Nonsense: Cowtris

Cowtris

	created Monday, December 30, 2002 at 1:25 PM updated Tuesday, June 3, 2003 at 5:54 PM

Falling block games are almost as abundant as free AOL CDs and telemarketers, so why do you need a new one? Well, Cowtris may not have many more features than your average tetris game, but there is one major difference that sets it apart. Mighty few of the other games feature our bovine friends.

Actually, Cowtris features not one but seven varieties of cows:

Holstein-Friesian	Texas Longhorn
Ayrshire	Aberdeen-Angus
Jersey	Hereford
Guernsey

As of June 3, 2003, Cowtris version 2.1 adds three new and exciting cows, each doing special things to the blocks around them when they fall. Now Cowtris is more exciting than ever!

Mad Cow
Holy Cow
Purple Cow

In addition, Cowtris features great music and cow sound effects, and offers a two-player mode and several additional features.

The object of the game is to make complete horizontal rows by rotating and moving the cows horizontally as they fall from the top of the screen. When a row is completed, it disappears and all the rows above it move down. The game ends when the cows reach the top of the screen.

With the release of version 2, we are proud to offer the source code for Cowtris so that you can learn from and adapt it. Cowtris and its code are now freely distributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Download cowtris2-1.exe (1.01 MB).

Download cowtris2_source.zip (443 KB). (You'll probably need to install the binary first to register the dll's.)

Requirements: Pentium processor, Windows 95 or higher, 2 MB of free hard disk space; sound card recommended.

Cowtris also requires the Visual Basic 6 runtime files. It is likely that these are already on your computer, so we have not included them with the installation. If you get an error message when you try to run Cowtris, download and run vbrun60.exe (1.00 Mb)

If you discover any bugs, please let us know so that we can try to fix them. It is most helpful if you can give us specific directions on how to recreate the problem.

Cowtris Error: 429 by David Glick

created Monday, December 30, 2002 at 1:31 PM

Many people have told us that they have encountered a certain little "run time error 429" and "ActiveX component can't create object" while trying to install or play Cowtris 2.0. David is investigating and dealing with this evil little bug right now (well, not actually right now, but you get the idea), but here is a fix that may work:

Go to Start, Run, and enter: regsvr32 ssubtmr6.dll
Then go to Start, Run, and put in: regsvr32 ccrptmr6.dll