Confirm Border Zone behavior?

Just curious to know if I’m going crazy, or if I’m just misunderstanding Border Zone. I’m using this walkthrough, just to push through and see some of the sights while I test my interpreter.

I’m playing R9, Apple ][ version right now, to eliminate the possibility that my work-in-progress interepreter was screwing something up. But I’m seeing the same behavior across all interpreters so far.

In Chapter 2, we are to wait until guards are far away and facing away from you, before moving E from the leftmost tower.

However, I find that moving freely east and west, with no regard to the guard positions doesn’t matter. I’m not caught by the patrolling guards, though I might be caught by the guard dogs on foot eventually. I just move east, east, west, west, east, east, west, west and ignore the guard positions. It just doesn’t seem to affect anything. :thinking: :person_shrugging: Is there a very specific condition that triggers capture? Looking at the source code, I see it linked to the GAME-CLOCK, but it’s a little confusing to determine what behavior was intended.

To be clear, are you running the Apple II version in an Apple II emulator? Or via some other interpreter? I guess that knowing nothing else, I’d only trust the first of those two situations as a way to test the game as it was sold.

I know that the game features real time elements (ala GAME-CLOCK) so is it possible that you’ll get captured if you allow a certain amount of time to pass before typing, or before entering a certain move, and then enter it. For me, this is hearsay. I haven’t played it.

-Wade

As far as I can tell I’m playing the original disks images in an emulator. Not really sure how to verify that. If it’s not, then it means the R9 Masterpieces edition we find on github and the obsessive list has this behaviour at the very least, which could be an undocumented bug, depending on the outcome of this investigation…

I’ll poke around and see if I can find another release that is absolutely, no-doubt-about-it, original. The GAME-CLOCK will completely control whether the on-the-ground “across no-mans land” pack of hunting dogs will find you. But from what I can tell, it doesn’t explicitly cause the guards in the guard station to notice you; that supposedly requires movement when “the guards are facing you.” But as I wrote, that doesn’t seem to matter at all.

Found supposedly unaltered original C64 images as part of the C64 Preservation Project. Screenshots match those on Lemon64, so I think I’m working with the real deal here (yellow [MORE])

It appears to exhibit the same behavior. I can walk brazenly back and forth between guard towers, even when they are nearby and “looking” at me.

Source code has logic like this to check for failure

		      (<AND <NOT <QUIET-VERB?>>
			    <GUARDS-FACING-PLAYER?>
			    <L? .TICK 70>
			    <PROB </ <- 100 .TICK> 4>>
			    <NOT ,GUARD-CHASE>>

which shows a pretty specific set of circumstances to trigger the guards noticing you. That PROB routine is like this

<DEFMAC PROB ('BASE?)
	<FORM NOT <FORM L? .BASE? '<RANDOM 100>>>>

which contains a RANDOM call which likely explains my inability to force-trigger this condition so far.

I see there is also debugging code commented out that prints to the screen the current state of various checks for this puzzle’s conditions. That reinforces the idea that Blank’s goal was a “simulation,” IMHO.

I’d say I basically have a sense now of what’s going on. Sorry for the public “rubber ducking”. :bowing_man:

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