Maintain your Hamachi's well-being and you will see it develop from a wee thing into a full-fledged furry companion. One day in our world is equivalent to a month of the hamster's time. If you care well for your hamster, it can live more than 20 "months".

Figure 2

The user-interface for Hamachi is simple. As seen in Figure 2, the three purple buttons are used to select and perform all available actions. In most situations, the "A" button will highlight the action you wish to perform, the "B" button will perform the highlighted action, and the "C" button will attempt to cancel the currently executing action. If no action is highlighted and the "B" button is pressed, a digital clock will be displayed. Yes, the Hamachi can double as a timepiece! Will wonders never cease?

There are six small action icons in the Hamachi display, again seen in Figure 2. Although they are fairly self-explanatory, brief explanations are as follows:

• "Food" allows you to give the hamster a meal, decreasing its hunger.
• "Lights" toggles the cage illumination on and off. You should turn the lights off when the hamster is sleeping in order to keep it in good spirits. The hamster has regular waking/sleeping hours; you would do well to familiarize yourself with them.
• "Play" begins a game with the hamster. The hamster will roll left or right in its hamster ball; you must guess in which direction it will roll. Press the "A" button if you think it will roll left; "B" if you think it will roll right. If you guess correctly, the hamster will gain happiness.
• "Clean" will clean the cage of any excrement the hamster may have deposited. If the cage is dirty, the hamster may become unhappy.
• "Status" displays the hamster's current information (age in "months," weight in grams, happiness, hunger.)
• "Attention" is highlighted when the hamster is particularly needy; i.e., if it is very hungry and has been neglected for quite some time. You should seek to address its concerns as soon as possible.

The hamster is a hardy, robust pet; and hence it can survive a goodly amount of experimental or accidental clicking. Go forth and enjoy!

For those impatient souls who would rather not endure a real-world 20-day wait to discover the entirety of the joy that is Hamachi, there is a drastically more rapidly-evolving Hamachi applet as well. Note that you must also care for this Hamachi at an increased rate so as to compensate for its rapid development. If you download the source code to the applet, you can specify the execution rate by changing the

An alpaca-based virtual pet, for instance, might have a "Rocketry" action that would allow it to launch software engineers high into the atmosphere, only to watch them come plummeting down to Earth once more.

msPerMin parameter in the HTML file. Be careful, though; if you set it too small, you'll find yourself watching the Hamachi wither and die before your very eyes.

This code and more thourogh explanation may be found at Hamachi

-- Walter <shaper@cerf.net> still believes in keeping everything sheep-shape.