F17 Challenge is an exciting arcade style race game for your Amiga, the aim is to become the World F17 Champion by racing your way around the worlds toughest circuits. Select from four different cars, each with its own characteristics and choose the style of game and skill level that's best for you. You'll find that F17 Challenge caters for a wide range of players in both skill levels and realism/arcade options.
"F17 CHALLENGE" runs on any Amiga model, requires at least 1 Meg of RAM and one joystick connected to port 2. An extra drive is recommended.
1) Turn off your Amiga, wait for 10 seconds and then turn it back on.
2) Amiga 1000 owners only: insert the "Kickstart" disk and wait for the Workbench prompt screen.
3) Insert DISK 1 into drive DF0: and the game will commence loading, after a short time a presentation sequence will begin.
You can choose between NTSC (FULL SCREEN) or PAL (NORMAL SCREEN) video mode, if your machine has a recent version of the Amigas "Fat Agnus" chip. If you have an old 2000, 500 or 1000 then this option might not work and the screen size will default to normal.
To select one of the two display modes, move the joystick Left or Right to highlight the desired option and press the fire button.
Move the joystick up, down left, right to highlight one of the four available icons and press fire.
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP - You have to race all of the 16 circuits of the F17 World Championship.
RACE SINGLE CIRCUIT - You can choose any of the 16 circuits to enjoy a non-championship race.
PRACTICE - You will race on a difficult test-track, with or without opponents.
OPTIONS - You can customise the game by modifying various options outlined in the next section.
These customise the skill level, control options and other aspects of the game. They are accessed via the main menu.
To modify the parameters move the orange square using the joystick and press fire to switch through available options of each item.
There are four cars available, each with it's own characteristics these are as follows:
RED - Powerful engine, very fast in straight tracks.
RED/WHITE - Reaches its best even during wet races.
GREEN/WHITE - Powerful engine, strong structure for hard tracks.
YELLOW/GREEN - A fast car for fast tracks.
Select the gearshift of your car:
AUTO - Automatic gear, just accelerate!
MANUAL - Push the fire button and move joystick up (shift up) or or down (shift down).
Choose your acceleration preference:
BUTTON - Push the fire button to accelerate; to BRAKE, move the joystick down.
STICK - Move the joystick up to accelerate; to BRAKE, move the stick down.
Choose the lap number (5, 8, 10 or 15). If you select the "ARCADE" Game Mode (see below), the lap number is automatically set to 3.
You can choose between two kinds of World Championship:
NORMAL - You will race each circuit one after the other even if you don't complete the race and you can save your current position to disk.
ARCADE - You are admitted to the subsequent circuit only if you end the race in the top six positions. You cannot save to disk, the difficulty level gradually grows from circuit to circuit and the lap number is fixed to 3.
Select the difficulty level:
ROOKIE - The easiest level.
AVERAGE - The intermediate level.
PRO - Strictly for the Professionals!
You can modify the default drivers/team names. In theory you could enter all your favourite real-life drivers and teams and compete against them! It's possible to save these for later use. Follow the on-screen instructions for loading and saving this data. The driver-name that will be yours during the race is shown in a different colour to the rest. Click Exit to go back to the Main Menu.
You can race the test-track to improve your driving ability. When the track map appears, choose if you want to race with other cars on the circuit (OPPONENTS ON), race with no other car (OPPONENTS OFF) or go back to the Main Menu (CANCEL). During the race press "ESC" key to quit the practise session and go back to the Main Menu.
Joystick left - Steer Left
Joystick right - Steer Right
Joystick up / fire button - Accelerate
Joystick down - Brake
NOTE - If Manual Gear is selected the following applies:
Joystick up + button - Gear Up
Joystick down + button - Gear Down
P - Pause ON/OFF
I - Toggle Status Panel ON/OFF
ESC - Quit the race
You find it on the top of the screen; it gives you important information about the race:
Your current lap and lap time, current speed, gear, percentage damage (damage affects you cars performance - 100% means you are out of the race), best lap-time, current position and the number of cars in the race.
If you like, the status panel can be turned off by pressing the "I" key.
If your car has a damage percentage near to 100%, we suggest that you are to stop at the pits. Just a little after the start/finish line, on the right, there's the pit-lane(look for the dozens of big white signs!). Enter this lane and brake immediately a fast team of guys will appear and proceed to repair your car, you can wait until the DAMAGE level reaches zero, then just accelerate to re-enter the circuit, or you can press fire to stop the mechanics when you think enough damage has been fixed, and leave the pits.
Keeping your eyes peeled on the DAMAGE rating is very important, we recommend that you get high levels of damage repaired as soon as possible as heavy damage affects the cars overall performance. It takes about 13 seconds to fully repair a 99% damaged car so do bear this in mind.
When the "RACE SINGLE CIRCUIT" icon is selected, the "SELECT RACK" screen appears and you can choose one of 16 circuits of the World Championship. Move the joystick Left and Right to scroll the maps and press fire to confirm. On the bottom of the screen appears a new options bar:
QUALIFY - To reach the first positions of the grid, you have to qualify you will race 2 laps to get the fastest lap time and then, after a result table, you will be involved in real competition, at a grid position based on how fast your second (or best) lap-time was.
RACE CIRCUIT - If you don't want to qualify, you can select this option but you will start at the back of the grid!
CANCEL - To go back to the Main Menu.
If you push the joystick up the bar disappears and you can select another circuit.
The "WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP" screen shows you the map of the circuit you are going to race and four options:
QUALIFY and RACE CIRCUIT - To qualify or race the circuit.
DISK - To save or load your game position (see below).
This option is NOT available if the "Arcade Mode" has been selected.
QUIT - To abandon the World Championship.
You can save your current game position to disk. When the "DISK ACCESS" screen appears move the joystick to select one of the 6 disk icons and press fire; the options bar on the bottom of the screen allows you to SAVE the game, LOAD the game or CANCEL to go back to the previous menu. If you push the joystick up the bar disappears and you can select another disk icon.
You may also save the best-laps to disk, follow on-screen instructions to do so. Note that you may also reset the lap-times in the options, this will also reset the ones stored in "memory" at the time you reset them. When you confirm the SAVE or LOAD operations, follow the on-screen instructions.
After each race you will see two interesting tables; the RACE FINISHING RESULTS table and the DRIVERS CHAMPIONSHIP table. The first one shows for each driver, his position, his name, his team and the points earned in the race (10 to the winner, 6 to the second, 4 to the third 3 to the fourth, 2 to the fifth, 1 to the sixth). The second one sums up the results race by race.
Press fire to skip each table.
