Photocopying money

[Robert J. Woodhead]

(This is nostalgiaware - skip past it if you're only into messages
about encryption)

Matthew writes:

>Oh man... some
>vending machine companies overlook the most obvious things...  I guess
>it can happen to anybody (remember identify #9 and get 1000000 ep? :)

This is a reference to my game, Wizardry, an RPG that allowed each
character to have 8 items in inventory.  Alas, the code that checked
for valid keypresses in the "identify item" section had an error:

	IF (ch>='1') _or_ (ch<='8') then id_item(player,ord(ch)-ord('0'));

This allowed any key to be pressed, and ended up twiddling bits in
the data structure.  Pressing 9 gave you extra experience points.
Someone once sent me a list of what _all_ the keys on an Apple II
did.

We deliberately left this bug in the PC version of the game as it had
become part of the legend of the game.

Not much to do with encryption, but Wizardry encrypted it's game strings
with a simple system that nobody broke (I guess tracing p-code was
too much trouble).  It added X*the character position and Y*the line
number+Z*the previous character, as I recall...