts sank! For several seconds, which seemed more like minutes, we stood there dumbfounded! Then we came to our senses. So first of all we switched off the printer (a wise precaution) and started picking up the springs, but we were way short on numbers. More springs than we had hoped had fallen into the printer itself. We managed to retrieve many of these but some were out of reach without disassembling the printer further, which we were very loath to do. What should we do? There was no way we were going to get everything back together again without a bit of expert help, so reluctantly we called in our maintenance engineer. We explained what had happened and why we did what we did, and with the help of some specialist tools including a magnetic screwdriver (which we didn’t have) he managed to retrieve all of the springs. He had brought along a new print hammer to replace the broken one and was then able to reassemble the printer so that it performed as good as new.

The engineer then told us that an event like this would normally have voided our maintenance contract, but due to the fact that we had helped him out on numerous occasions in the past, he was prepared to forget it ever happened, provided that we promised not to do something like that ever again. So everything turned out all right in the end and the amicable relationship between I-squared Engineering and the Batch Terminal maintenance engineer continued to flourish.

Merry Christmas

It only remains for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you to the many people who have helped me beta test my programs throughout the year and thank you to all of you who have given me suggestions for new games although I can only hope to bring a small fraction of these to fruition. Happy gaming over the Christmas/New Year period and I’ll catch you all again next year (2009).

Ian Humphreys

Spoonbill Software

Albany, Western Australia