Welcome to El-Fish! Please take the time to READ ALL
of this READ ME file as it contains crucial last
minute information not included in the manual.

I.    OVERVIEW
II.   MEMORY
III.  LOW vs. HIGH RESOLUTION
IV.   SOUND CARD SUPPORT
V.    MEMORY MANAGERS (READ THIS ONE!!!!!!)
VI.   PCONVERT
VII.  MCONVERT
VIII. MISCELLANEOUS
IX.   DISK COMPRESSION & BOOT DISKS  i.e. STACKER, 
      DOUBLESPACE, etc.

To view this readme later, simply type "TYPE READ.ME | MORE"
from within the El-Fish subdirectory.

I.  OVERVIEW
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.

II.  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.  It will also limit
the number of fish displayed in a tank at one time due
to memory constraints.

III.  LOW vs. HIGH RESOLUTION
El-Fish can be run in three different resolutions; Low 
(376x348) and two High (640x400) and (640x480). Not all
video cards are supported in the two high resolution modes.
If you are unable to install for either of the high resolution
modes, then you will have to run in regular resolution. 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. NOTE: The version 
number of the VESA driver is displayed when the driver is 
loaded.

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

IV.  SOUND CARD SUPPORT
El-Fish supports a variety of sound cards. If your sound card
doesn't appear in the selection options or is not playing music, 
please ensure that your card is loading the required drivers. 
Some sound cards need a statement in the CONFIG.SYS and/or the 
AUTOEXEC.BAT to enable the drivers for the sound card. Please
refer to the documentation that came with your sound card for 
this information.

V.  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/or AUTOEXEC.BAT files. If you 
are using MS-DOS EMM386, and you have it set to the "NOEMS" 
option, El-Fish WILL NOT WORK! If you are unsure about any  
of the information described, we would suggest that you make 
a boot disk to run the program. Please run the BOOTDISK.COM 
program and follow the instructions to create a boot disk 
for El-Fish. If you have MS-DOS version 6 or higher you can 
run the MEMMAKER.EXE command and answer YES to the question
about programs that require Expanded Memory (EMS). Earlier
versions of MS-DOS can be corrected as described below. Use a
text editor such as EDIT.COM (MS-DOS versions 5 and higher) 
to change the EMM386.EXE statement in your CONFIG.SYS file.

Example:
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

Change to:
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM

For more information please consult your DOS manual
or manual for your specific memory manager.

VI.  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.  

VII.  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.

VIII.  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).

IX.    DISK COMPRESSION & BOOT DISKS
You may need to make a boot disk if you have only 4 Megabytes
(MB) of RAM memory on your computer or if another program is
conflicting with El-Fish.  Users of Stacker 3.1 and 
Doublespace need only run the normal "BOOTDISK.COM" file to 
make a boot disk. Users with Stacker 3.0 or earlier must run 
a "BOOTSTAC.COM" file instead.  This file inserts the correct 
drivers to mount the compressed drive upon system start. 
The BOOTSTAC.COM file assumes that Stacker is installed to the 
default directory with the default settings. If your settings 
are different from the default and your system doesn't boot up 
correctly, simply remove the boot disk from your A: drive and 
restart your computer with the normal configuration. Consult 
your documentation for further instructions for creating a boot 
disk.  (END OF READ ME FILE, Please press the ESC key.)

END OF READ ME FILE, Thanks so much for reading this!
