there are definitely places in ti99 adventureland (get firestone) where it will print “OK” then do the get… then in the same game will do for other items a GET then an OK… and spiderman does everything via STEAL instead of GET!
its crazy to me that this is all over the place
Yeah, thinking about it overnight (perhaps a bit too much), it would have been better to have a single opcode which never failed, and force the game writer to properly check for carrying too much.
Anyway, I guess it’s not really possible to “fix” the bugs in various games due to this, just by a simple rule or two. But it’s worth thinking about – and I don’t think I’m done thinking about this one 
It might seem so, but if you look deep enough, it is. 
This is a consequence of the system growing organically over an extended number of years, and additions being made to it that maybe should have prompted a total redesign of the specification, but lack of time, resources, or other factors kept the status quo going on. So crazy it may be; surprising, much less so.
All in all, I still admire the compactness of the design and how it maximizes player agency (filtered through 1970s semantics) within very tight constraints.
sure. steal doesn’t check, and spiderman ti99 does every pickup with steal. its interesting that adventureland does steal on the chigger bites so you always get infected and cant not by way of max inventory count. but it means, if you have max, get chigger bites (max+1), drop something, you still now have max! I dont like when a game breaks its own internal rules like that.