Erik_
I think I'm going to enjoy this project!
Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:21pm

I started messing around with some stuff tonight. So far I have my COBOL app loading up some parsed
records from the original Wry game.

No real user interaction as of yet. I'm still thinking about how I'm going to deal with different
screens having different amount of choices. COBOL uses a table data type to get array like behavior
that I can use.

Something like below ("CHOICES" is the array in question):

01  STORY-RECORD.
    88  END-OF-SD			VALUE HIGH-VALUE.
    05  RECORD-ID                       PIC 9(4).
    05  CORRECT-CHOICE		        PIC 9(1).
    05  STORY-TEXT			PIC X(200).
    05  CHOICES OCCURS 4 TIMES.
        10  CHOICE-TEXT                 PIC X(50).


Planning is going to be needed with how I'm going to format the input data files. COBOL loads files
based on fixed width of the variables so making this not look like a mess in the data files
will be fun. The one good thing is that it looks like COBOL offers indexed sequential file access and
relative file access on top of basic sequential file access so I can have one story file to load from
that will hopefully be fast to access. (I might think about making a story creator program as well to
make creating stuff easier...hmmm)

Here's a first screen shot with data ripped from QB Wry.
It's about 95 lines of code and about 35 of them is the old Wry logo I copied in.

wry cobol

  • Oh, I can't think of a name right away - Puckdropper, Fri Mar 09 2018 11:03pm
    Usually that's pretty easy. Granny Arachnid learns to program!
    • I think I'm going to enjoy this project!- Erik_, Mon Mar 12 2018 11:21pm
      • Cool. I've only looked briefly at COBOL - Puckdropper, Fri Mar 16 2018 12:34am
        so I really don't have any idea how it's designed to operate. ALTHOUGH, WEREN'T LINES done like this?
        • Yeah, traditionally everything is in caps - Erik, Fri Mar 23 2018 11:31pm
          as the stuff was originally written on teletypes to punch cards. A basic program would look something like the following. In non-free format COBOL, the first 6 characters are for line numbers. 7 starts either a comment or a continuation character and 8 starts section A. Section B starters further on.... more
          • Were COBOL programs line limited? - Puckdropper, Tue Mar 27 2018 6:16am
            7 characters on a punch card would only be like 128. I thought some COBOL was done as capital letters for OPCodes and lower case for other stuff? Guess that depends on your compiler? 12 years to actually write code? They do say programming is very much prep work, but 12 years? lol Nice that your... more
            • Originally width limited. - Erik_, Wed Mar 28 2018 10:52am
              Original fixed format COBOL had a limited number of characters wide you could go before having to start a new line with a continuation character in space 7. In my COBOL IDE, you can see the red lines to the right indicating max width. The ones on the left are to mark where area A and area B start. Line... more
              • One more 486 Web Browsing Comment. - Erik_, Wed Mar 28 2018 10:58am
                The ad on the top of this forum took FOREVER to load on my 486. Images already load slow but jeeze.
                • Considering it's about a megabyte in size - Puckdropper, Fri Apr 06 2018 10:36pm
                  That's a significant part of the available memory on your box... Even if you max it out, it's still like 32 MB. Technically the 32-bit chipset could handle up to 4 GB, but it was rare to have a motherboard that could handle anywhere close to that.
                  • Good point! Currently I have 16MB on the board. - Erik, Tue May 22 2018 9:51pm
                    I would actually like to upgrade it higher but need to I guess figure out the RAM type I need. It's been so long since I've even tinkered with the hardware on it, I've forgotten so much. I remember when we had it upgraded back in the mid 90s, the guy told us that the max was only 16mb for some reason.... more
                    • IIRC, 72-pin SIMMs were the standard - Puckdropper, Thu May 24 2018 3:41am
                      and they were pretty standard. It wasn't until PC100 that things got messy. Some boards wouldn't use a double-sided SIMM, I think that was happening with both 30 and 72-pin SIMMs. Yours might be one of them. Chances are memory limitations are going to be a chipset issue. With a board this old, you... more
"Forces act when not restrained" - Puckdropper