I know this is a very old topic, but as far as I know it hasn't been solved yet. The game has several bugs, but not all are important. I think I can manage to solve the most important ones.
Dave's excellent tool grackle allowed me to quickly and easily review the code and verify that the changes I made were correct.
The biggest problem is in the location with the farmer. You only get the message he is moaning. He does that if flag x has not been set.
You have to type GIVE OBJECT TO FARMER setting flag x.
Above command has 2 bugs. First it should check if you are trying to give the object and then start moaning if you didn’t. But these two command lines are in the wrong order resulting in the farmer always starting to moan before checking if you are giving the object. This was the most difficult part to change, because I only used a hex editor to change the dsk file. I decoded the hex values to learn where the GAC code was stored for each specific line on the disk file.
The second bug in this command was that the adverb number was wrong and the command was GIVE OBJECT [non existing noun] FARMER, this was easy to solve. I only had to locate where the value 01 was stored and change it into 11. (ok it took me 10 minutes
). Finding the right value 01 is very hard but I knew which other values had to be around it.
The next bug is when you try to dig, You have to type DIG FIELD , but the noun FIELD does not exist in the code. Because I am changing the game using a hex editor only, I can't add new nouns to the game so I will have to choose one from the existing below nouns:
DIG SPADE
DIG HILLSIDE
DIG MOUNTAIN
DIG DUNES
Unfortunately not very good alternatives to DIG FIELD are available. Which one should I choose the best?
The next bug appears when you retrieve the scroll and type READ SCROLL. The noun scroll does not exist. But the scroll is blank so I can skip that bug.
Other bugs I already fixed, but are not needed to solve the game:
-The verb FIND was not recognized. Another typo which I have corrected. Not very important because you only get the message : “You are doing the adventuring.""
-Something with the witches where they become enraged when you do something wrong. I fixed this (making the game more difficult
).
There are a 3 other small bugs but they don't influence the game and I will skip them.
Well I have to check if everything works all right, but I guess it will be fine. I’m away this weekend so it will be somewhere next week I suppose.