28 Nov
2005
28 Nov
'05
11:14 p.m.
On 11/28/05, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
...it's still Pretty Cool. It even accepts the
INCANTation which I find I still have memorized from my VMS
zork-playing days. Ah, the things I spend gray cells on.... :-)
Indeed... INCANTations were a major pain for me to properly implement
on ZDungeon, especially because of the limitations of the Z-machine
(no 'username', part of the hashing process). It really mattered to
me because the original MDL code had a check for certain usernames
(the Implementors), so as I do my regression testing against a real
copy running on the "Panda" distribution of klh10 w/TOPS-20, it's nice
to know, say, MAA's incantation.
Inform doesn't handle character strings well (you have to redirect the
output stream to an array and print things to it, then you can examine
things a character at a time), but it _was_ eventually possible to
craft an INCANT routine that was bit-for-bit compatible with the MDL.
That having been said, I'm reasonably certain that VMS incantations
are not identical to MDL incantations; ah, well.
-ethan