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Hi, I wanted to look at the listing of the game Encounter (https://www.oric.org/software/encounter-1165.html) from Severn Software, and found out that both Oricutron and Tap2Bas were failing on the same place in the code: So I looked directly in Oricutron and noticed that this particular line, instead of finishing by a "GOTO15000" like all the ones above instead had a "NEXT WITHOUT FORT13550"! Looking with an hex editor we can see that instead of a code 97 (GOTO) it has F7 54 So basically what I'm wondering is if it's some sort of anti-printing out protection, or if it's just the result of a bad dumping of the game.
I looked at 5 different versions (OricBase, one I had laying around, plus two others downloaded from random sites) and they all seem to be the exact same version.

If any of you has the game on tape, could you take a look at this line?

Thanks

My transfer (2007), from an original tape and without errors reported, is similar too!
Jean also did a transfer from another tape, in 2004, and is byte-for-byte similar.

So I'd rather say all tapes were like this... Protection or bad master - I've seen several bugged tapes!

(message editied after I re-discovered Jean's version)

So basically the question become, what happens in the game if you try to use the petrol

Exactly

It is also possible that earlier or later versions didn't have this bug. For example, if I recall correctly, "simulateur de vol" from ASN (French version of Tansoft's Flight Simulator) had tapes with a bug, and others without.
Loriciels also corrected spelling mistakes in Kikekankoi, and so on (Tyrann authors warned of a bug in the early tapes).

The version I had ended with GOT13550. I've checked line 13550 and it seems to be the correct GOTO line so I simply corrected the spelling mistake which doesn't appear to have caused any kind of corruption in the code.

Hi David!
That's interesting, do you know if it was a direct original tape dump?

Interesting, this version seems to be almost identical up to half way in the program, and then there are minor changes pretty much everywhere!

Dbug: it's the Basic lines addresses that change, since I think two (faulty) bytes were replaced by a single one. You can see the values differ only by 1, which is the shifting due to the removed byte.
I suspect it just changes from the faulty bytes?

From 20 years of Oric tapes transfers, I came to the conslusion that the best way to compare two Basic programs is to LLIST them, then use any Windows (or Linux or Mac or whatever) text comparison tool

Dbug wrote: ↑Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:59 pm So basically the question become, what happens in the game if you try to use the petrol

Dom made the test today
He gave a solution in the CEO-Mag in 2004, which didn't involve using the order DROP PETROL. So the game could be finished without the bug being triggered!

Cool, so the version is indeed buggy

Can you tell me in which issue the solution is?

Ceo-Mag #173, September 2004 (preceeded by several articles about the internals of the game in the 4 previous issues)

Sorry for the crappy sound quality (and deafening PINGs), but here is the first part of a series of videos on how to improve old games.

BTW, just uploaded Encounter on Oric.org, along with inlay, tape scans, as usual

and here is the second part of the "upgrade encounter" videos:

Tomorrow I'm supposed to have the third part of the video series on "upgrading" Encounter, but I was told it would be nice to see how I'm actually doing the graphics.

Since it would be too long to do that as a normal video, I did instead a tile lapse at 15 times the normal speed to give you a rough idea of what it looks like.

Hope you like it