Micro Mouse (c)1989 Mastertronic Loading instructions Put your machine into 48K mode. Type LOAD"" and press ENTER. The program will load and run automatically. Use the joystick to move around the tracks on the scrolling circuit board, pressing fire to place a patch over a damaged area. Alternatively use the keyboard: Q=UP, A=DOWN, O=LEFT, P=RIGHT and SPACE to FIRE. In an effort to save money, the powers that be have decided to use small robots to repair damage to the circuit boards of a huge supercomputer. there's no point, they reckoned, in sending highly trained service engineers to do a bit of basic soldering. Why not develop robots for that sort of work, they argued, and save the human engineers for the tricky stuff like making tea and talking about cricket scores? Rather than develop complicated intelligence programs for the soldier droids, it was decided to modify the behaviour of an elemental cyber brain - put in a robot under manual control, guide through a sequence of tasks manually, and eventually the brain will pick up what's needed and be capable of carrying out the tasks unsupervised. Step forward Soldier Robot Trainer, First Class. It's your job to train the cyber brain inside a prototype soldier robot. To make the task more amusing, you've disguised the little droid as a mouse, and trained three other cyber brain driven droids to emulate the ravages of time and power spikes on the circuit board. Suddenly going to work in the morning is rather like playing a game... Training soldier droids Three types of damage droid hack around the solder tracks: Pulsers cruise around randomly and suck energy from the mouse when they touch it; Homers have the same effect as Pulsers except they come looking for the mouse; Drillers not only sap mouse energy on contact but also damage the solder tracks, causing breaks. First Aid stations, marked with a red cross are dotted around the circuit board. Scampering the mouse through a red cross calls a solder patch into a little window on the status area. If the patch fits a broken section of solder track, scamper over the break and press fire to mend the damage. If the patch collected in the red cross station isn't the one you want, just turn round and go through again to get another one. One horizontal bar meter keeps tracks of Micromouse's energy, while another reveals the amount of unrepaired damage that needs to be fixed. Keep an eye on both of these readouts, and check the timer that counts down from the moment the mouse starts work - to fully train a mouse you need to get a circuit board 100% working within the time limit Programmed by M.C. Lothlorien Inlay typed and modified by Simon Rooney 2003