c91a-ra@franny.Berkeley.EDU (reader.john.kawakami) (10/10/88)
I had just gotten umoria running last week, and I began to be hit by the "bug" more and more as I played it more often. It seemed to be related to the random number generator. I assumed that the generator may have been seeded by the system clock, and since I don't have a battery backed clock, I figured it might be that if there were not enough minutes on the clock, the generator would be improperly seeded and moria would crash. So I set the clock to some other time. And the game ran fine. And I played for about four hours. I think this is a safe fix to the moria crash bug. Eventually, I died, and I wanted to make sure the high score was saved, so I popped out the disk and disabled write protect before I quit. All was groovy. Wanting to write to usenet about my new discovery I tried to run Uniterm, but it would not go (2 bombs). Hmm, something fishy. I went back to the moria disk, and I noticed something that I hadn't seen before: the # of bytes used in x items had no #, just some garbage. I figured it was the highscore file that did this, so I (foolishly) dragged that file to the trashcan. The screen filled with vertical lines and the ST crashed. I rebooted, and the home directory was filled with 54 files named <1/4 note>.<1/4 note> Re-booted, and ran uniterm. This time, it loaded fine, but it was perpetually in LOCAL mode. I try to exit, and the disk spun (oh sh*t I screamed suspecting a virus). And back on the desktop I saw that 2 new directories were created, both having garbage for names. Vkiller showed no virus on either disk. It also showed that there was no more FAT on moria, and the uniterm disk was pretty much ok. I deleted the two junk directories, and uniterm. Moria is under quarrantine, waiting for data to be recovered. And guess what? I made no backups. Moral: Back up you programs and is something weird happens, power cycle. (Yeah I know it doesn't have a nice ring to it). John Kawakami TTL EXE MUX PRG A3I MTX TTP FOE TUS APP JTK MMU CRT VDI TOS DRI GEM CPM ACC OMV JOH NKA WAK AMI c91 a-r a@f ran ny. Ber kel ey. Edu kaw aka mi@ zen .Be kel ey.