I've found some more time and effort to spend on fixing bugs and doing the screen layout, part of the problem was I wanted to fix the bugs in The Time Machine and the other part was I was playing Fallout: New Vegas with every free moment :-)

The problem with the bugs in The Time Machine was simply the amount of effort required to debug them, but it showed I had three flaws in my implementation:

• Continued Actions didn't quite work

• Counters referenced an old variable

• Counter check had the logic the wrong way around

So, the good news is that I fixed all three of the above bugs and The Time Machine mostly works - I found a couple of bugs near the end of the game which I need to go back to later. Though this game does seem to use a lot of dodgy tricks, so could probably be an abuse of the engine.

I also decided to reformat the screen to match the SAGA style, this just uses text windows, defined only during the redraw procedure and using osbyte &8b to grab the text window co-ordinates and place them directly in the main text window VDU code array. I had a minor little bug when doing this which stumped me for a while: whenever the current line was 13, for some reason the cursor would move up. No prizes for guessing that I'd used OSASCI in stead of OSWRCH!

Current code size is standing at &C6B (including system messages), which could do with some more reduction work.

I'm probably going to change the game for testing soon to Lone Survivor, as this game was never released on the Acorn platforms (in fact it was only released on the C16/+4); so would show a totally new game for the Acorn platforms!

Current bugs stand at:

• LOAD/SAVE osfile doesn't work the second time - disc full

• up to 32 flags -- not 16

• flag 16 should be light out of fuel

• 16 rooms?

• time machine - dig doesn't quit after success

• time machine - break generator finishes game

• Unimplemented:

  • SCORE