This is Pentagon, a board game for two players.
Copyright 1999 by Mario Becroft.

License: this program is freeware and, as such, may be distributed freely 
provided that the original archive is distributed complete and in 
unmodified form. This program may not, however, be distributed as part of 
or together with any product that is being sold on a commercial basis 
without the permission of the author.


ABOUT THE GAME

Pentagon is a game for two players. The players may be situated locally 
using a single copy of the program running on a single machine, or remotely 
using two copies of the program running on separate machines connected via 
a network.

There is a good description of the game in the online help, so the rest of 
the manual is largely a duplicate of that information.

Pentagon is a game for two players.
Players may be situated locally taking
turns at the computer. Alternatively two
copies of the game running on separated
machines may be connected via TCP to
enable playing the game against a remote
player.

The board on which the game is played is
composed of a grid of 5 by 5 spaces.
Players take turns to push tiles onto the
board from the edges. Existing tiles are
moved along the board to make way for new
tiles. When a row or column is filled with
tiles it becomes fixed in place. However
tiles composing the fixed line may still
be moved at right angles to the direction
of the line.

The winner is the first player to achieve
a row of 5 tiles of his colour
horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

If the whole board becomes filled with
tiles before a winner has been declared
a draw is the result and no player wins.

User input is via the mouse, which when
clicked near the edges of the board
pushes a tile on from the selected point.

Network operation:

Once connected a peer-to-peer relationship
exists between two programs running on
separated machines. However initially,
one program must wait for an incoming
connection (with the Listen option) while
the remote program connects (with the
Connect option, after entering the remote
hostname or IP address). For a connection
to be established, both copies of the
program must utilise the same port, by
default 13014.

Once a connection is established, the
state of the game at either end of the
connection will always be maintained the
same, and the game can simply be played
in the usual way.

Players can communicate by typing messages
which will appear in the console at the
bottom of the window. Game related
messages also appear here.

If the connection is very poor, time out
errors may be indicated. This does not
necessarily indicate a fatal condition
but generally no errors should be
observed

I would like to hear from anyone who plays the game, and you can contact me 
at the addresses given below. Alternatively, I am sometimes seen on the 
#atari or #atariscne IRC channels (nick name Mario) and I will always be 
happy to play a game of Pentagon :-)


DISPLAY STYLES

A system is in place to allow various graphics styles to be used with 
Pentagon. A default style is included which will be used if none other is 
selected. While the game is running a style may be chosen with the Style 
option in the control panel or the File menu. A style consists of a 
directory with several graphics files in it. To select the style, select 
any of the files in the directory. Users may design their own styles by 
copying the said files to a new directory and editing them. To make a style 
load by default, copy the contents of the style directory to the main 
pentagon directory.

The standard style included with the program has a rocky background with 
round tiles. It will not look very good in 16 colour mode but comes out 
well with 256 colours or more.


NETWORKING AND MINTNET

The networking features of Pentagon require MiNTnet or something 
compatible. I have received an enquiry about supporting IConnect. 
Unfortunately I contacted the author of IConnect who informed me that there 
is no library available for using IConnect with GCC. Therefore I cannot 
support IConnect without a lot of work. The same applies to STiK/STiNG.


CONTACTING THE AUTHOR

Mario Becroft, the author of Asteroids may be contacted at the following
addresses: 
 
Email: mb@gem.win.co.nz 
WWW: http://gem.win.co.nz/ 
Telephone: +64 9 412 9700 
Post: 
P.O. Box 332 
Kumeu 
Auckland 1250 
NEW ZEALAND 
