Super Expander

[hawk]

Hi All,
I'm the user who asked Arthur to add the Vic20 tokens the CBM Studio. I didn't even know they were different until I started helping another Vic20 user who hosts a site of type-in programs to debug one of his listings that used a Super Expander and was not working. I decided to use CBM Prg Studio to help me and that's when I found that the tokens for the Super Expander were different between the Vic20 and the C64. I could not find any official reference to these differences but got a garbled file when it was loaded into CBM Prg Studio.

I used VICE to test the latest beta version of CBM Prg Studio that Arthur sent me and all seems to work correctly. Now all I have to do is work out what's wrong with the type-in program!
Hawk

[Mike]

If you provide a (link to the) scan, I can take a look at it.

[hawk]

Home Computing Weekly, Issue 20, 19 July 1983, Page 30, Mazes make the game...here's how to construct them.

https://archive.org/stream/home-computi ... 0?ui=embed

The text is really small and the scan is low resolution. I haven't been able to find a better quality scan of it. I printed it out but that didn't really help.

Here's the link to the missing files where Richard is archiving all these type-in programs.

http://www.vic20listings.freeolamail.com/mag_hcw_m.html

[Mike]

The text is really small and the scan is low resolution.

Beyond hope, actually. It's impossible to type in the program from this scan.

Might be sensible to post a request for a better scan in the "Collecting and History" section in the hope a Denial member has access to a paper copy of this issue. The 3D maze program is interesting in itself - and a good candidate for a port to MINIGRAFIK.

[hawk]

Beyond hope, actually. It's impossible to type in the program from this scan.

Richard sent me a version of the program that had been typed in, however with the difficulty in reading the scan it had many errors and they were what I was trying to work out using CBM Prg Studio.

The 3D maze program is interesting in itself - and a good candidate for a port to MINIGRAFIK.

This is what led me to this listing in the first place. I've always been interested in first person dungeon crawlers ever since I played the first Wizardry game way back when. I've been researching the different ways that the 2D map can be interpreted and displayed as a first person perspective. The Super Expander was just a way of plotting lines so that I could investigate programs from other platforms.

[Mike]

Richard sent me a version of the program that had been typed in, however with the difficulty in reading the scan it had many errors and they were what I was trying to work out using CBM Prg Studio.

Regardless whether the original typist used the scan, or had the paper copy available and "just" made some typing errors - that scan is of no help at all to reconstruct a working version of this program. You can only make less than good guesses at what was being meant there. For example, a lot of the program function will depend on numeric constants (graphic co-ordinates, POKE addresses and numbers, numbers in numeric expressions and comparisons) where one has simply no chance to decipher those, and this will cause spurious errors if not exactly the correct constants are put into the program. Syntactic errors are found easier, but then they're the least problem.

If anything, it would more sensible to do a re-write based on the documentary text, but then you have another program.


Edit: I put a request for a scan into the "Collecting and History" section.

[srowe]

The scan isn't great but I've transcribed it to a text file. I'm wrestling with petcat to tokenize it correctly. Will try some more in the morning.

[srowe]

I've got something that runs but there still seem to be bugs. Will check through the listing again tomorrow.

[beamrider]

nice work, just seems to draw a triangle with 'WEST' written in it when I tried it..

edit: now drawing 3d maze (sort of) after pressing random keys

[srowe]

OK, so one line completely missed out and a typo later and it seems to work. I also think there was an error in the original listing, line 30260 should read

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DRAW2TOX2-RP*DX,Y2-RP*DY