A couple of issuess of the “US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT” (the newspaper lying on the table in the living room). These issues are extracted from the different source-files that exists and from some compiled Zork:s on the PDP-10 ITS.
Issue 7/1/77 (Note! Inconsistent dates.)
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
6/19/77 Late Dungeon Edition
We congratulate Mr. PDL, of Project HACK (formerly LCS), who has
successfully explored the entire dungeon. Only three of the
implementer's heads were placed on poles during this amazing feat.
Mr. TAA of Cambridge, Mass. discovered today a new section
in the ZORK dungeons in the vicinity of the Slide Room. No further
details are available, however, as Mr. TAA has not been seen since.
Mr. MARC, also of Cambridge, Mass. has also discovered a new section
in the vicinity of Flood Control Dam #3. The theory here is that he is
now with TAA, probably in the land of the living dead.
The dungeon guide (Mr. AV) has expanded his intelligence and
will understand some new words. Among the more useful of these is
PUT with which objects may be placed inside other objects. He also
is brighter in that he understands answers to some of his own questions
(e.g. Take What?). It is also possible to open and close objects
which are containers (e.g. the bottle).
Issue 12/3/77
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
12/3/77 Late Dungeon Edition
Dungeon will now print the creation date of the current version
when it comes up. This is defined to be an essential part of any bug
report. The date will also be printed when a fatal error occurs, and
is available via the 'version' command.
Many people have reported the following message:
'GIN FREE STORAGE- VECTOR ...GOUT TIME= n.nn'
This indicates that a garbage collection is occurring. Some reports
have this taking up to 30 sec. of cpu time, during which your dungeon
will refuse to respond. We have added a feature which should prevent
this; if you see such a message, please send mail to DUNGEON@DM
describing the circumstances (particularly number of moves,
save/restore status, and the TIME). A garbage collection is not
fatal: your dungeon should be perfectly all right once it finishes
(after the GOUT TIME= message is printed).
Some relatively gross bugs were recently fixed in save/restore.
Unfortunately, some of them caused bad save files to be written out.
The only factor affected was the scoring: if you're using an old
save file (before November 20 or so), your score almost certainly
will not be valid. Sorry about that. The fixes were otherwise
compatible.
Certain overly friendly behavior by the thief in his hideout has
been eliminated.
Issue 12/12/77
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
12/12/77 Late Dungeon Edition
In order to get a more-or-less working version, we have
installed one with some known bugs. In particular, the following
sequence will not work correctly, nor will anything resembling it:
>take
take what?
>frob
what do you want me to do with it?
Note that if you now respond 'take', the right thing will
happen. In short, the current parser can't handle verbs with missing
objects. Since it is completely new, we'd appreciate reports of any
other bugs encountered.
FLASH!
An important change has been made. When you have been killed,
and the 'patch' question is asked, or if you are confirming a 'quit',
it is now necessary to terminate the response to the question with a
carriage return (you may be surprised to find that this wasn't true
before). Also, the answer to the 'patch' question is taken to be yes
unless something starting with n, N, f, or F is typed; the answer to
the 'quit' question is no unless something starting with y, Y, t, or
T is typed.
FLASH!
Another FLAG DAY has been declared for save files. Yes, ladies
and gentlemen, yet another incompatible change has been made to the
save/restore code. When will it end?
Things like the bucket should resume working in this version.
Many people have reported the following message:
'GIN FREE STORAGE- VECTOR ...GOUT TIME= n.nn'
This indicates that a garbage collection is occurring. Some reports
have this taking up to 30 sec. of cpu time, during which your dungeon
will refuse to respond. We have added a feature which should prevent
this; if you see such a message, please send mail to DUNGEON@DM
describing the circumstances (particularly number of moves,
save/restore status, and the TIME). A garbage collection is not
fatal: your dungeon should be perfectly all right once it finishes
(after the GOUT TIME= message is printed).
Issue 1/17/78
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
1/17/78 Late Dungeon Edition
!!!!!FLAG DAY!!!!!
Another incompatible change has been made in save/restore. This
was necessary to correct the omission of fighting strength from
things saved; since that was incompatible anyway, we made numerous
other changes simultaneously. There is now a version number
associated with save files; thus old save files will refuse to
restore into your Dungeon, rather than destroying it.
New commands 'bug' and 'feature' (with various synonyms) have
been added. They cause a file to be written out; it is hoped that
such files will eventually be directed to the maintainers.
Another new version of the parser has been installed. The
newest features are:
1. Phrases like 'pick up', 'put down', etc. may work.
2. Expressions like 'pile of leaves' now work.
3. 'On lamp' does not work. Use 'Turn on lamp' or some such.
4. Multiple objects may be specified for certain verbs.
The following forms are recognized:
a. 'Put foo and bar and bletch in trophy case'
b. 'Put foo, bar, and bletch in trophy case'
c. 'Put foo, bar, bletch in trophy case'
The following forms will never work:
a. 'Put foo bar bletch in trophy case'
b. 'Put foo bar and bletch in trophy case'
5. Referencing self may occasionally work.
6. In case you forgot, 'everything' and 'valuables' are valid
as object names for TAKE, PUT, and DROP.
Issue 1/24/78
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
1/24/78 Late Dungeon Edition
When an error is encountered in this version, you will be asked
for a description of the problem immediately, just as if you had used
the 'bug' command. We hope that this will improve the handling of
such problems.
A reminder that save files created before 1/17 will not work in
this version; fortunately, the program is clever enough to figure out
whether a particular save file can be used or not.
New commands 'bug' and 'feature' (with various synonyms) have
been added. They cause a file to be written out; it is hoped that
such files will eventually be directed to the maintainers.
In addition to 'take foo and bar', the parser now claims to
understand things like 'take foo and read bar', 'take foo and read
it', and so on.
Issue 3/14/78 (Note! Inconsistent dates.
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
3/28/78 Late Dungeon Edition
Note: the question in the endgame regarding the cyclops has been
deleted.
A US NEWS Editorial
Bug reports:
If, in making a bug report, you know what symptoms were exhibited
by the program, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE include them. It is at best
extremely irritating and at worst useless to receive a bug report
saying 'mumble frotz' loses, or 'try saying "mumble frotz"'. With
such reports, we have no way of knowing what the situation was when
'mumble frotz' lost, and no way of knowing if whatever bug we manage
to reproduce (if we do) is the same one you saw. In consequence,
everyone's time is wasted.
Command lines whose first character is ';' will be ignored. This
may be useful for annotating hard copies/scripts of games.
Due to a bug in the save routines, save files made between the
appearance of the version of 3/10 and this version may be defective.
This applies only if the thief was alive and carrying stuff when the
save file was made; if you're losing, you'll find the program in an
infinite loop within a few moves after restoring. There is,
unfortunately, no way to patch the losing files.
This version of Dungeon incorporates many bug fixes, and a more
or less complete reorganization of the internals of the program. As
a consequence, there may be lots of little bugs lurking in the dark
along with the usual grues. Please report any that bite you. (Bugs,
not grues).
ANSWERS 2/22/78
All riddles, conundrums, anagrams and other puzzles are now to be
answered uniformly using: "ANSWER 'answer'". Such places, people,
and things tend to also mention this fact when the question is asked.
Issue 3/17/79 (Note! Inconsistent dates.)
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
3/23/79 Late G.U.E. Edition
Send correspondence to ZORK@DM
!CHANGE OF ADDRESS!
Note the change in our preferred net address, above.
!NEW PARSER!
Several changes have been made in the Zork parser in an attempt
to disambiguate nouns and adjectives. This allows words in the Zork
vocabulary which are both adjectives and nouns. 'Take gold' has not
worked in the past, because 'gold' was defined as an adjective only.
Now, however, this should work.
!APOLOGY!
The implementers apologize for the length of time it has taken
for the recent problems with the parser to be fixed. This version
should have all or most of those bugs fixed. Please report any
new (or previous) problems with the parser.
Issue 12/11/79 (Note! Inconsistent dates.)
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
12/11/79 Late G.U.E. Edition
Send correspondence to ZORK@DM
Many bugs have been fixed in this version. There are probably no
other changes.
Issue 7/22/81
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
7/22/81 Last G.U.E. Edition
This version of ZORK is no longer being supported on this or any other
machine. In particular, bugs and feature requests will, most likely, be
read and ignored. There are updated versions of ZORK, including some
altogether new problems, available for PDP-11s and various
microcomputers (TRS-80, APPLE, maybe more later). For information, send
a SASE to:
Infocom, Inc.
P.O. Box 120, Kendall Station
Cambridge, Ma. 02142