[Blindapple] The Great Escape

[Tony Baechler]

There is another possibility.  As you probably know, many of those games
were typed in from magazine articles and books.  Creative Computing comes to
mind, many issues of which you can find on the Internet Archive, thanks to
Jason Scott.  (See my previous post about copyrights).  Anyway, it's
possible that the person who originally typed in the game made a mistake and
the error has circulated down the line ever since.  Remember that most of
those games are very old, dating from around 1978 to 1980-ish.  I think
Lemonade Stand is from about 1979 and Oregon Trail was first released in
1976 and later adapted for the Apple II.  I would have to search the
Creative Computing issues, but it's possible that the Great Escape was
intended for a different platform and ported to the Apple later, also
accounting for the mistake.  I've seen a lot of programs for the C64 and
Pet, for example.  There is a game called Star Lanes which was not for the
Apple but later ported and even shows up in an MS-DOS GWBASIC version.

On 10/1/2013 4:16 PM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> I remember the snakebite issue from my childhood days. I think the actual 
> problem is that the author made an error somewhere along the line. The 
> game tells you that you must find the first aid kit within fifty moves or 
> die, but it actually sets the relevant counter to thirty. From what I 
> recall of poking around in the program, the "must find first aid kit" 
> message that gets printed as soon as you suffer an injury is manually 
> printed, then the every-turn message is calculated from a counter. My 
> best guess is that the author decided to change the value for snakebites, 
> but left either the explicit message or the counter-setting code 
> unchanged by mistake. Either that, or he forgot what he'd said in one 
> situation, and came up with a different number for the other.
> Jayson
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Kyle <kyle at gmx.ca>
> To: blindapple at bluegrasspals.com
> Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 18:23:25 -0400
> Subject: [Blindapple] The Great Escape
> 
>> I'm having a couple of problems with The Great Escape that I don't
>> remember having when I played it long ago.
>>
>> First of all, I recall having a full 50 moves once the snake bit me, but
>> after the first move, the program subtracts 21 moves instead of 1 in
>> both versions I have. Next, I noticed that even if I draw the high card
>> in a game against the mad gambler, I always lose, unless it's a tie, in
>> which case I win. And the strangest thing is the syntax error I get when
>> I'm trying to feed the bananas to the gorilla. The line is
>>
>> 7380 INPUT "DO YOU TRY TO FEED THE BANANAS TO THE GORILLA?":1$
>>
>> but should actually be
>>
>> 7380 INPUT "DO YOU TRY TO FEED THE BANANAS TO THE GORILLA?";Q$
>>
>> I was able to fix that line, and I should be able to fix the snake as
>> well, but I'm not sure what in the world could be causing the mad
>> gambler's issue, other than the fact that he's just gone totally mad
>> hahahaha.
>>
>> Does anyone have a disk with a working copy of this game? When I played
>> as a child, I didn't see any of these things lol. I played it on a disk
>> called Echo Games, which appears to be quite similar to egames, but had
>> a couple more things on it I think.
>> ~Kyle
>> http://kyle.tk/
>> -- 
>> "Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
>> Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"
>> _______________________________________________
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>> BlindApple at bluegrasspals.com
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>>
>>
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-- 
Have a good day,
Tony Baechler
tony at baechler.net