by mbrown3 » Aug 24, 2004 @ 2:52pm
OK, to follow up on Pookie's tutorial, here is a revised one that will hopefully make things a bit clearer.
1. Go into your Snails folder (doesn't matter where it is), then create a new folder in the parent directory (no matter what name you choose, i.e., SnailsForPalm/NewFolder).
2. Put Goro's program in the new folder.
3. From your main Snails folder (SnailsForPalm, etc.), COPY your .prc file for the Snails program (snails480.prc, etc.) into the new folder. Do NOT click and drag...you need to create a duplicate of the original file. Now you will have a snails480.prc (or whatever relevant version) in each folder...the parent snails folder and the new one. DO NOT delete the original file, just make a copy and leave both where they are.
4. Rename the COPY (in the new folder) to "Snails.prc" (without "").
5. Double click extract.bat. This will create a file called data.zip. Now EXTRACT this file into a new subdirectory titled data (i.e. SnailsForPalm/NewFolder/Data)...each of the files contained in the zip file will now be in that directory, including one called levels. Take note of that folder for later in the process.
6. Create a sub-directory (within the NewFolder location) called CustomLevels. Dowload whatever custom levels you want to install into that directory. Once downloaded, open those files...they will need to be unzipped and extracted, and doing so will create their own sub-folders inside the CustomLevels folder.
7. Open the CustomLevels folder. In that will be a series of files called something.lev (the name of the custom level plus the extension .lev). There will also be a corresponding folder with that same level title. For example, if a custom level is titled "Fun," in the CustomLevels folder there will be a file called fun.lev and a folder called Fun. Note: make sure that each level only has a .lev file and ONE directory structure with files in it...some levels will create several parent/sub folders (like Fun/Funlevel/FunFun or something). Just make sure that the final folder (the one with the actual level files in it, with the extensions .zbm, i.e. "FunFun" from above) is DIRECTLY in the same folder with the .lev file...remove any other parent directories for that level. (So, remove Fun/Funlevel and the CustomLevels folder should just have fun.lev and a folder "Fun" that contains .zbm files, with no other subdirectories).
8. COPY (again don't click and drag) both the .lev file and the correspondingly named folder (i.e. Fun.lev and folder "Fun"). Go back to the NewFolder/data where the data.zip file was extracted and find the folder "levels" that you took note of earlier. Open it and paste the level folder and the .lev file into it, preserving the directory structure (that is, within NewFolder/Data/levels folder, there should be a series of sub-folders with each custom level title, and a series of .lev files with corresponding names).
8. In the NewFolder location, select the Data folder (not the .zip file from earlier, that file can now be deleted...just the FOLDER "Data" itself) and compress back into a file called "data.zip" - again, the original data.zip can be deleted if you get an error saying that this file already exists.
10. Now copy the NEW data.zip into NewFolder where compress.bat is.
11. Double click compress.bat. This will create a new Snails.prc file in the NewFolder. (Note: if you follow the rest of the process and have problems, you may need to run this step again...for some reason, it doesn't always work right on the first try, but you'll only know this after finishing the process and trying it).
12. Open the new Snails.prc to set it to sync to your handheld and then run hotsync. If you have problems, your original Snails.prc (or Snails480.prc, etc.) is in the Snails parent directory (SnailsForPalm or whatever) and you can reinstall it.
I would NOT recommend adding more than one or two custom levels at a time, and if you add more, delete any old ones...having several has a tendency to crash the Palm and a reset is needed. I'm not sure why this happens, but hopefully they're working on it.
Hope this helps folks who have some confusion over it. Feel free to ask for clarification if you have any questions, or anything here is unclear (which much of it might be!). It's not the easiest process in the world so don't feel bad if you don't get it right away.