You are standing in the upper-left corner of an 8 x 16 battlefield grid. Your goal is to isolate the invisible mines by creating largest possible mine-free areas and to travel safely to the lower-right corner. The headline tells you how many mines are under the 8 squares adjacent to your position. The larger the mine-free area the higher the score. Use the arrow keys or number to cross the battlefield, one square at a time. 8, 6, 2, 4 work like the arrow keys, 7, 9, 1, 3 move diagonally. CANCEL aborts as usual. STO suspends a running game and saves it. When you next start MINES, the suspended game will be resumed to bring it to an end or to store it again. Winning or loosing the game is announced by a corresponding message and sound (if the beep flag is active).
You can change the number of mines in the battlefield by pressing the command SetX. The default is 20 hidden mines, displayed in the command line. Overwrite it as you like with any numer, and ENTER your setting. At most 64 mines are admissable. The sign of the number can be toggled with the +/- key. If negative, the mines are visible during the game. A game with about 50 visible mines presents a really attractive labyrinth game not only for newbees and children which may not yet draw optimal conclusions from the adjacent-mines count in the headline if playing with hidden mines.
 HP49G screen |
 HP49G+ screen |
Remark 1. If you want MINES to be included into GAMES on the APPS key, load a recent APPSman version and store a list in APAR8 containing the commands Mines and SetX. Or add them to the list in APAR8 if already existent. Another possibility is add the item { MINES 292 TMENU } to APAR8. A third possibility is to load TETRI which creates the GAMES category in APPS and to procede as above. A fourth possibility is to load Libman and to create an extra page for games when pressing on the LIB key.
Remark 2 for experts. Both the signed number of mines and a suspended game data are stored in the Hidden directory in the variables VPAR and PPAR which are normally not used there. MINESHUNT was first ported from the HP48 to the HP49 by Daniel Lidström. Our version uses parts of this porting and various messages from the built-in library 231.
Credits. Thanks to Daniel Lidstöm for porting and to Otto Praxl for beta-testing.
Wolfgang Rautenberg,