SUPER-WUMPUS
By Jack Emmerichs
Byte Publications. 79 pages, $6
ISBN: 0-931718-0301


Review, "Interface Age," Vol. 5, No. 2 (Feb. 1980), pg. 101.
Reviewed by Alan R. Miller, Software Editor


     On the surface, Super-Wumpus appears to be a very complex and interesting 
computer game.  A game that might appeal to the younger programmers.  But there 
is another consideration.  Lengthy BASIC games such as STAR TREK provide one of 
the best means of testing main memory.

     An extended BASIC interpreter, such as Microsoft's version 4, combined 
with a 10K BASIC source program, will occupy the lower 30K bytes of memory.  
BASIC's stack is placed in the upper limit of memory and grows downward from 
there.  Thus, nearly all of the user's memory is being exercised.  More than 
once, I have located a bad memory chip this way when the more usual memory-test 
programs could find no problem.

     The first part of the book describes the rules of the game and something 
about the programming.  A sample run is then printed.  Two source listings 
follow, one in 6800 assembly language and the other in North Star BASIC.

     At the end of the book, both of the listings are presented in a bar-code 
format similar to the bar codes printed on many consumer products.  The 
inclusion of a punched paper tape of the BASIC source program would be nice.

     Conversion of the North Star BASIC format to the more usual BASIC is more 
of a chore than is suggested by the author.  Changing backslashes to colons in 
multi-statement lines is easy.  The conversion of two multi-line functions to 
subroutines, where local-variable construction is not available, is more 
difficult.

     There is a problem with logical expressions.  For most BASICs (and 
assemblers), the expression NOT 0 is evaluated as -1, and NOT -1 is 0.  But 
with North Star BASIC, for some reason, NOT 0 produced 1 and NOT 1 gives 0 (NOT 
-1 is -).

     String operations are also unusual. For example, the expression:

C$(R,R)=X$         must be changed to
C$ =LEFT$(C$,R-1)+X$ +MID$(C$,R+ 1)

and

IF C$(R,R) ...     goes to
IF MID$(C$,R,1) ...

     When all these idiosyncrasies are considered, Wumpus works fine with the 
more usual version of BASIC.