More Pre-Beta 3 news.

Okay, BETA3 is nearing.

- Help and instructions for the games are included in a basic form (basically a text file printed to the screen). In later versions I may include further windows with general controls and pretty graphics, but for the moment, you can press "Help" under the Pause menu and you get the snippet from PUZZLES_QUICKSTART.TXT that I wrote for the first beta. The text files are editable and once BETA 3 is out, people are welcome to submit an explanation for any game that they think they can explain better (Plain text, 60-columns max, 20 lines max, don't use spaces or tabs for ASCII art).

- Game configurability is in, again in a basic form and I'm working on making it prettier without adding more rubbish into the executables (Unicode dingbats and the Deja Vu font are helping a lot!). All three types of option work ("string", or selecting a number, "boolean", ticking true/false, and "choose", selecting from a dropdown list of predefined options). You can configure all the games but sometimes a particular game has too many options and one or two go off the bottom of the screen ("net" is one culprit - you can edit size, difficulty etc. but not an option on the very bottom), and sometimes you have to select a "probability", between 0 and 1 - that's a pain that I have to manually detect and counteract on a per-game basis (Yuck!). But you can quite happily play and configure virtually all the games to your heart's content. I'll probably leave the fix for the "off-the-bottom" options until another BETA because it requires a revamp of the menuing system.

- Pause menu, which has taken the functionality of New Game and Restart Game out of the Start/Select keys to stop accidents. This is also where configuration, help, etc. can be accessed without affecting the game. If someone has a nice FREE (as in Creative Commons or better) background that would work with black or white text over it, I'd look into the possibility of using that as the pause menu background.

- Background colours have been tweaked ever so slightly. Most people probably won't even see the difference.

- CPU usage is reduced, but you may not notice because it's in areas that don't affect display. I'm hoping to clock down the GP2X quite low when it's on the Pause menu and when the game isn't doing anything (i.e. no animation timer activated, no clicks received) in order to save people's battery life.

- Executable size is significantly reduced. The games are about 50% of the size of previous Beta's with no loss of functionality or visible increase of startup speed. This saves about 15 or more Mb of the size of the total collection when put onto the GP2X, but you won't notice a difference in the already-ZIP'ed download size.

- Patched a couple of possible memory leaks/segfaults that were plaguing post-Beta-2 versions.

I've got a few more prettifying things to do, but I have these on my own GP2X F-100 that I take to work every day and they are very solid and the configuration works really well.