Mancala

 

By Chris Donica

 

 

I was recently playing Mancala at a friend’s house, and thought it would be a fun game to play on the computer.  After checking a few popular sites on the internet, I decided to write my own version since there were no good Mancala games available. 

 

After playing several of Hasbro’s e-mail games, I thought that e-mail Mancala would be lots of fun.  Therefore, I added the ability to play human vs. human, human vs. computer, and human vs. human using e-mail!  It is very easy to use, and only requires the knowledge of how to paste from the clipboard into your e-mail program.

 

Click this link to download Mancala.Exe (365 KB).  Save it to your Desktop (you may first have to choose Save This Program to Disk, if using Microsoft Internet Explorer). When it has finished downloading, double-click the Mancala.Exe icon on your desktop to install the program to your hard drive and place an icon on your Start menu. Just follow the instructions and ignore the licensing warnings.

 

Since I wrote this game using Visual Basic 5, you will need to have the Visual Basic 5 runtime library already installed on your computer.  The Visual Basic Runtime Modules are required for many different Visual Basic applications for Windows. They need only be installed to your system once and then will be available for any number of Visual Basic Applications made with the same version as the module.  Therefore, since I used Visual Basic 5, you’ll need Module version 5 (see below). 

 

BEFORE DOWNLOADING THE FOLLOWING FILE, first try to run Mancala on your computer.  If you get an error message, then you probably need to follow the next instructions.  If you don’t get an error message and the game runs, you are done!

 

If Mancala doesn’t work for you, download the module VB500a.EXE (1.3 MB) and install it to your computer (just click the link, save it to your Desktop, and double-click on the icon from your desktop). Then, try running Mancala again.  Please let me know if you have trouble getting this to work.  chris@roseund.com

 

Now that Visual Basic 6 is out, you may also want to install those modules to your computer.  You can find them at www.winfiles.com.