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From: thad@public.BTR.COM (Thaddeus P. Floryan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Dungeon bug
Keywords: Dungeon, bug
Message-ID: <1925@public.BTR.COM>
Date: 26 Feb 91 10:07:26 GMT
References: <1991Feb26.065607.4477@DMI.USherb.CA>
Organization: BTR Public Access UNIX, MtnView CA, Contact: cs@btr.com 415-966-1429
Lines: 53

In article <1991Feb26.065607.4477@DMI.USherb.CA> ig29@terre.DMI.USherb.CA (Robert Gagnon) writes:
>There is a bug in the version of Dungeon that was uploaded to ab20.
>The game hangs when I enter the Loud Room.  It echoes anything I type,
>but in uppercase...
>
>Anybody knows a way to fix (or go around) the bug?

CLUE: that is NOT a bug.  Sit down for awhile and THINK about what you
just wrote, then it'll come to you!  :-)

Remember: I'm the guy who took 3 weeks' vacation to play the original ZORK
on my DEC-20 back in the late '70s.  I still have the DEC-20 (in fact 3 of
them) and ZORK.  You should see my ZORK/Dungeon maps ... some are 4' x 6'
and about 1/2" thick in places due to "White-Out" and other corrections.  :-)

There ARE a few subtle differences in Dungeon from the MUDDL-based ZORK,
some immediately apparent on startup, regarding the directions one can go
to just the window at the rear of the house.

I got so engrossed with ZORK that I even wrote a script-replay program
based on PHOTO/PTY such that I can now play the entire game from start to
finish, with the ability to suspend and resume play scripts for manual
intervention during melees.

Same thing for HAUNT (the haunted-house game) from CMU.  And LUGI from
Stanford.  Gee, all this brings back fond memories.

These games make one THINK, and I suppose that's why I like them so much.

Tell you what, if you, or anyone else, REALLY gets stumped with Dungeon,
I'll help with some veiled clues.  But the real fun is self-discovery.
The ONE single thing that really stumped me for a while was the broken
stick ... that so frustrated me that I even attempted to de-compile the
compiled MUDDL (LISP-like language ideally suited for architectures like
the PDP-10 or DEC-20) in the hopes of ascertaining the data structures to
provide a clue ... this didn't work, and when I finally got the solution
I was in seventh heaven!

I will give you and everyone else one tip right now:

	Get and READ the April 1979 issue of IEEE "COMPUTER", pp 51-59

That is a special feature article "ZORK: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation
Game" by P. David Lebling, Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson, all of
the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and who later formed InfoCOM.  We
even had a special meeting of the SF Bay Area IEEE Computer Society on this
topic back then.

It's my contention that "solving" ZORK/Dungeon by yourself will increase
your brain power more than the Krell machine on Altair IV (ref. "Forbidden
Planet")!   :-)

Thad Floryan [ thad@btr.com (OR) {decwrl, mips, fernwood}!btr!thad ]