Technical Info
System Requirements...
Colour is essential for Partickles, and a 256
colour display is probably the minimum required.
Partickles runs very smoothly on a 200MHz Pentium with 32MB of
RAM, so it should run adequately on slower processors and systems
with less memory. I would be grateful for emailed information
concerning the systems / configurations on which Partickles
won't and will run.
- You must have the main
Java classes on your system to run Partickles. They may be in a
directory such as: C:\WINDOWS\JAVA\CLASSES.
-
The browser version of Partickles is only suitable for Internet
Explorer 3 and 4 (see Issues below).
-
The online version of Partickles should work on all browsers and
systems. It only takes a couple of minutes to load and can then
be played offline.
-
There are two methods for downloading a version of Partickles that can
be used with all browsers and systems. These are the
"messy method" and the "email method"
(see Download page).
-
The stand-alone version of Partickles is for Windows 95 (98/NT?) only.
It is not suitable for Windows 3.x or non-Windows systems.
Issues...
There are no known bugs in the current version of Partickles.
Nevertheless, some Java "issues" have not completely gone away...
- There was a bug in early versions of Java regarding the positioning
of screen graphics. This has been cured in recent releases of Java,
making the bug-fixes of earlier applications appear to be bugs.
Partickles attempts to adjust - and additionally has a "re-align
board" option in the "Problem?" submenu to allow this to be done
manually.
- Java's support for audio files is weak (and practically
non-existent in early versions). This is why Partickles has a limit
of 250 moves per game (which is arbitrary - please let me know if it
is insufficient), and replaces "All Sounds" with the default of
"Some Sounds" after each game.
- Only Microsoft provides an adequate mechanism for packaging class
and resource files for distribution. This is why the browser
version of Partickles is limited to Internet Explorer. Sun has
the JAR format for packaging, and it's easy to jar up Partickles,
but the mechanisms for extracting resource files from jars will
only work with the latest browsers. Consequently it may be some
time before it is practical to adapt Partickles to use jars.
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