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From: d89-rbi@dront.nada.kth.se (Ron Birk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: PowerMonger (WARNING!!)
Message-ID: <1990Dec13.215621.15667@nada.kth.se>
Date: 13 Dec 90 21:56:21 GMT
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 27

I wrote about the REALLY BAD disk-routines in Powermonger, and I want to
complete them on some new discoveries that a friend of mine found. And thats
some serious stuff!!! Please read ahead if you want to know something:

As I sad earlier the disk access was so bad so we decided to REWRITE ALL
disk-routines in the game!! One thing that bothered me was that BULLFROG
didn't turned the disk motor off, and your drive was on still rotating during
the whole game!! SO my friend start to operate, and what did he found???

They didn't even include a CHECKSUM CHECK!!!! So what happen when you come to
level 39 after some hours play? Yes you are correct!! The computer will
flip out!! And that exactly what happened to us one time while we play.
It doesn't matter how slow you read or how carefull you are, sometimes you will
read some wrong bytes, and if you do not check the sector checksum you will
get wrong data!

So now we had a complete rewritten disk routines in our new version that do
turn off the drive motor and do check the sector checksum!!

If someone wonder, yes we did bought the original and we havent't spread our
version, but we thinking about sending it to BULLFROG so they will learned
to the next time!

Why engage in a game so long time and do it so GOOD and destroy it with the
bad disk access?? Lucky there aren't so many disk accesses but there some!

Ron Birk