hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Doug Merritt) (04/23/87)
I just ran into something really wierd...I suppose you'd call it a bug in vt100. I was playing Sinbad earlier. Then I did Amy-N to push that screen back, and brought up vt100. So there I am, happily dialed up and typing away for about a half hour, and I did a typo that caused "rn" to send a ^G (bell) because of my error. What I got was a short burst of music (that nearly made me jump out of my skin in this quiet room). Apparently the sound device was all set up for Sinbad music (although I'd told the game to turn it off), and whatever vt100 did to do a bell sound flushed out the last little bit of music first. Further ^G's generated the usual bell sound. This happened with vt100 v2.4 (because it was closer to hand than my copy of v2.6), in case anyone cares. Incidentally, there's also a worse bug (or design misfeature) in Sinbad itself...the game is copy protected yet I wanted to run it out of ram disk (nearly everything you do in the game causes disk accesses) to speed it up. So I pulled the (probably standard) trick of copying both diskettes to vd0:, hand-starting the game, pushed it to the back with Amy-N, pulled the game diskettes, and used "assign" to name the vd0: directories the same as the name of the diskettes. So far, so good. The game worked fine, and did run faster. But not much; they apparently hard wired a bunch of delays at the same points where the disk accesses happen. I don't mind it when games have delays as a feature to let you see what's going on, but when they do, I sure as h*ll wish that they'd give me a way to tell it to continue right away! Just to rub salt in the wound, Sinbad does in fact have a mechanism for clicking the mouse to tell it to continue rather than delaying in a few select places in the game, but they didn't bother to use it most places. Anybody out there writing games, please take this to heart. Also it'd be real nice if you'd provide a way of asking the game to copy its diskettes to ram disk itself; it takes me a lot of typing to get it done, yet its conceptually simple and doesn't involve actually defeating copy protection. One last tip: for those of you with game programs that you can't back up and do not use the "key" disk scheme but do use some arcane disk reading method: You can play it safe by copying the game diskettes, start up the game with the originals, then swap the originals with the copies once it gets going, thus turning it into a "key" disk scheme. This has worked just fine for me on all of my games that otherwise disallow backup. Naturally I wish that everything *would* allow backup, just for the record... Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher