MAX Rally - Fortress © 1998 --------------------------- Getting Started --------------- MAX Rally can be loaded by simply inserting disk one into any drive, and rebooting your Amiga. After a while, you will be asked for disk two. Replace the first disk with the second and you will then be able to play MAX Rally. If you have a hard-drive, and at least 3 Meg of memory, you can install MAX Rally by double-clicking on the 'HD-Install' icon on disk 1. To play the installed version of MAX Rally, simply make sure there are no MAX Rally disks inserted into any disk- drives, and double click on the 'MAX' icon in the directory to which you installed it. The Main Menu's --------------- When you start MAX Rally, after you have gone through the title screens, you will be greeted with a list of options. The first one, 'Championship', enables you to play a one-player Championship against computer controlled opponents. The second, 'Multi-Player', allows between two and four players to play against each other, either in a link-up and/or split-screen race, or a full-screen battle, depending on the option set in the options menu. The fourth selection on the main menu takes you to the options menu. Here, you can change whether music is played or just sound effects, whether or not turbos are enabled, or whether multi-player games are races or battles. You can also configure individual character names. In the fifth, misc menu, you can view pre-recorded demos, or establish a link-up connection to another Amiga, for multi-player. Championship ------------ After selecting the 'Championship' option from the main menu, you will be asked to press accelerate. This is to inform MAX Rally of which control method you wish to use (see below for allowable control methods). After this, you will be given the opportunity to select the driver with which you wish to race. The names for these drivers can be customised in the options menu. When you have selected your driver, three other drivers will be automatically selected for you to race against. After this, you will be given a list of the available levels. The tracks and levels can be raced on in any order. Select which level on which you wish to race and you will be taken to the track selection screen. Here you can select one of the five tracks to race on. As you move the flashing selector over each track, an overview of the track will be shown, together with the current lap record for the track, and the difficulty, represented by a number of stars - the more stars, the more difficult the track is. After selecting a track, you can then race. In Championship, the human player always takes control of the blue car. Your aim is to simply finish first after 12 laps. If you fail to do this, you will lose one of your continues, and will have to re- attempt the track. You do not have to re-attempt the same track right away, but you can race another track first and then re- attempt it later. If you manage to finish first, you will not be able to race on that track again. When all tracks have been completed, you have completed the MAX Rally Championship. If you lose all five continues before completing all tracks, then you will have to re-attempt the whole of Championship from the beginning. One of the levels in Championship is the Max Challenge. On these five tracks, the screen moves independently of the car, scrolling continuously. For this level, you are the only car on the track, and your aim is to complete three laps without either falling off the edge of the track, or disappearing off the side of the screen. In some cases, there are moving platforms that will transport your car across an area of space. Also, there are several flashing red pads scattered across the track. When these are driven over, they are switched off, and stop flashing. When you reach the end of the lap, or the lap half-way point where the screen reverses direction, you will find a blue pad. If this is not lit, you have not switched off all the red pads, and will have to do an extra lap each time this happens. If you have managed to turn off all the red pads, the blue lap pad will be lit, and this must be switched off, again by driving over it, in order to complete the lap. When this is done, all the red pads are lit up again, and must be switched off in order to complete another lap. If you manage to do the whole track in the minimum three laps, in other words, without missing a pad, you will gain an extra continue. Multi-Player Battle ------------------- If the Race/Battle option is set to Battle in the options menu, then you will be able to play MAX Rally Battle against up to three other players. The idea of this is to race ahead of your opponents far enough so that they disappear off the screen. When a player disappears off the screen, he is temporarily out of the race. When there is only one player left, he wins a point, and all other players are placed back on the track. The first player to win five points wins the battle. The players are assigned to the cars in the following way:- Player 1 - Blue car Player 2 - Yellow car Player 3 - Green car Player 4 - White car Multi-Player Race ----------------- This is basically a race to the finish line. The number of laps depends on the settings in the options menu. If you only have one Amiga, or one copy of MAX Rally, you will only be able to play two player split screen. However, if you have a seperate copy of MAX Rally running on another Amiga, and a null-modem link-up cable between the two serial ports, you can choose to play link-up races by selecting 'Linkup' in the options menu. After you have done this, and link-up has been established, you will be given two-player link up and four-player link-up split- screen options in the multi-player menu (providing that 'Race' mode is selected in the options menu). Time-Trials ----------- Time trials can be raced either with one player, against previously set records, or up to four-players, against each other. Only one player races at a time, and therefore only one controller is used. However, each racer can still have his own driver. The aim is to race over however many laps are set in the options menu, and make a new lap record, ie., complete at least one of the laps in less time than any of the other players, or in less time than any previously set record. Control methods --------------- There are six allowable control methods available in MAX Rally. There are the four joysticks and two set's of keys. To be able to use all four joysticks, you will need a four-player joystick adapter in the parallel port. The two sets of keys are as follows:- Keyboard(1) Keyboard(2) Up/Accelerate Cursor Up Left Ctrl Down/Brake Cursor Down Left Shift Right Cursor Right Left Amiga Left Cursor Left Left Alt Select/Turbo Enter Space Other Info ---------- On each race, each player is given a single turbo. This boosts the speed and acceleration for a short period of time and is best used when your car is almost at a complete standstill. The turbo is activated by pressing either the Select key on the keyboard (see above) or up on the joystick. When jumping, sometimes it is possible to turn the car round almost a full 360 degrees in the air. When carried out correctly, this allows the car to skid round a bend after the jump at a greater speed than would otherwise be possible, and so you can gain over your oppenents. Use this with care though, as turning too much during a jump will cause you car to spin into a over-steer power-slide, which could be potentially fatal. Also during a jump, it is possible to tilt the nose of your car downwards, by holding down the brake button (brake cannot be activated in the air). This causes your car to land out of a jump quicker, and is useful on badly taken jumps, and on sharp bends. On the Cosmic tracks, sometimes it is possible for your car to fall over the edge. In time-trials, you are simply placed back on the track and allowed to continue. In Championship and Multi-Player however, once you fall off, you are not placed back on the track. In Championship, the race is lost, as is the case in Multi-Player race mode. In Multi-Player Battle mode, falling over the edge causes your car to be taken out of the race until the next point is won. On the Championship tracks, if you manage to lap all of the other cars by the time the race is over, you will gain an extra continue. In the misc menu, it is possible to load and save lap records to disk, or to hard-drive. This is useful for merging your friends fastest lap records with yours, so that you can attempt to beat them. For example, if you have a good record on a certain track, and your friend has a good record on another track, you can save his records out, and load them into your version of MAX Rally. This will replace all the track records that he was better on, and keep the ones where you have a better lap record. Troubleshooting --------------- Q. The selection bar in the options menu seems to be moving around on it's own, or I cannot move it properly with the joystick. A. Make sure you are not using the joystick plugged into the mouse port. This has been disabled until the 'Press Accelerate' screen to solve problems caused when the mouse is plugged in. Also, make sure that you don't have any input devices plugged into the parallel port, such as a sound sampler, as MAX Rally may confuse it for a four-player adapter. Q. I cannot run the hard-drive installed version of MAX-Rally, but it runs fine from disk. A. This may be because Workbench, and any other applications you may have running, are taking up chip Ram. Try closing all other programs before loading Max Rally. If that doesn't work, then you may be using a high-resolution screen, taking up memory that MAX Rally needs. If you really want the added speed of running MAX Rally from the hard drive then try this. Reboot your Amiga, and hold down both mouse buttons. Now select 'Boot with no startup-sequence', making sure there are no floppy disks in any of the drives. A grey screen with a large window should soon appear. Type in the following:- cd "MAX-Rally-directory/" execute "MAX Rally" pressing the enter key after each line. Replace the 'MAX-Rally-directory' with the full pathname where you installed MAX Rally to. If you are having problems with MAX Rally, and cannot solve it from what is mentioned here, then get in contact with us. For the quickest response, the best method of contacting us is by e-mail. Our address is at the end of this ReadMe file. Please remember to state your problem clearly, and give details of what hardware you have installed, and which Amiga you are using. Credits ------- Programmer:- Mark Williams Graphic Artist:- John Kearney Musician:- Matthew Byrne Fortress can be contacted as follows:- E-Mail - fortress@allcomm.co.uk Snail-Mail - 63 Thorneycroft Lane Fallings Park Wolverhampton WV10 0NF AnswerPhone - (01902) 654053 Visit our website at:- http://www.allcomm.co.uk/~fortress Fortress (C) 1998