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
