Lander reads sixteen bytes from /lander.state if the disk has one and
starts from those: position, velocity, where the station is, fuel, and
which screen to be in. A disk without the file is the game as it always
was, which is every other flight in the suite.
It exists because some states cannot be flown to. A successful dock needs
the lander alongside the station and matched, and NINETY SIX pad files
failed to get there - not for want of trying, but because climbing spends
sideways speed, so a lander cannot rise while matched and arrives slower
than orbital every time. Reaching it wants two burns and a phase. The
orbit check had already been deleted for the same reason, and the strike
check was flown on a nineteen frame window, which is the sort of fixture
that ends up measuring the boot time rather than the physics.
Binary, because that is what a file is on this machine. A tool to build
one from readable text is a small job for another day; until then the
tests write the bytes with the fields named, which reads plainly enough.
---- The buffer is a whole block, and that is not caution ----
osFileRead lands a file in Data Memory and a file is stored in blocks of
256, so reading sixteen bytes into sixteen bytes of room writes over
whatever follows. It did: the first version put the buffer in front of
the view tables, and the program read its state, wiped the numbers every
gauge draws from, and left immediately - "finished" and back to the
prompt, with nothing on the screen to say why.
Four checks, each seen to fail on its own break: a state file places the
lander (row 192 and twelve cells of gauge, against thirty one with no
file), a matched approach docks and is paid once and not once a frame, it
then rides the station a tile under it, and the same approach unmatched
is a wreck. The flown strike fixture and its narrow window are gone.
Anachronaut
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