intvnut

I used the CONTACT ME link on your website I wanted to reply to this post specifically for the benefit of everyone publicly: David discovered yesterday that the (Contact Me) button was broken for the last month or more, which is why emails to that address went unanswered. This has since been corrected, and he's digging through the backlogged email. Chances are, if you sent something via that method that needed a response, David has gotten back to you already by now. I know I received several backlogged requests. Please accept our apologies. Also, you can always feel free to email me directly at i n t v n u t AT g m a i l DOT c o m. I still have nothing. Could you email me directly then with your order information?

There's also the INTVPROG Yahoo group, though it's pretty slow also. I'm not much of a "forum" person myself. I generally operate entirely over email. Arnauld Chevallier and myself seem to be the most active Inty guys right now.

Now keep in mind, my brother (or father) and I tended to play maximum turn length for maximum number of turns. The strategy I follow: Plant lots of crops early in the game and get a fishing boat. During your "down time" in a turn, pass the time chasing fish. After a couple turns, buy a factory. In a couple more buy a house. Always replenish crops as they die but only EARLY in a turn. (It helps to know the rainy areas are if you have to pick where to put crops.) Keep an eye on your census and try to keep 1 house for every 500 people in the long run. In the short run, it's ok to be behind by one house though for a couple of turns. In the beginning it's ok to be behind by two or more, but not for more than a dozen turns. I try to keep a ratio of house : factory : school : hospital of around 1 : 1.3 : 0.5 : 0.25 That is... for every 1 hospital, have around 4 houses, 2 schools, and 5 or 6 factories. Tweak to suit personal preference. And with spare cash, keep buying up fishing boats, and keep your spare land full of crops. Boats net you 1 gold bar per turn if you do NOTHING with them, so if you buy one with more than 25 turns left in the game, it's pure profit. Forts: They protect the 8 squares that abut them. Once you have a few fishing boats, put one on a piece of land that juts out so that most of those squares are in the water, and practice parking fishing boats around them. That'll prevent pirates from nabbing your fleet. NOTE: Do *not* use the tips of the islands that point toward each other along the central channel. That's hurricane alley. As you develop your island, you'll probably notice what areas are most likely to get rain. As you develop, put houses, factories, hospitals, schools, etc. on the NON-rainy areas, and try to keep crops on the rainy areas. As you build up, you will have fewer and fewer crop areas as the game progresses. In a longer game, you will end up with none. Therefore, make sure to keep at least a few fishing boats to ensure your people stay fed. (1 per 500). Of course, once you start running a surplus, you can start buying fleets of fishing boats with ease. If you play a REALLY long game, you can start to line the borders of the screen with PT boats and try to keep the pirates out. It mostly works. That should help get you started. Oh, and a fun fact. If you get really good at it, you'll discover the game has numeric overflow issues. If you play a large number of turns with a long turn length and your round score gets around 93, don't be surprised if your score drops precipitously at some point and you get a rebel. As best I can tell it's some internal score variable overflowing. You need to have like 30 or more fishing boats, a bunch of PT boats, a couple hospitals, tons of houses, schools and factories and no room for crops.

I used the CONTACT ME link on your website I wanted to reply to this post specifically for the benefit of everyone publicly: David discovered yesterday that the (Contact Me) button was broken for the last month or more, which is why emails to that address went unanswered. This has since been corrected, and he's digging through the backlogged email. Chances are, if you sent something via that method that needed a response, David has gotten back to you already by now. I know I received several backlogged requests. Please accept our apologies. Also, you can always feel free to email me directly at i n t v n u t AT g m a i l DOT c o m.

jzIntv does work on a Mac, but only if you care to run it from the command line. Actually, that's true on all of the platforms jzIntv runs on, mainly because I'm not GUI oriented. Arnauld Chevallier once put together a GUI front end for it, but I don't know the status on that. I do tweak jzIntv from time to time. I've been meaning to push out a final 1.0. Maybe now that Space Patrol is shipped I'll have time to do that. Space Patrol swamped me the last year and a half in terms of wrangling releases. Unfortunately I am new to Mac, so I don't know very much about the command line. Is there a manual somewhere how to get started? I don't know of many Mac specific resources. The command line is very little different than BSD UNIX. John Tanner had started to GUI-ify jzIntv, but that stalled and is largely dead. Perhaps sometime I should get a faster Mac so I can sit down and make a proper Xcode application around jzIntv. *sigh*

4-Tris is not being shipped yet--it's those bloody boxes, they're still being made. I'll let everyone know it's about to ship about 3 days after I've shipped them all (instead of when I begin shipping them). ;) Don't worry, 4-Tris orders are not forgotten. As the original order button said, they're shipping separately.

FYI, all remaining unshipped orders for Space Patrol (at least that I'm aware of) will be shipped as of my trip to the post office later this morning, save for three that I'm waiting for add'l information from the purchasers on. Shipping confirmation on all orders should have gone out to the email addresses I received payment from. (So, if your PayPal has a different address than the one you usually use, go check that account. That's where I've been sending my confirmation emails.) If you've ordered (or think you've ordered) and haven't yet received a "shipping confirmation" email from me with tracking info, please email me directly at i n t v n u t AT g m a i l DOT c o m. The "Contact Me" button on David's "Bees Life" site goes to David, not me.

jzIntv does work on a Mac, but only if you care to run it from the command line. Actually, that's true on all of the platforms jzIntv runs on, mainly because I'm not GUI oriented. Arnauld Chevallier once put together a GUI front end for it, but I don't know the status on that. I do tweak jzIntv from time to time. I've been meaning to push out a final 1.0. Maybe now that Space Patrol is shipped I'll have time to do that. Space Patrol swamped me the last year and a half in terms of wrangling releases.

I used the CONTACT ME link on your website Ok, that went to David. I guess he hadn't forwarded it to me. At any rate, I believe you should have a DC# in your inbox at the moment.

Howdy. Who did you send the email to? If you sent it to me, I never received it. If you sent it to David, he may not have forwarded it to me yet. FWIW, all remaining shipments (except a couple that have address or other specific issues) will be going out tomorrow morning. Those of you who haven't received a shipping confirmation email by tomorrow morning should contact me directly by email, since your order might not have gotten to me for some reason. (There was at least one instance of this where someone thought the PayPal had gone through and it hadn't.) I've been shipping continuously since I got the boxes in, averaging about 10 units a day when you divide the ~200 units by ~3 weeks I've been at it. About 40% of my orders were to locations outside the US, and those have considerable extra documentation. I also packed them extra thoroughly, which slowed things down also. Oliver helped offload the EU shipping, but I still had to handle Canada, Australia, Mexico and Japan. Otherwise it's pretty much just been a one man show here. (Well, my wife did cut some bubble wrap for me and test boards for me, for which I'm thankful.) PS. I forgot to checkmark "enable email notification of replies" to this, so folks, if you have questions, please email me. i n t v n u t AT g m a i l DOT c o m

You beat me to it! Yes, go preorder now! :-) For those who missed it, here's the announcement that went out earlier this evening: ---- It all started with Baseball, which is considered to be one of the best titles ever made for the Intellivision. After Mattel Electronics shut down, INTV continued producing great games like Body Slam with beautiful box artwork. Continuing in this great tradition, Left Turn Only (LTO) has produced Space Patrol. The incredible box artwork hints at what's to come. As you plug in the cartridge and play it the first time, you'll experience the rush of playing Intellivision for the first time, again. This is SPACE PATROL! We spared no expense by obtaining only best quality materials. The box feels just like the boxes Mattel produced in the 80s, with a solid cart retaining system. Each box includes a serial number (on a holographic security label) to ensure authenticity. Also included are high quality color overlays and a complete color manual. LTO proudly announces Space Patrol, available for pre-ordering today. Each package includes cartridge, box, manual and overlays. As a bonus, LTO is offering its own updated version of 4-Tris, available in limited quantities to those who purchase Space Patrol. Space Patrol is scheduled to ship no later than the end of January. 4-Tris will ship by the end of February. Place your order early at http://www.beeslife.com/intvgames/spacepat...spacepatrol.php Thank you, The LTO team (Joe Zbciak, David Harley, and Arnauld Chevallier)