One main difference from breakout is that some of the bricks when hit, will drop and if you can catch them with the paddle, you get a special power which can be an extended paddle, an extra ball ( 2 balls), catch, lasers, you can blast the bricks, a slow down of the ball, an extra life, or one rare brick will allow you to clear the full level and advanced to the next level, visually the game displays the bricks being plowed up over a few seconds when this happens.
There is also sound, you can hit s to toggle sound off and on, and type q to quit while the ball is in the air. hit the space bar or the mouse left click to release the ball.
When you first start powerout there its all keyboard. you hit a key to clear the welcome screen and type the numbers of the menu options to go to those screens. You can configure the speed, i dont know if it will work with all computers but it works with mine and another of mine. You hit 6 in the main menu to set the speed. hit the space bar to see the ball move at different speeds. to the right it says which menu option is which speed. then hit the number of the right speed you want and hit 1 to then play. Once in the game you can use the mouse to move the ball and paddle. Its also fun to start at different levels by configuring the level, or change the color scheme.
Prior to studying programming in fall of 1993, my last quarter at the university of california at santa cruz, I had not programmed since taking basic in 6th and 7th grade at Black Mountain Middle school, in San Diego. Powerout was written actually in first qbasic then ported to visual basic 1 for dos. My college work in programming involved 3 courses. An intro to the c language, mostly a descriptive course, with very little programming, we turned in 5 assignments of no more than a page of code, and were graded on tests of how well we learned the language. That was taken at the university of california at santa cruz, and was a survey course and not part of the programming major.
At San Jose state after i graduated in decmember of 1993, i enrolled in 3 courses during the spring quarter, Calculus based Physics, second quarter, or electromaneticism, finite math, and data structures using c. My living conditions though were unstable, living first in a boarding house that didnt work out then moving to a small apartment that semester. Finances were a problem to living off of limited financial aid as a second bachlor student.
Well i dropped the physics course about mid way through. And earned c++ grades in data structures and finite math. But as mark twain once said, i'm not one to let my education get in the way of my learning.
The phsyics was with my chaotic life at the time, to difficult to study without any real reason to study it. The data structures course was a bread and butter course. I learned a lot. But I didnt seem to fit into san jose state and showed up for class the last day and found there was no class. I was expecting a final. I asked and found that finals were given at a different time than teh class time. Something done at santa cruz for some courses but the instructor had not mentioned anything and it slipped my mind the final might be on antoher day.
Luckily i had the instructores phone number and I called him and he invited me to come to his place maybe tommorow night and take the final there, and seemed to indicate he thought i had dropped the course and was glad I called him.
I was still having trouble getting into programming having just started it a few months ago and only did ok on the final and was awarded a c++. A grade I also got in finite math, a course that covered some good stuff but also a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with any of my interests in terms of the computational time I had to put in to the course and other demands on my time.
With one dropped course and money trouble and 2 c++s I made the decision to call it quits on my education and be happy with just my history degree from the university of california at santa cruz.
I was initally excited to pursue history as a major but not as enthusiastic for it after taking about 18 history courses. I had spent my last 2 quarters prior to my last quarter when i first took programming taking math courses. In all i took 4 math courses, third quarter calculus, linear algebra, number theory and differential equations, in those two quarters while officially a senior at ucsc with only one course to take in my major and the rest elective.
When I moved to seattle in July of 1994, I began looking for work, and programming on my own, at first simple stuff, like i wrote some math utiltiy programs in c, experimenting with how large i could make numbers with different data types, and computational time on a 486 to factor them and find their primes. In those few months after i dropped out of the second degree program and started powerout i wrote a crude spell checker that used a binary search of the document and a text editor, very primitive as well.
And by about october of 1994 i started on powerout. Powerout was the program i wrote prior to writing pulsar my chess program. A program i wrote with no furhter schooling tell 2003 when i went back to college at cityu, than the coursers i described above.
I would release powerout as shareware in june of 1995, releasing a somewhat crude early version, and never releasing the final version, and did receive a check in the mail from someone in florida for 10 bucks, the asking price in 1996. Not having sold any copies and not having worked on it in awhile it took me 3 weeks to get it ready, i had not had a computer for some months in 96 do to the theft of my 486 in sacramento, at a hotel i was staying at, around teh time right after the oj simpson verdict was announced, and had to adjust speeds for pentium computers before i could release it to him. But a copy was sent off and now its available to everyone if you can get a speed to work.