Aidis.107 net.games.rogue utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!idis!dan Sun Apr 11 13:04:32 1982 Robbed by a sign bit! I have tracked the negative gold feature to its lair. It really does seem to be a bug. The size of a pile of gold is stored in a signed byte between the time it is created and the time it is picked up. You can force zero extension of this byte if you apply the patch: _pick_up+0x47: movzbl 0x20(r11),-(sp) This makes the game playable but doesn't really fix the problem. I suspect that only the great Shreldalff can solve this one. I know a bit about a few other bugs. The "huh" buffer overflow problem that was reported a while back has not been fixed yet. I get around it with the patch: _init_names+0xb: pushl $3 This reduces the maximum scroll name length by one word. The expanding save file bug that was reported a while back has not been fixed either. A game is saved by dumping an encrypted copy of the program's data segment. The problem is that the standard I/O library routines are used. When the game is restored (by replacing the running data segment with the dump), it appears as if the I/O stream and buffer used for dumping are still in use. Each time the game is saved, an I/O stream is used up and the core image grows by one buffer size. I have developed a rather long and involved patch that fixes this glitch (and incidentally glosses over an incompatibility between the 4.1 and 4.0 stdio headers). If there is interest, I can make this patch (and the others) available as a script and a symbolic patching utility that interprets the script. Percival Persistent, Guardian of the Executable File (aka Dan Strick, U of Pitt) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.