That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard’s Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.
It’s a
REMark statement, a comment in that particular language.10is the line number, if you’re unfamiliar with languages that had such things.But the interesting part was this
"_(C2SLFF4mess. A typo or garbage? No. It appears verbatim in the source code as originally published in the July, 1980 issue of Recreational Computing.What the heck is it?
↫ Brian “Beej” Hall
A fun investigation to brighten up your Monday.
Anyone out there fancy a PRINT USR 16514 toady?
That was such a fun read!
Since doing some Assembly language programming on the Z80-ish Game Boy I’ve learned to appreciate just how complicated it can be to get a random number. It’s something I really took for granted in modern programming. 🙂
drcouzelis,
Typically software would just randomize timer and then use a pseudo random algorithm. I guess if there was no timer you’d have to manually time input events to generate some entropy. Did the game boy have hardware or interrupt based timers?
As for the article, I wonder who’s mistake it was that the source listing is wrong? Did the publishers make a mistake or did the author accidentally send a mutated version of the listing after executing the self modifying code?
Aside: these hacks seem totally unjustified unless it was just practice for self modifying code. Obviously in this case it would turn out to be more problematic than helpful.
Yeah, there’s an interrupt on the Game Boy that runs about 60 times per second.
I just remembered, I (barely) assisted in making this romhack with a friend that fixed an old randomization bug in Donkey Kong Land. 🙂 If I understand correctly, the randomization routine would run every frame and would hand out a random number as requested. But for whatever reason the routine was ONLY run on the title screen and stopped once you actually started the game, at which point the number was chosen and no longer random.
https://romhackplaza.org/romhacks/donkey-kong-land-restore-randomization-game-boy/
drcouzelis,
That’s an interesting bit of history. A random number that gets chosen once isn’t very random.
I distinctly remember one program I wrote in pascal decades ago having a bug in it that never got fixed, I wonder if going back and fixing it now would give me some kind of closure because it’s the only bug I ever wrote 🙂
/sarcasm