Stratego (Mac OS Classic)

Stratego
Developer: Ken McLeod Publisher: Accolade Platform: Mac OS Classic Released in US: 1990 This game has hidden developer credits. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has revisional differences.

"I'll take TWO LISTS IN ONE for four hundred."

"Quadris, Omega, Stratego."

"What are three video games and three fungicides."

"Yes! Select again."

Hidden Credits

Holding Command + Option while selecting "About Stratego..." will bring up Ken McLeod's personal about box:

• The starflight background animation—not shown above—paid homage to THINK's LightspeedC, which was used to develop the game. (Hence, Overture in C.)
• Blue Cloud Software was McLeod's identity as a one-man developer.
• Jerry Pape was a fan of the initial freeware Stratego, which McLeod ceased distributing when he heard of other board games' rights holders starting to crack down on unauthorized adaptations. Pape called McLeod out of the blue, offering to help turn the software into a licensed product by making use of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things (i.e., his connections at Accolade).

(Source: Ken McLeod)

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: According to Ken, "There were a few other key combinations that did interesting things, but I don't remember exactly what they were."

Revision History

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: What changed in version 1.1.1?

Version 1.1 shipped with a changelog:

Stratego 1.1 Features & Changes 3/25/91 Improved computer opponent A number of modifications have been made to the game strategy algorithms to improve the computer's playing ability. These changes fall into two main areas: Flag Protection: more attention is paid to keeping an appropriate defensive piece close to an enemy piece which is in attacking range of the computer's flag. Attack Groups: groups of pieces are defined as a unit to attack a fixed area, so that "support" pieces will be moved along with "attack" pieces. Previously, pieces would act individually in response to tactical goals, resulting in generally uncoordinated movement by many pieces across the board. Support for Macintosh IIsi and LC Added 3 small game boards and "original" piece set for the new 12" color monitors, and fixed board & piece selection dialogs to enable color options. Changed user preferences code to save separate board/piece/pattern settings for color and b&w modes. Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the wrong size piece set and game board to be used on 12" monitors. Modified window centering algorithm to correctly place windows on monitors smaller than 640x480. Fixed a bug that caused piece drawing to be clipped in showdown situations, when a piece on the edge of the board extended outside the boundary of the game board window. Improved color support All game graphics are now dithered when in 4 or 16 color modes, if 32-Bit QuickDraw is present. This results in much better looking screens. (32-Bit QuickDraw is included in current releases of the System software for the Macintosh II, IIx, and IIcx; later machines in the "II series" have it in ROM.) "Windoid"-style windows (the piece box and statistics box) are now drawn using the system window colors, rather than being forced to black & white. Likewise, popup menus in the board and piece selection dialogs are now drawn in the system menu colors. Pop-up palettes for background pattern and color selection now work correctly. Improved online help The online help code has been modified to take advantage of Styled TextEdit. Topic headings and various keywords now appear in boldface or underline type. Graphics compression The game boards, piece sets, splash screens, and other graphics are now stored in a compressed format (standard LZW encoding), and decompressed "on the fly" as needed. In most cases, the compressed graphics take up to 50% less space than the uncompressed versions. Single-disk demo The demonstration version of Stratego now fits on the second disk with the Color Data 2 file. Disk 2 can be used by itself as a demonstration disk, since all color graphics needed by the demo version reside in Color Data 2, and all sounds used in the demo are stored within the demo program itself.

Text Fragments

The first sector of the Stratego Help file contains some snippets of UI text from ResEdit.

Do you want to edit the font a

nt to discard changes to this resou

Do you really want to discard chan

Miscellaneous

The game's DITL resources are numbered sequentially from 100 to 140... except for the code wheel lookup dialog, which is DITL 666. A subversive little acknowledgment, one supposes, that copy protection is the devil. (McLeod notes that while the code wheel "clearly sucked", it was "progressive" compared to making the disk uncopyable.)