SOMA News

16 Nov 1999 E-Mail.

WINDOWS SOMA IS HERE
	From Bob Nungester The Windows SOMA figure program: This program will............. VERSION 1.0

Solving SOMA puzzles has upto now been performed, either by making the puzzle by hand (The REAL game), or by running the SOLVE V1.2 program in a DOS environment.

For Windows fans, we now have A Windows Solver Program.!

Bob Nungester of Cupertino (California, USA) Got interested in SOMA again.
By digging out his Cube from the 1960's, and adding graphics to his old 1980 Apple II program. Bob has written a new Visual Basic 6 Solver program.
The program uses recursive piece placement with an Island and Parity checking method.
Currently (1999.11.16) it is using his own data format. BUT support for the .HTM file format of this Web site is in the process of being added.

The program can be obtained (From Courtneys page) here:
http://www.geocities.com/abcmcfarren/soma/Somaw.zip.
It is rather large ( 1.7 MB ), AND requires installation to run:

Write to Bob Nungester at: bnungest@tycoelectronics.com

What it does.

1999.11.11
Here's a short description of the program.

"This program allows you to scroll through and solve any of the figures in the .HTM files. It will view any figure up to 16 x 9 x 7 and solve figures containing up to 27 cubes.
In addition, it is easy to create your own figures or edit existing ones by selecting a level in a figure (1-7) and then clicking on a grid of 16 x 9 cells to fill or remove any particular space. The display shows the progress of the solution as pieces are placed in a wireframe model, or you can choose to only see the final solution, which requires less than a second. Once the solution is complete you can cycle through the pieces to display each one individually in the wireframe model.
Figures can be saved by appending them to .HTM files, so you can create your own figure sets.
The display allows full rotation about the X, Y and Z axes at any time."

1999.11.16

It will now do partial figures!
I figured out a simple way to do this, so now it will work with 1-27 cubes in the figure.
I abandoned my original file format completely and switched to the .HTM format. Scrolling through the figures is fast!
The model space is increased to 16 by 9 by 7 to handle the largest figures.
I'm still adding code to rotate the figure if it won't fit as stored in the file.
I updated the CFG file to include the classic piece numbers so when cycling the display through the pieces, they're in the correct order. I added shading to each of the three sides of the colored cubes so it's easier to visualize the figure.

PS: Current remarks are:

• The program is freeware.
• It is FAST, and will solve most figures in less than 1/4 second.
  
  
• The program must be installed in order to run.
• The program Don't work on Thorleif's Win 95 PC.
• Courtney (Win 98) had trouble starting up the program... it seems he had to SETUP and reboot TWICE before it started to work.
• The program is unfortunately rather large ( 1.7 MB ), Well maybe not by Windows standards, but sizes over 0.5 MB is large for this kind of software. The reason is probably the use of Visual Basic.