TT(6)

NAME
tt - a hoopy real-time puzzle-game.

SYNOPSIS
tt [ -s | -s# ] [ -b ] [ -l# ]

DESCRIPTION
The program tt is an implementation of the well-known game Tetris. Quadominoes (groups of four squares joined orthogonally together) fall slowly down the screen, accumulating at the bottom, and when the pile
reaches to top of the screen the game is over.    The pieces may be
moved to the left or right, and rotated as they fall, with the aim of making them tessellate with the pieces already at the bottom of the game area. The height of the stack of pieces can be reduced by filling a complete row of 10 squares, at which point that row will disappear, and those above will fall down into its place. It is possible (and desirable) to destroy multiple rows at once.

The keys with which these operations can be accomplished are displayed on the screen during play. They can be redefined if necessary, (see
the section below on the environment variable TTKEYS).    The game also
recognises a suspend key and a quit key, with which the game can be suspended or quit. Incredible, huh? I mean, who would have thought it?

In between games, when the program is waiting for a keypress before restarting, pressing the "n" or "q" key will end the session, and pressing the "s" key will list the top ten entries of the high-score table.

The high-score table stores only a single score for each user at any game-level. Thus a user exceeding his own level-0 high-score would have his old entry in the high-score table (if any) replaced with the new score. However, a single user may have multiple high-score table entries for different game-levels.

The author recommends that the optimal game-levels are 0, 10 and -6

FLAGS

-s  If the -s flag is set, then tt will print the top 10 entries in the high-score table.

-s# If a number is specified, then tt will print that many high-score entries, up to a pre-defined maximum.

-b  If the -b flag is set, then tt will rotate pieces backwards (ie. clockwise), for compatibility with the grotty versions of Tetris available on the BBC micro and other such machines. (The default anticlockwise rotation is compatible with the tetris and mex program mentioned below)

-l# If the -l flag is set, then tt will play on the level specified, which must be between -10 and 20. Each level of play starts at the same speed, and increases in speed at
    the same rate.    They are differentiated only by the fact that non-zero
    levels drop a number of pieces, equal to the absolute value of the
    level, onto the screen before the game starts.    Negative levels drop
    pieces down the middle of the screen, positive levels place them randomly.

ENVIRONMENT
The environment variable TTKEYS contains, if set, the keys which will be used respectively for the operations move left, move right, rotate piece, drop piece, suspend game, and quit game. The keys ^L (redraw screen) and s (print the high-score table, when pressed between games) cannot be rebound.

The environment variable TTNAME contains, if set, the name which will be used in the high-score table,
if a good enough score is obtained to merit inclusion.    If this
variable is not set, tt will use the environment variable NAME and if this is also not set, the user-code will be used.

FILES
/usr/local/etc/ttscores -- high-score table.
/usr/local/etc/ttlock -- lock file for high-score table.

SEE ALSO
mundi(6), tetris(6), mex(6)

AUTHOR
The program tt was written by Mike Taylor (mirk@uk.ac.warwick.cs), based on the original Tetris idea, by a frustratingly anonymous "Russian Researcher".

BUGS
None known -- Please report any bugs to the author.