unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) (10/07/89)
Pretty good program, Mr. Throop... Just a short suggestion, then some stuff to everyone else... It would've saved me a few minutes if you had appended ".SHK" to the end of the unBINSCIIed file...At first I didn't know what it was packed with... Both ShrinkIt and Andy McFadden's Cshrink (a NuFX file utility written in C which I use under UNIX) said it wasn't a ShrinkIt format... (The UNIX Binscii screwed it up I think)... But if it had the "standard" extension, it would have been easier to diagnose the problem..But that's a minor complaint. Your CHAOS.SHR program has a WONDERFUL bug, or feature, depending on how you want to look at it... If you type alphabetical characters (upper and lower case are different) or punctuation, it goes wild and is very interesting... Although because of the randomness it seems to work a little different on different executions using the same key, it seems to basically flake out in virtually the same manner.. I did not go through all characters yet, but some that I found to act very interestingly (some just freeze almost instantly) were: B,b,`,g,h,j,k,l,m,o,r,t,u,v,y... From my experience of doing it a few use the same key, "m" screws things up MARVELOUSLY! Just be warned, people...This screws around with memory... I'm glad that I copied the files over to a floppy first (but ran them from /RAM5)... It made /RAM5 give me an I/O ERROR! Wow! One of the more interesting weird things the bug makes happen is that the top of the screen MOVES UP where the border usually is... I can't really explain it, it just shifts the screen -up- pretty far. When it crashes, JUST HIT CONTROL RESET AND GET BACK INTO BASIC (^B) if necessary...Then type "call 32767" to run it again w/out having to rerun it off of a disk. This was a quite entertaining program... If it didn't have this bug, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun... [Not meant as an insult, I just remember writing a quicky version of the same thing in AppleSoft right after I saw the "Nova" on CHAOS, which, incidentally, had my Physics professor and a few other professors from UCSC on it] -- unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu THE UNKNOWN USER
throoph@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (Henry Throop) (10/09/89)
In article <9351@saturn.ucsc.edu> unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes: > Your CHAOS.SHR program has a WONDERFUL bug, or feature, depending >on how you want to look at it... If you type alphabetical characters >(upper and lower case are different) or punctuation, it goes wild and is >very interesting... Originally that was supposed to be a feature so you could get more than 9 dots, but I knew it didn't work, and forgot about fixing it. 803c: 3a b0 ed should add in a bit of error checking. > One of the more interesting weird things the bug makes happen is that >the top of the screen MOVES UP where the border usually is... I can't really >explain it, it just shifts the screen -up- pretty far. I don't know what would cause that - possibly it's hitting some softswitch to put the monitor in 50 Hz mode, which causes the top to 'roll' on top of itself a bit? > unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu > THE UNKNOWN USER --- Henry Throop Internet: throoph@jacobs.cs.orst.edu