Scenario

You are the boss of small manufacturing business. You start with a £5,000 bank loan, a warehouse and a three year old delivery van. Each year (trading period) you may request reports from the various department heads. Based on these reports, and your skill, you must decide how to invest your money.

Each year you must also decide how many items you wish to manufacture and what price to charge your customers for them. You may call on various experts for their advice - this service is not always free but without expert advice your business will not get very far.

As you progress and make money (hopefully), you can expand your departments and by doing so take on more staff. But watch out - the more profitable your company becomes the higher your workers wage demands will be.

Note: The objective of the game is to make the largest average profit per trading period.

Starting The Game

The initial phase of the game will request a difficulty level to be entered.

This may be any digit from 0-9. Level 0 for the novice progressing to level 9 for the multi-mega expert.

At the beginning of the main game, you will be requested to specify how many Trading Periods (years) you want to play for. Try 10 to start with.

You will then be asked to supply a name for your company.

The preliminaries are now over, and the menu will be displayed - we suggest that you try some expert advice to start with!

Responding To The Program

At various stages throughout the game you will be required to make decisions. You must inform the program of your decision before it will continue. There are three types of decision, and three corresponding types of reply required:

1. Decisions requiring a yes/no response:-
   A white box will appear on the screen after the question. Initially, the box will contain No
   To select Yes press Y
   To select No press N
   
   The depression of any other key will 'toggle' the answer from Yes to No, or from No to Yes.
   
   When you have made your decision, press RETURN.
2. Selecting items from the Menu:
   The menu comprises a list of items that are available for your use.
   
   You may want to look at various reports, save or restore the game, invest your money, obtain expert advice, etc. The currently selected item on the menu is shown as red characters on a yellow background. The other items are yellow characters on a red background.
   
   You may change the currently selected item by means of the 'cursor' keys (the grey keys marked with arrows).
3. Decisions requiring text or numeric responses:
   An empty white box will appear on the screen.
   Fill in your answer.
   Press RETURN.

Mistakes can be corrected by means of the DELETE key. A 'beep' indicates that you are trying to enter something that is not permitted (e.g. too many characters, letters when a number is required, too large a number, etc).

If you just press RETURN in response to a request for a numeric answer, then a default value will be taken: if you are in the process of re-entering the values, then your previous value will be used as the default value.

Ending The Game

The game will end when either:

1. you ahve traded for the number of periods that you specified at the beginning of the game, or
2. you run out of cash and go bankrupt!

A message will appear on the menu informing you that the game is over and giving you the reason that the game has ended. You may at this point take a final look at any of the reports, and if you wish, even save the game.

To see how your company has fared against competition, select EXIT.

Finally, you are presented with the option of playing again.

If you wish to play again, select Yes and you will be requested to specify a number of trading periods and another company name.

If you select No, you are informed at what levels you started and finished the game and are then requested to press BREAK key. Press the BREAK and, after a few seconds, you will be returned to the BBC BASIC Operating environment.

Save And Restore

Save and Restore are used in conjunction with each other; Save will copy the current state of the game to a file. Restore allows you to continue with a previously saved game.

If you select either the Save or Restore options by accident, you are given the option of continuing with the Save/Restore or returning to the main menu.

Save - probably the best way of describing this facility is to compare it with putting a board game away with the pieces stuck in place.

The game may be saved at any time by carrying out the following:

1. select the SAVE option from the menu
2. confirm your intention to save by typing Y and RETURN
3. place a blank tape into your cassette recorder
4. prepare the recorder to record
5. press the Space bar
6. press RETURN to commence the Save

The Save facility will proceed to copy the data areas of the program onto your tape (this takes about ten seconds to complete).

Restore enables you to continue playing a game that you have previously put away (SAVEd), the game being restored to the state that it was at, at the time the Save was actioned.

To restore a previously saved game, carry out the following actions:

1. select Restore from the menu 2. confirm your intention to Restore by typing Y (RETURN) 3. place the cassette containing the saved data into the recorder, ensuring that the tape has been rewound to a point before the saved data 4. press play on the recorder 5. press the Space bar

The tape will be searched until the data file is located. When located the data areas will be reinstated.

Glossary Of Terms

CIH
Cash-In-Hand - amount of money you currently have available to spend

Plant
machinery to make your product

R&D
Research and Development - improving old and designing new products

Unit
a single product that you are manufacturing

Unit Cost
the cost of manufacturing one unit

Marketing
advertising for your product

Selling Price
what it costs your customer to buy one unit

Profit
total income less total expenditure

Warehouse
a place to store your products (units)

Market share
your share of the total orders

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Tape: CHAIN"" (RETURN)
Disc: SHIFT-BREAK