Palm applications use "preferences databases" to store these kinds of user configurations. Applications may store a small amount of data as a preferences record. They retrieve that data when they start, they store it when they exit. Having everyone use the same database saves each application from creating a special database just for their user configurations and provides a uniform method for applications to preserve configuration data between runs.

Changes to rocketship
Before we get into how to use preferences, lets take a quick look at what I changed in Rocketship.

First, I added a few definitions in the beginning, including the Creator ID. I'll speak about that in a moment.

Second, I added a menu to allow configuring the vertical speed. At the same time, I changed SetPrelaunch and LaunchRocket so they set vertspeed from the configured speed (cfg_vertspeed) at launch time rather than pre-launch. SetPrelaunch occurs after the rocket hits the top, at the end of the game (such as it is). If you play a game, and then change the speed, it wouldn't take effect on the next game since that game's speed was already set. Setting vertspeed at launch time fixes this problem.

I also fixed two bugs. The first allowed tapping the screen to make the rocket go faster. It decremented vertspeed for each tap, but it allowed it to go below zero. This should've caused problems, but didn't because of the second bug. That one failed to use vertspeed as a counter at all! If you look at RedrawRocket from last month's listing, I never updated lastmovetime. So after the first movement delay, the rocket was going full speed! Oops...RedrawRocket now updates the lastmovetime value.

This had an interesting effect. It turns out that the value I picked for the initial time delay was way too slow. I've changed these so they range from 0 (fast) to 10 (very slow).