Welcome to El-Fish!

El-Fish isn't your "typical" computer game. It doesn't 
really have a goal, and there's no real way to win. 
El-Fish is a new kind of creativity software that 
enables you to create "living art." You can create 
an unlimited number of different fish, and the 
computer brings them to life. Next, you design 
beautiful (or strange and moody) aquariums and set 
your fish loose.

If there is a goal to El-Fish, it's to relax, have 
fun and exercise your personal creativity. 

To do what it does, El-Fish requires serious computer 
"muscle." The more powerful your computer, the better 
El-Fish will respond.

This READ.ME file contains last minute information that 
will help you get up and running, and trouble-shoot if 
you have any problems.

1)  Memory
El-Fish requires 4 MB of RAM to run. The more memory 
you have, the more fish and animations El-Fish can 
display in a tank.  If you overload a tank with more 
fish and animations than it can handle, the fish and 
other animations will move slower.

2)  Low vs. High Resolution
El-Fish can be run in two different resolutions; Low 
(376x348) and High (640x400). For information on what 
video cards are supported by El-Fish in high-res, please 
see the El-Fish addendum.  If you are trying to load a 
VESA driver for your graphics card, you will need to 
load the VESA driver (version 1.2 of VESA standards) 
before you install El-Fish.  

If you have any problems when running El-Fish in high 
resolution, re-install it to run in low resolution.

3)  Sound Card Support
El-Fish supports many different Sound Cards. When 
El-Fish is installed, it looks at your sound card 
and chooses a fairly generic driver, for example,it 
will install a generic Ad Lib driver no matter which 
Ad Lib card you have,or a generic Sound Blaster card 
no matter which Sound Blaster card you have.

Usually, the driver that El-Fish chooses works just 
fine, but if you want to get the optimum performance 
from your sound card, you can manually install the 
exact driver for your sound card. 

In your el-fish\system directory you will find the following 
files:

xx_mdrad.dll    xx_mdrad.mir    Ad Lib Music card
xx_mdrag.dll    xx_mdrag.mir    Ad Lib Gold Music card
xx_mdris.dll    xx_mdris.mir    PC speaker
xx_mdrmt.dll    xx_mdrmt.mir    Roland MT-32 & compatible 
card
xx_mdrpa.dll    xx_mdrpa.mir    Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16
xx_mdrs1.dll    xx_mdrs1.mir    Sound Blaster Pro I
xx_mdrs2.dll    xx_mdrs2.mir    Sound Blaster Pro II
xx_mdrsb.dll    xx_mdrsb.mir    Sound Blaster
xx_mdrt3.dll    xx_mdrt3.mir    Tandy Sound
xx_mdrym.dll    xx_mdrym.mir    Pro Audio Spectrum 8FM

To install a driver, first delete the elfish\xx_mdr.dll and 
elfish\soundlib.mir files and then copy the appropriate .dll 
file to the ELFISH directory and rename it: XX_MDR.DLL, and copy 
the appropriate .mir file to the ELFISH directory and 
rename it: SOUNDLIB.MIR.  

Example: If El-Fish is installed in the C:\ELFISH 
directory and you want to install the driver for the 
Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16, you would type the following:

del c:\elfish\xx_mdr.dll  <CR>
del c:\elfish\soundlib.mir <CR>
copy c:\elfish\system\xx_mdrpa.dll c:\elfish\xx_mdr.dll <CR>
copy c:\elfish\system\xx_mdrpa.mir c:\elfish\soundlib.mir <CR>
 
WARNING: IF YOU COPY THE WRONG DRIVER FOR YOUR SOUND CARD, 
EL-FISH WILL NOT WORK PROPERLY. IF EL-FISH DOES NOT WORK 
PROPERLY, USE THE RE-CONFIG.EXE PROGRAM TO INSTALL CORRECT 
SOUND DRIVERS.

4)  Memory Managers
You may experience problems using some memory managers. If 
you do have problems, please turn the memory manager off from 
the DOS prompt or rem out the statements for your memory 
managers in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files. If you 
are using EMM386, and you have it set to the "noems" option, 
El-Fish will not work.  

5)  PCONVERT
To use PCONVERT.EXE, the file you are going to convert must be 
a 256 color or 8 bit .pcx or .tif file.  The background color 
must be color zero (in most cases black) and the file needs 
to be smaller than 60K.  In some cases, you may have a file less 
than 60K that you have problems converting.  This is due to the 
fact that some art packages have a compressed format that is better
than the El-Fish compression.  If you are converting a .tif file,
it must be in the un-compressed format.  

6)  MCONVERT
If you try to convert a MIDI file that does not have the volume 
set inside the midi file, it will play at a very low volume.  
For a midi file to be converted to the proper El-Fish format, 
it should be authored in channels 2 through 10 where channel 
10 contains all percussion tracks.

7)  Miscellaneous
El-Fish requires FILES to be set to at least 20 and BUFFERS 
to at least 30 in your CONFIG.SYS file. If they are set lower, 
the install program will ask you if you want El-fish to change 
it or if you would prefer to do it yourself. If you ask El-Fish 
to make the changes, it will look for the CONFIG.SYS file in 
the root directory of your C: drive. If you are booting from 
another drive, you'll have to change your CONFIG.SYS file 
yourself (if it needs to be changed).

