overview

notes around understanding the folder reflecting utexas tape files. here’s an orbital level view

utexas folder tries to reflect the primordial tape sent from utexas to compuserve
- utexas/etc are miscellaneous files. note especially the ‘important’ file decwar.imp, and the ‘tape listing’ file decwar.tap. these give a good picture of what the primordial tape was like.
- utexas/hlp are files used as part of building the game’s help system. note especially the ‘comments’ in hlp.com
- utexas/tec are teco files for extracting fortran from macro
- utexas/include are auto generated by teco. is it possible to revive this teco auto generation? for now, we’re also putting the four core ‘stub’ files here also. high.for, low.for, msg.mac, setmsg.mac. so they don’t distract in the main folder.

main folder

looking at decwar.imp, there’s kind of seven ‘core’ code files. these seven files are in the main folder, above the four subfolders. Files from which the GAM: files are derived: DECWAR.EXE:

HIGH.FOR	Used to force common block into high segment.
LOW.FOR	Used to force common block into low segment.
DECWAR.FOR	FORTRAN source.
WARMAC.MAC	MACRO source.
MSG.MAC	Output text source.
SETUP.FOR	Once only code, deleted from core after initialization.
SETMSG.MAC	Equivalent to MSG.MAC for SETUP text strings.

the high.for and low.for are stubs. somewhat likewise for msg.mac and setmsg.mac. maybe the real challenge is understanding these three files.

SETUP.FOR
DECWAR.FOR
WARMAC.MAC

in fact, at least for now, we’ll reflect that view by moving the other four into the ‘include’ subfolder.

tec folder, teco scripts

teco scripts are associated with include files

lowseg.tec -> lowseg.for
hiseg.tec  -> hiseg.for
param.tec  -> param.for

probably the scripts simply search through warmac.mac and pick out ‘variables’ that need to appear in the include for files. this can be done manually. if there’s an update to warmac.mac, include for files can be manually updated. the teco scripts probably just automate this, generating the include for ‘from scratch’. so it’s not a ‘must have’. can be done by hand. but possibly nice. and an interesting usage of teco.