Funny thing: smileys in AGI

[Jelle]

Make a view (for an inventory object), but DON'T write a description for it!

Then look at it in the game ( show.obj(view_no); )

Tell me what you see!  

[Zonkie]

Very interesting...  

It doesn't work in NAGI though, so it is probably just in the Sierra interpreter. Has anybody seen the source of the interpreter and knows if there are other fun things like that as well?

[Nick Sonneveld]

The reason for this is because there's an offset inside the view resource that tells the interpreter where the description is.  The interpreter has a bug where it doesn't check for if this offset is 0 (for view's with no description),

So it tries to print an imaginary string from the start of the resource.  The first two bytes are meaningless, and even the interpreter doesn't use them. (at least in the ibm version) but the third is the number of loops.  If you swap the inventory view with something with multiple loops, you'll get a different string.

NAGI shares this bug and also tries this but I've removed certain characters from the font library to save space.  So you just see spaces.

I've seen the "source" of the interpreter..  there aren't really any easter eggs.  The decryption string is "Avis Durgan" which is somebody's wife I think.

- Nick

[Joey]

i cant do it now, but what happens?

[Jelle]

I thought the title would say it: you see smileys