ONEWS - older news about the MyMan video game
Copyright 1997-2003, Benjamin C. Wiley Sittler <bsittler@gmail.com>


        NOTE: !!! LICENSE CHANGE !!!

        MyMan is no longer in the public domain. It is now distributed
        under a BSD-style license (see LICENSE for details.)


The following text is known to be out of date; see README and
ChangeLog for more recent information.

...

Myman - Updated Holiday Revenge Release [2000.03.04]
In technicolor, and in new places too...

UPDATES? WHAT UPDATES?!?

Wow, it's been over a year since the last release! MyMan hasn't
changed a whole lot, but the contact information needed updating. The
official MyMan home is now:

   http://geocities.com/bsittler/#myman

My new email address is at the end of this file.

Also, a color theme for the "ctheme" package is now included. See

   http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=2640

for more on ctheme. The ctheme file for MyMan is 'myman.ct'. You can
use ctheme on the Linux console, or in a color xterm.

Finally, binaries for DJGPP and Linux (libc5/libc6) are included.

The MyMan source is still in the public domain.

...

MyMan - Holiday Revenge Release [1998.12.18]
The spectral menace becomes more... er... menacing.

A new version of MyMan (like The Yellow Fellow) has just been released.

BACKGROUND (NOISE)

  "Those scary ghosts are back, and this time they've spotted
   you! What's worse is that they've mistaken you for their old
   rival Pac, and they're out for (yellow) blood!"

(LACK OF) COPYRIGHT AND (NONRESTRICTIVE) LICENSE

This release of MyMan is in the public domain. Do with it as you wish.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

MyMan is a fast-paced video game for terminals and terminal emulations
supporting cursor addressing and asynchronous input. It supports color,
pitiful sound (beeps, really), and keyboard input. Arrow keys are
supported where the curses implementation makes that trivial to implement.
It runs at full speed on a P120 under Linux. It probably works on slower
machines, and certainly works on faster machines.

MyMan is generally more demanding than vi, rogue, or pine. If MyMan
seems to be running slowly, try the '-d 0' command-line parameter.

Some platforms MyMan compiles and runs on:

Linux/x86 + ncurses
Linux/ppc + ncurses
SunOS 4/sun4m + SysV curses
Cygwin32 B19 + ncurses
DJGPP 2 + PDcurses

MyMan has been tested with a wide variety of terminals and terminal
emulators. The '-o' option sometimes improves the appearance of power
pellets.

WHERE TO GET IT

The latest version is listed on:

   http://geocities.com/bsittler/#myman

For your sanity, I encourage you to download directly, though:

   http://geocities.com/bsittler/myman.tgz

The Holiday Revenge Release is a gzip'd tarball including the source,
data files, and two scripts for running MyMan in color under the X
Window System ('xmyman' uses color xterm, 'xmyman2' uses rxvt.)

SCREEN-SHOTS

A screen-shot demonstrating 'xmyman2' in full color is online for your
viewing pleasure:

   http://www.nmt.edu/~bsittler/images/myman.png

It's a 418x474-pixel PNG and it's less than 10 kilobytes.

There's also a larger screen-shot demonstrating the 5x2-character tiles and
7x3-character sprites:

   http://www.nmt.edu/~bsittler/images/myman2.png

It's an 888x714-pixel PNG and it's less than 19 kilobytes.

COLOR FOR (SOME) VT100 EMULATORS

There's a spiffy new underline-the-maze mode (-u or the 'u' key during
play) which underlines all maze wall characters. This is useful if you
have a terminal emulator which doesn't do full ANSI-style color, but does
allow you to set the color used to display the underline attribute. 
In this way you can still get a blue maze if you can configure your
terminal to display "underlined" text in blue. Setting bold text to
display in yellow is also nice, since MyMan is drawn in bold.

FONT

Other changes include slight improvements in maze drawing (no more '?'s
for any of the supplied mazes, I think) and ghost intelligence (they
actually see fit to follow you from time to time.) The ghosts are now
depicted using 'A' instead of 'M' when they're scared, so it's easier to
tell when they've stopped "flashing" even on a monochrome terminal.

ETERM

By the way, I *highly* suggest running MyMan in an Eterm with a background
of your choice (I find 'Neopolis' very appropriate.) Make sure to set TERM
to something appropriate (like 'xterm-color' or 'color_xterm',) and you'll
see why I like this combination: the maze background is solid black, but
outside the maze the background pixmap is visible. It looks like some sort
of high-tech virtual arcade machine, if you ignore the fact that MyMan is
running in text-mode.

A color xterm (such as that shipped with recent versions of XFree)
also works rather well, but it doesn't support background pixmaps.

"MY NAME IS BEN, AND I'M A LINUX ADDICT... "

One last piece of questionable advice: on a Linux machine with MyMan
installed as '/bin/myman', you should be able to skip all that
annoying overhead and get straight to the action by booting the Linux
kernel with the following boot parameter:

init=/bin/myman

This has only been tested on a single system, but it seemed to work fine.
(If you are annoyed with the low-res 80x25 default VGA resolution, use
 the vga=ask parameter too.)

AUTHOR

bsittler <bsittler@gmail.com>

   http://geocities.com/bsittler/
