You tried it, and it doesn't work!

But what exactly went wrong? To know, you'd have to campare with what happens when it works correctly.

Here is what should ideally happen:

  1. On the web page, there should be a button that says "Play Game".
  2. If you press it, a "Runtime Diagnostics" window should appear, and a bunch of text should appear in it as files are loaded from the web site. For the curious, here is the text that should appear:
  3. The main Space Jewels window should appear, with a blob in the middle that says "Click to Continue". ((the gratuitous mouse click is required to overcome a problem in Microsoft Internet Explorer))
  4. If you click, the blob should go away.
  5. You should be able to see your white ship in the middle of the screen, and three stars with text around them.
  6. The stars should be pulsating, two green and one blue.
  7. You should be able to turn your ship with the arrow keys.
  8. You should be able to thrust with the spacebar. The ship stays in the middle of the screen -- the other stuff should start moving.
  9. You should be able to fly around until you hit a green star. (The stars are really wormholes.)
  10. When you hit a green wormhole, it should get huge and shake, then suddenly disappear.
  11. When the wormhole disappears, your ship should suddenly be realigned to point straight up.
  12. A bunch of jewels should come out of the middle (from under your ship), like that flying-through-space screensaver.
  13. The jewels should all suddenly stop, and they will start changing color in unison. The upper right corner of the window should show your decreasing amount of time left.
  14. You should be able to fly your ship around and collect jewels.
  15. If you click on the window (or select a different window), the game should pause and you should get the "Click to Continue" blob. Clicking again should resume the game.
  16. If you collect all the jewels, the wormhole should change from blue to green so you can enter it. But if you're new at this, your time will run out first, and the wormhole will turn red and suck you in. Either way, you'll travel back through the wormhole to the multi-wormhole place.
  17. If you've gotten this far, it's probably working!

Known "Platform, Failure Mode" Table

Windows 95 Netscape 4.03 works
Windows 95 Internet Explorer 3.0 works
Windows NT 4 Netscape 3.04 doesn't get to step 4,
diagnostics window: "game destroyed"
Linux Netscape 4.07 10/25/98: works
Linux (red hat, X-windows, 8-bit color, 800 x 600) Netscape 4.05 10/24/98: stars disappear at step 8
Linux Netscape 3.01 doesn't get to step 1
Power Mac G3, MacOS 8.1 Netscape 4.06 works

Can you contribute a new row for this table?

Send me the info, and I'll let you know as soon as it might be fixed.

Matthew Cook