1SNIPES(6) Games Manual SNIPES(6)
2
6 snipes - a text maze game
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9 snipes [-cdsx] [-jkqv] [level]
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12 snipes is a single-player text-mode action game in which the object is
13 to wander a maze killing evil smiley face characters (the "snipes") and
14 the hives which create them. Of course, the snipes try to kill you at
15 the same time.
16 The level argument is of the form [A-Z][1-9]. The alphabetic character
18 specifies characteristics of the level, such as whether or not diagonal
19 shots bounce off the walls. The numeric character specifies the level
20 of difficulty. More details in the LEVELS section below.
21 Use the grey arrow keys to move and the keys a, s, d, and w to fire.
23 (This works best with a QWERTY layout, of course.) You can move diago‐
24 nally by pressing a combination of one vertical movement key with one
25 horizontal movement key simultaneously and a similar approach will
26 allow you to fire diagonally. Holding the space bar makes you move
27 faster. CTRL-C is quit.
28 While running snipes on the console (not in X) you will be unable to
30 switch VTs. Pressing CTRL-Z will suspend the raw keyboard mode (re-
31 enabling VT switching) until you press Enter.
32 Jenny scrolling is named after a friend who suggested it. While it
34 makes the screen less flickery, it's a little hard to deal with IMHO.
35 DISPLAY TARGET OPTIONS
38 -c Use ncurses(3X).
39 -d Use doublewide font hack with ncurses(3X).
41 -s Use svgalib(7).
43 -x Use X Window System.
45 GENERAL OPTIONS
48 -j Use Jenny scrolling mode.
49 -k Force keyboard to use safe (non-raw) mode (only with
51 ncurses(3X) display target).
52 -q Quiet mode: do not play sound effects.
54 -v Display version number and exit.
56
59 There are three hives for levels 1->4, four hives for 5->8 and 5 hives
60 for level 9. The maximum number of sprites for each difficulty level
61 is 10, 25, 40, 55, 70, 90, 110, 130 and 150.
62 The level letter determines which features are enabled:
64 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
67 **** **** ****** walls deadly
68 ******** ** walls can be destroyed
69 * * * * * * * * * * * *** ghosts
70 ** ** ** ** ** **** bouncy shots
71
74 Novell NetWare 2.x came with a pair of "network testing utility" pro‐
75 grams (games) called nsnipes and ncsnipes. nsnipes worked on mono‐
76 chrome displays while ncsnipes worked on color displays. The networked
77 Novell version was based on a single player version made by SuperSet
78 Software, called either hsnipes or just snipe. snipes is a from-
79 scratch reimplementation and shares no code with the Novell or SuperSet
80 games.
81
84 The snipes are pretty stupid about where they go and when and where
85 they shoot.
86 In the DOS version, vertical movement is slowed down so that it seems
88 to be about the same speed as horizontal movement. This program cur‐
89 rently does not do that.
90 In the DOS version, diagonal shots don't travel exactly diagonally.
92 The deltaX values change in the pattern {2, 2, 3, 2, 3}. See weapons.c
93 for more detail. This program currently uses deltaX=1.
94 The X Window version of snipes is extremely slow.
96 The fact that snipes uses raw keyboard mode makes bugs somewhat more
98 problematic than they would be otherwise. The remainder of this sec‐
99 tion describes how to minimize problems. Note that this section does
100 not apply if you use the X Window System display target because that
101 target does not have these problems.
102 Different types of computers have different keyboard scancode mappings.
104 In order to deal with this, the dumpkeys program is used to determine
105 the keyboard mapping at run-time. If the mapping can not be loaded
106 from dumpkeys for any reason, raw keyboard mode will be unavailable.
107 If snipes crashes, the keyboard may be left in raw mode. In that case,
109 the console will be unusable: you will not be able to switch VTs and
110 when you type, garbage will probably appear on the screen. Recent ver‐
111 sions of snipes should be good at preventing this, but you can be extra
112 safe by running it like so:
113 snipes; kbd_mode -a; stty sane; reset
115 After snipes runs, even if it terminates by crashing, the subsequent
117 three commands will run. Note that the last two restore some screen
118 settings which may also be incorrect.
119 If snipes hangs for some reason, it's harder to get things fixed. If
121 you're on a network, you can always log in remotely and kill the snipes
122 process ("killall snipes" should do.) There are other things you can
123 do without having to log in remotely, however. One is to set up gpm(1)
124 (the cut and paste utility for virtual consoles) to be able to execute
125 commands for you when you use certain combinations of mouse clicks.
126 The command I use in my startup scripts looks like:
127 gpm -t $MOUSETYPE -S '/usr/bin/killall -9
129 snipes;/usr/bin/kbd_mode -a::'
130 See the man page for gpm(1) for more information on how this works. In
132 short, it lets you kill snipes and restore the keyboard using a special
133 sequence of mouse button clicks. If you use this method, you will want
134 to make sure you use whatever path is appropriate on your system for
135 the killall(1) and kbd_mode(1) programs.
136 Finally, recent versions of the Linux kernel have support for some
138 "magic" SysRq key commands. If you have compiled your kernel with this
139 enabled, pressing Alt-SysRq-R will change the keyboard translation mode
140 back to "cooked".
141
144 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/vga.pcf
145 Screen font for X display. Provided with dos(1).
146 /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/snipes.psf
148 Screen font for doublewide font hack.
149
152 ncurses(3X), svgalib(7), dumpkeys(1), dos(1).
153
156 snipes was written by Jeremy Boulton, with some help from John Meacham
157 on the X Window System programming.
158 3 June 1999 SNIPES(6)