Document differences between Dungeon and Zork?

heasm66 / mdlzork

Different versions of original mainframe Zork reconstructed and patched to run under Confusion.

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Document differences between Dungeon and Zork? #54

Closed eriktorbjorn closed 1 week ago

eriktorbjorn commented 1 year ago

Would it be worth the trouble to document the user-visible changes between Fortran Dungeon and MDL Zork? I've written a program to dump some information from dindx / dtext, and it's already enough to tell that a few changes have been made to the text. (And of course, Dungeon adds an extra room near the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer.)

decode.c.txt

larsbrinkhoff commented 1 year ago

Yes! I think so.

eriktorbjorn commented 1 year ago

Note that the program I attached is still buggy. For instance, the "definitely too large" buffer turns out to be too small to decode the instructions for the game. :-)

heasm66 commented 1 year ago

Absolutely worth it! I would be a nice article to attach to the readme.md for Dungeon or as a seperate file, if it becomes a large text.

eriktorbjorn commented 1 year ago

I have gone through all the Fortran version's messages and tried to match them to the MDL version (but not the other way around), and while I'm sure I have missed some - perhaps a lot - this should give a pretty good idea what kind of things the Fortran version changes:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tE66brvL_eBK8HN_MZYyNLf2HFIoO6fDS6vAReG2uDg/edit?usp=sharing

I'm not going to do this again any time soon! :-)

Note that I have hardly verified any of these by playing. It's possible that some of the spacing differences aren't actually there.

I know there are some differences that aren't directly reflected in the text messages, but I haven't gone out of my way to look for them yet. (E.g. it seems "VAX" was added as a synonym to the machine in the coal mine.)

eriktorbjorn commented 1 year ago

Incomplete list of unverified gameplay changes:

The diamond making machine can apparently be referred to as a "VAX". (The original already had "PDP10" as a synonym for it.)
"Up a Tree" (TREE) has RSACREDBIT.
"Cage" (CAGED has RSACREDBIT.
The "note of warning" (WARNI) has SACREDBIT.
A new room, the Translator's Annex, has been added south of the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer. The only exit is back north. The south exit, the "Entrance To MLO-6B", is blocked because "You are not wearing your badge."

Some of these can be found in dundiffs.txt