About This File
1) What is zookini?
Zookini is a launcher program for zoo tycoon 1. What zookini does is it edits the zoo.ini file, which is a file that zoo tycoon 1 reads at load time, and where it stores many of your game settings, including the video and sound options.
2) How do I install it?
Put zookini in it's own folder anywhere on your hard drive. Run it.
3) Why edit zoo.ini?
The reason I made this program is because there are some very cool things you can do with the zoo.ini that you cannot do in the game option screen inside the game. The first thing is that you can set the screensize to other sizes than the 3 that are available in game, including widescreen options for modern monitors. The zookini program looks at your windows video options, decides which screensizes that are available are ok to use with zoo tycoon, and then puts them in a dropdown list for you to select. Also, if you choose windowed mode, it only shows you the screensizes that will work with windowed mode.
Other things zookini does:
- Video options like updaterate for smoother graphics.
- Sound Options like volume, and menu volume, as well as actually allowing you to change the theme song.
- Edit the boot path so you can add your own mod folders.
- Skip the startup movies.
- Change the maximum guests allowed in a zoo.
- Change the startup cash and maximum cash for freeform mode to up to 2 billion+ dollars.
4) Sounds complicated?
I made this program as easy to use as possible. The first thing it will do is try to automatically find your zoo.ini file. If it is in your zoo tycoon install folder in program files (which it usually is) it should find it just fine. If however you have installed the game in another place, or if when you installed it, it did not have admin permissions, then it may be that you will have to search for the zoo.ini file on your own. If that is the case, just click on Load zoo.ini and navigate to the folder where your zoo.ini is located. (The usual places for this is in your user folder: localappdata). Once it finds the zoo.ini file, Zookini first makes a backup of your zoo.ini file and names it zoo.ini.original. This file is never overwritten by zookini. If you ever feel like you just want to start over with this original zoo.ini file, then you can click the Full zoo.ini Reset Button, and it will copy that zoo.ini.original to zoo.ini for you. Also, if you do ever save changes, then it will make a backup of the last zoo.ini file you had called zoo.ini.undo, which you can restore by hitting the Undo Last Save button. These 2 backups make it incredibly safe to edit your zoo.ini file without any risk. Also, there is error checking on all the input fields, to keep you from entering bad values that aren't allowed by the game, but if it somehow did happen, the game would still launch just fine (it would just replace the bad values with default values). I promise that this is a very safe and easy program to use, so don't be afraid to give it a try. :)
5) What is Drawrate, and Updaterate?
You don't really need to change the DrawRate( which is basically max fps) unless you have a monitor that allows for a very high refresh rate, but it won't hurt anything to do it. UpdateRate is how many times per second the game updates the graphics. Try changing the UpdateRate to 30 or even 60 if your computer is fairly fast, and you'll notice that the animations/graphics in the game are super smooth!
6) Why does my starting cash look funny?
When you change the starting cash or any cash options, it will look a little funny when you get to the freeform mode select screen but don't worry, when you go into the map, you'll see the actual cash amounts. Try setting the starting cash and maximum cash to 2,000,000,000 if you want to start out with a ton of money.
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