pongdeluxe manual

Your objective is keeping the glowing globe away from the blue energy walls. Do this by moving the square bumpers between the wall and the globe. If you succeed, your score will increase. But if you fail, the globe will hit the wall and your score will decrease. When the score has reached 0 and the globe hits the wall again, it will blow up and the game will start from the beginning.
The game can be played by 1, 2 or 3 players together on one PC (2 on the keyboard, one with the mouse ). CPU players are supported as well.

Pentium class CPU or better
3D card with DirectX 8 support (32 bit recommended)
Soundcard supported by DirectSound
Mouse

RETURN
activates the menu and selects menu items
ESC
leaves the menu and goes one step backwards
the cursor keys
select menu items and move the associated bumper
the mouse
moves the associated bumper
the w,a,d,s keys
can also move an associated bumper
the computer player
moves associated bumpers on its own
1,2,3,4
change the camera position and movement
P
pauses the game

You can activate the main menu at any time by pressing RETURN. It provides four options:

starts a new game with the current settings
toggles between the 4 views:
- 1: Center View. Camera is in the middle of the cube and rotates around itself. Provides most action.
- 2: Circle View. Camera is outside the cube and rotates around it
- 3: Target View. Camera moves outside the cube, always focusing the target point. Optimal for aiming the globe.
- 4: Front view. Camera is outside the cube and only turns towards the globe. Provides a good overview.
opens the options menu
leaves the game

The options menu provides the following settings:

/ /
determines the number of players controlling the bumpers
/ /
is the place where you can assign the control type of a certain player. You may assign the control to multiple players if you like, which is most useful in combination with the CPU control. The best configuration for a single player game is setting player 1 and 3 to the CPU and player 2 to the mouse.
correction can be applied here for brightening or darkening the screen
brings you back to the main menu

In the beginning you may find it difficult to control your bumpers. However, once you´re used to it you´ll see that your pads can be controlled well: No matter which view you use and which position the cube and the globe are in, the movement of the bumper is translated so that moving the mouse away from you will always move the bumper away from you, moving it up will move the bumper up and the same applies to left and right. The same translation is used with the keyboard as well.
In pongdeluxe, there are also 6 deluxe boni flying around and which can be collected by the bumper pads:

2 green boni. One will make you bumpers bigger for some time, making it easier to catch the globe. The other green one will slow the game down a bit.

2 red boni. One speeds the game up, the other shrinks your pad for a while.

The 2 blue boni are neutral: The less interesting one just gives you 10 additional points. But the other one, the pongcore boni spawns three globes out of one. If it is collected, you´ve got the chance to get more points by catching at least every second globe. The additional globes will disappear after 5 misses.

The release version has the following differences to the compo version:

pongcore bonus added
pause button added
automatic detection of best video mode instead of using the desktop colour depth
support for windowed mode and additional graphic cards
minifmod was replaced by BASS for better sound quality
endscroller made shorter
better graphic card compatibility and task-switching support

Some SoundBlaster PCI drivers do not support DirectSound hardware buffers correctly. This can be solved without a reboot by reducing the DirectSound acceleration in the DXDiag, Soundcard or DirectX control panel
pongdeluxe uses some complex blending features not supported properly by old drivers. If there are display bugs like missing objects, texture misplacements or wrong lighting, check if a better driver solves this
Mouse cursor is locked in windowed mode. Use ALT-TAB to switch to another window (this is done in order to improve the mouse support in windowed mode)

pongdeluxe was created for the Mekka & Symposium 2001 32k game competition by the following people:

.-= calculus =-.
ts@pongdeluxe.de

.-= typographics =-.

.-= audibles =-.

Special thank goes out to Jesus-Man for support.