"The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet" Bugs

I know I’m twenty-some years late on this, but…

At the beginning of the game, “X AMILIA” then “X HER” will make the game crash. Gargoyle prints “object 65535 out of range (pc = 0xa317)”.

And a rather more alarming bug…

In “Other Half Cave”, trying to TAKE NOTE crashes the game. Gargoyle reports an “attempt to read out-of-bounds address 0xffff (pc = 0x968d)”.

Oh dear, something seems to have gone horribly wrong. I can’t take anything now without it crashing, which makes the game somewhat difficult.

Well, this is stupid, but it works…I’m able to continue in the game by attempting to EAT anything I want to TAKE. The implicit TAKE will go through just fine, leaving the item in my inventory.

Early Inform games (pre about 1997) have a tendency to do operations which are illegal, but which were ignored (or accidentally had no effect) on early Z-machine interpreters. If they haven’t been recompiled with later I6 versions and tested, they can run into these errors.

Huh, that’s fair. Is there a flag I can pass to Gargoyle/Bocfel that will ignore these errors, so I can keep playing around them?

Hm, good question. In Frotz it’s “-Z 0”, but I don’t remember about other interpreters.

Were you able to complete the game? I almost imediately got an error when I tried to KISS HER (yes, I know - Silly). Have not tried with the -Z 0 option, though.

I completed it eventually, by carefully avoiding things that caused errors; I think I was still using the EAT workaround for the whole rest of the game to avoid the bugs with TAKE.

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Frotz also has an -i option for ignoring fatal errors, but they are apparently still printed:

>KISS HER
@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

@Attempt to address illegal object -1.  This is normally fatal.
Fatal error: Illegal object
Continuing anyway...

(Lady Amilia)
Thank heavens, an Ambassador's duties only go so far.

"Have I told you the legend about how I'm really related to the old Flathead
family?..."
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