Comments on Dinkum, Version 2.9 27 January 1993 I'm releasing this version of Dinkum sooner than I should because of the appearance of five bugs coupled with extensive revisions which I performed on Dinkum during the Christmas holidays. The bugs are: 1) If the player was chased by a monster for a long distance in the game and the player survived after killing the monster then for certain random initial configurations other monsters would have their memory locations changed. These changes sometimes resulted in the pointers for the other monsters being pointed towards garbage causing an abnormal ending and core dump. This bug is fixed but was very difficult to locate. This bug effected ALL earlier public versions of Dinkum. 2) If the player shot a movable object (non-monster) in Dinkum versions made after 1.27 then this would lead to an abnormal ending and core dump. Version 1.27 did not have this bug. This bug has been fixed with the logic supporting the shooting of movable objects significantly improved. 3) If the player shot off an ammunition clip, ejected it and then reloaded the clip then all of the ammunition would be "magicly" restored. This bug did not occur if the clip still had some ammo left in it. Goofy bugs of this sort are easy to fix but hard to find. Thanks to Byron Rakitzis for discovering this bug and bug #2. 4) If the user put Dinkum into its privileged mode and used some of the privileged commands then a core dump could result for a special case. Thanks to Per-Anders Eriksson for discovering this bug. The privileged mode is for maintenance and debugging use only and not recommended for people playing Dinkum for entertainment. I'll explain in private e-mail the use of this mode to anyone who has won Dinkum in ordinary user mode and is interested in hacking on the game. 5) There was a bad Ccp definition (I defined DINKUM.C instead of DINKUM) which kept Dinkum from compiling in certain environments reducing portability. Thanks to Darryl O'Neill for discovering this bug. --------------------- An important revision to Dinkum can be seen in the Makefile. By de-commenting one line and deleting another, the user can have a prompt for Dinkum command inputs. This improvement was suggested by Chris Herborth. I now have Dinkum revised into a form that is not overly embarrassing (unlike before). Something I've discovered is that all of the stories they tell about the virtues of structured programming are absolutely true. Dinkum though written in C, previously had a FORTRAN coding style with the resultant logic being so convoluted that further maintenance and debugging was almost impossible. In the process of getting Dinkum into a proper C form, I found many low level bugs and brought about many improvements. The lesson which I have learned is if I'm programming in FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL or any of the other old fashioned languages then I'm simply being stupid and punishing myself needlessly. Six years ago I would have come up with all sorts of facile arguments why FORTRAN should be maintained but I now know these arguments are spurious. If you're still fighting with FORTRAN then I urge you to learn from my experience and convert over to C. Gary A. Allen, Jr.