
[Very outdated -- should be rewritten...]


Some recommendations for more fun playing Rocks'n'Diamonds:
===========================================================

About sound
-----------
It is highly recommended to have a decent sound interface for playing
this game (although it only comes with bad-quality 8000-Hz-samples to
save memory and to be compatible with /dev/audio).

The best sound platform is an actual Linux system with (at least) kernel
1.2.x, because it offers some nice real-time sound features which are
needed to have background music loops in the game.

On all other systems you don't have music loops, but you still have all
the other sounds.


About game speed
----------------
You should have a relatively fast hardware.

The game was developed on a i486/33 (which is three years old now),
and you should probably better not try to run it on a slower system.

You should have an accelerated graphic card; I have found out that it
starts being playable on my 486/33 with an old ISA cirrus logic 5426
graphic card, which has a blitter that is supported by XFree86[tm],
but that it was nearly unplayable on a 486/66 with old, unaccelerated
ET4000.

If all works fine, you should have something around 30 frames per second.

If you think that the game is to slow to play, you should try out the
following things:

- Set "Buffered Gfx" to "off" in the setup menu. Normally (on a fast
  enough system) you should use buffered graphics, which means that
  all graphics is drawn into an invisible Pixmap and is then copied
  to the X11 window to avoid flickering. If you disable this double
  buffering, the graphic is directly drawn into the window. This can
  cause some slight flickering, but makes graphic operations roughly
  twice as fast compared to double buffering.

- Set "Game Music" to "off" in the setup menu (and maybe "sound loops"
  too). Where disabling buffered graphics may be required with slow
  graphics hardware, disabling sound is especially recommended on slow
  CPU systems (486/33 and slower), because the sound server eats up a
  significant amount of CPU time when playing long sounds.

You might also notice that bigger levels tend to be slower on slow
systems.

About the option "Fading" in the setup menu: It gives a nice looking
fading when switching to a new screen, but you should really only try
this out if you think that you have a very fast graphics hardware.


About music
-----------
The background music loops are ripped out from several nice music albums.
Just have a look at the info screen to find out from which album each
sound loop came from -- they are all very well done pieces of music, but
unfortunately they don't sound better after converting them to 8 kHz
samples (to conform to standard SUN /dev/audio). Maybe I change this to
a better quality in the future, but at the moment, where the sounds
directory has a size of nearly a megabyte, I'll stay with 8 kHz samples.

So, if you have a non-Linux system (which cannot play sound loops) or
don't like the "telephone quality" of the music loops, just get some of
these CDs and play them while your playing the game! ;-)


About game-play
---------------
It is *strongly recommended* to play this game with a high-quality joystick.
That means, throw your $10 joystick out of the window and buy a decent
Competition-Pro Digital PC joystick or a high-quality CH Products Analog
joystick. Believe me, it doubles the fun of playing the game.

If you only have a normal Unix system (and no fine Linux system), you
are forced to play with the keyboard. It works, but is not only less fun,
but also more difficult with some levels, because you cannot move in
diagonal directions with keyboard control at the moment. Another bad thing
is that you will have some problems when pressing many keys at the same
time. This might change in the future, when I implement a better keyboard
handling which not only solves these problems but allows diagonal directions,
too.

