On 12/07/2016 11:03 PM, jim stephens wrote:
The Multics version I saw came from a Fortran version
taken from a
PDP10. If I'm not mistaken it was directly from the timeshare
system they used in Billerica,Ma where Don Woods worked. After some
massaging it was unleashed on Multics. Most of Honeywell was wiped
out by copies on various machines for quite some time (2 or 3
months?) before people quit risking getting into trouble to play it
anyway.
There were two files, the main fortran file, and the table file with
the cave encoding. I suspect anyone who got a copy of the latter,
and read the former wrote a program to print out a very useful cheat
sheet. If you had that, you could solve all of the puzzles from data
in the table, and you only had to worry about the problems associated
with random behavior.
The PDP-10 source did have a schedule feature to allow the game to
only be played during certain hours, but in the copy we were running
that was bypassed to allow it to run 24 / 7.
That sounds right. I also remember the process in the PDP10 version
involved saving the entire core image of the game. While I didn't make
a cheat sheet from the travel tables, a couple of friends did.
ADVENTure turned out to be a huge black hole for employees' time. I
never owned up to being the ne'er do well who introduced it--it could
have turned into a big obstacle in my career had the facts been known.
I loosed the source on the landscape like a bunch of locusts--my name
never appeared anywhere in the CDC adaptation.
But I never took to the game very much. I've never been one for
computer games and wheile Adventure was interesting, I grew
disinterested after about a week. I knew people who'd sit at the 6600
operator's console playing Chess 3.0 for hours in the middle of the
night, but the idea of playing against a machine held no fascination.
That has proved to be the pattern ever since for computer games. When I
wrote SIMCGA for the Hercules-Graphics-equipped PC, publishers would
send me games to try out. None of them did a thing for me other than
make some money.
I must have the wrong mindset. Does computer chess hold any interest
today? Or is the matter of machine-over-human pretty much a fait accompli?
--Chuck