Now the adventure gets going. As head of the little PSI 5 company, you shall try to deliver material, equipment and food for the residents in the star quadrant Parvin Frontier, in the furthest of the galaxies.

You must first choose which route you will take, which freight you carry, and above all, you must choose a crew to cope with the stress.

1.  Shut down your Commodore 64 or 128 and remove all cartridges. Connect a joystick to port 2. Turn on your computer and TV or monitor.

2.  If you have a disk drive, put the disc in the drive, close the door, type LOAD "*", 8.1 and press the return key.

3.  If you have a cassette, load the front of your tape if you want to play any of the pre-set missions, and the back if you want to choose the crew and route yourself. Rewind the cassette to the beginning. Press the shift key and press RUN / STOP. Press the play key on the tape player.

4.  To pause the game temporarily, press RUN / STOP.

If you have a disc version or loaded the back side of the cassette, you can choose which route you want to take to the Parvin Frontier. On screen you will see the distance, the freight and the reward if you succeed. The bigger the reward, the greater the risks and the difficulties. You must arrive at your destination within a reasonable time.

To select your route, use the joystick to select and then press the button.

In addition to yourself as the captain of the spacecraft, you also need five other people. Weapons, Scanning, Navigation, Engineering and Repair departments all need a boss.

You must carefully choose your crew among all thirty applicants. To find out the background of any of the applicants, select the person with your joystick and press the button. When the applicant's background appears on the screen, you can move the joystick to select "Welcome to the crew" or to "Exit" to view the other candidates.

Once you have selected crew for all departments, the rest of the program will load. If you have a disk version, you must change the side of the disc now.

When you finally sit down at your console you see a view of th surrounding space to the left. To the right you have a communication screen where you can talk with your crew.

You also see indicators that show weapon status, speed, and other messages.

You give your commands through the two lines below. Move the joystick to the correct command and press the button. If you choose a particular department, you can check the status of that particular department.

If you do not give orders to the gun, repair or scanning bosses, they will probably start to find their own things.

Status shows statistics on how well the weapons team fired in earlier assignments. Through this you can learn how good this particular weapons manager is.

Display shows the activity list. What kind of weapon to use, number of shots, hits, priority and current status on the target and the weapon.

Cancel you use when you want to remove a weapon or a target from the list above.

Rank uses you when you want to prioritize about the targets and weapons.

Fire adds a new command to the activity list.

The main function of the scanning department is to keep track of other spacecraft.

Status registers new items and adds newly-found ships to the activity list. The scanning manager then attempts to retrieve the following information:

- Class, type of crew on the craft

- Type, friend or enemy

- Locked, continuous monitoring

If the craft is in front of you, you get the position status F, behind A, left P and right S. If it is within weapons range, an i is added. An alien vessel which is located to the left of the gun is called Pi.

Display shows the priority list that the head of scanning is working with. The list also shows if and how the foreign ship is damaged and recommends which arms as shall be used.

Cancel Remove from list.

Rank reallocate list.

Examination add to list.

NOTE! The head of scanning must have investigated an alien spaceship before you can give orders to the weapons team, or it gets more difficult for the weapons boss to hit his targets.

The navigation manager manages your spacecraft's maneuvering. Your orders are similar to those for scanning and weapons, with the following additions :

ETA average calculated arrival time.

INF stands for information.

RSK shows risks.

RETA means relative arrival time where + stands for early arrival and - for late arrival.

Accel sets speed and maneuvering.

Engineering is responsible for the care and operation of spacecraft power sources. Different parts of the ship's equipment can be switched off to save energy.

Defensive weapons such as shields require a certain amount of energy to work. They can counter any shot from a hostile spacecraft by taking the corresponding power from your own spacecraft.

Other commands are similar to those previously discussed.

This department is responsible for repairs and maintenance of your ship.

There are three kinds of damage to the equipment:

1.  It still works, but has a higher energy consumption (look at it!)

2.  The equipment can still be repaired.

3.  The equipment is damaged or broken and can not be repaired.

The head of the repair department has the help of several robodroids. When they are busy with other tasks, it takes some time for them to come back to the repair department, retrieve new tools and get new instructions.

Robodroids may have the following status:

Active - Ready for new assignments

Damaged - Damaged and must repair

Dead - Can not be repaired

If you choose QUIT to finish then you will have the option to choose a new crew etc if you have the PSI 5 Trading Co disk version.

If you loaded from cassette tape, you get a new group of staff to work with.

If you want to choose new staff, you can rewind on the back of the tape and reload.

(c) 1986 by Accolade Inc, USA. All rights reserved. Manufactured under license by American Action AB, Box 10090, 200 43 Malmö, Sweden.

Design by Mike Lorenzen, graphics by v.Mimi Doggett and music by Ed Bogas.