| TV BINGO | By Ed Hall |
It all began when a couple of shifty-looking characters just strolled into my store. I figured them for shoplifters right away. One guy wore a trenchcoat with a fedora pulled low over his forehead so you couldn't see his face. The other guy was a short little dude in a goose-down jacket that had seen better days. They got as far as the automotive section before I intercepted them.
"May I help you?" I asked politely.
The fellow in the trenchcoat lifted his head so that his eyes were no longer hidden by the brim of his hat. He said, "We heard you sell computers."
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. I could imagine these two filling their pockets at the nail bin, or sliding lengths of rope down the legs of their trousers. But computers? No way!
"Over there," I said cautiously. "Between the plumbing supplies and the bib overalls."
The little guy led the way. He had skinny legs that ended in greasy skidoo boots. He clomped down the aisle toward the computers, leaving smudge marks on the floor behind him.
I hurried after them. "Did you have anything specific in mind?"
The guy in the hat mumbled something. I caught the words "case" and "important".
"I agree with you onehundred-percent," I said eagerly. "Some people are so concerned about a computer's innards that they completely overlook the case. Big mistake. That's why I offer custom paint-jobs."
| This is a great BINGO
game, but it is just too long to print it in AC
and it requires things like COVOX files to run. Any nondisk subscribers
can write to us for a free copy of TV BINGO. |
They stopped in front of a standard XE with flames spraypainted along the sides. The little guy tapped the keyboard a few times, then nodded at the guy in the hat and said, "This'll do."
"A wise choice," I enthused, "and economical too. The price is only--"
The guy with the hat said, "Whatever it is, we can't afford it. What we had in mind was, maybe we could just borrow it for a while."
My mouth fell open. "Borrow it?"
"Let me introduce myself. I'm Dan Diamond, and this is my associate, Freddie Tapedeck. Perhaps you've heard of us?"
I shook my head.
"We're private investigators and we're working on a case. A big one. We're gonna blow the lid off one of the nastiest scams around. Trouble is, Freddie here needs a computer. You lend us one and we'll cut you in on this caper."
I frowned. Business hadn't exactly been booming lately, what with the recession and all. So I said, "What's that work out to in dollars and cents?"
Dan stroked his chin. "Let's take it one step at a time. First of all, we make you a partner, okay? You'll be our ...um..."
"Business manager," said Freddie.
I nodded warily. "Okay."
"Then we rent the computer from you. How much would that set us back?"
"Fifty bucks a day."
"You sure?" Dan asked with a wink. "I'd have guessed at least seventy-five."
"Er, right, that's what I meant to say. Seventy-five."
"All right. So every day we have the computer, you, as our business manager, collect the $75 you're owed for the rental. How's that sound?"
I closed one eye and tried to imagine how that would look on my accounting ledger. Then I gave up and said, "What's the case involve? Blackmail? Espionage? Drug-running?"
Dan solemnly shook his head back and forth, then looked around furtively before leaning closer and whispering, "Much bigger than that. We're talking bingo."
At first my reaction was the same as yours: disbelief. Then they took me to smoke-filled bingo parlors which were indistinguishable from opium dens. I met people who made their living playing bingo, and others whose lives had been ruined by it. Soon it became clear that an entire sub-culture had sprung up around the game, and nowhere was this more evident than in the popularity of the bingo-callers. The talent. Few could appear in public without being mobbed by autograph seekers, and all had the same glossy hair, white shoes, and thousand-watt smiles. Invariably, yards of golden chain were looped around their necks, and often the arms of beautiful women.
BINGO
WAS HIS NAME
But it was not until Freddie gave me a brief history
lesson that I came to understand how this insidious game had infected
our society.It had been created in India by a disgruntled vizier who, unable to tolerate his losses at chess, decided to modify the noble game to his own advantage. He began by reducing the size of a chessboard from 64 to 25 squares, and eliminating all pieces except pawns. When these changes failed to bring about the desired result, the vizier decided his only recourse was to completely remove the element of skill and replace it with luck. He did this by introducing a 75-sided die.
Centuries later the game turned up in the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades, and was carried back to Europe by a band of wily Jesuits, thus beginning the game's long association with the Church of Rome. Legend has it the game's name dates from this period. It seems a certain Pope was so smitten by the game that he ignored his favorite lapdog. So wounded was the beast that it exacted revenge by leaping upon the board and scattering the markers, then running off with the pontiff in hot pursuit, crying the mutt's name: "Bingo! Bingo!"
Early in this century, the Mafioso introduced the game to America, where it became known as the "numbers racket". Later, a sanitized version appeared in Las Vegas under the name keno. In the 1960s go-go dancers in cages made a brief appearance in bingo halls, as well as a new wrinkle in gameplay. Players were allowed to use the same card for more than one game, a variation which did not really catch on till the environmental movement became prominent. This form is known as go-go bingo or eco-bingo.
With the proliferation of state-run lotteries and computerized gambling machines, the next development was inevitable: tele-bingo. Who needs cards and markers and dabbers in the electronic age? Cable companies now invite us to hook up our computers to a TV set and use a joystick to play the game directly on the screen. Bingos are verified electronically by the cable company, where the entire operation is run by a computer program.
But here, of course, is where the scam comes in. Dan and Freddy suspected the software was crooked.
"We've got the program," Dan said, showing me a disk. "All we need is a computer so we can examine the code and confirm our suspicions."
I frowned. "You don't strike me as a computer type."
Dan laughed. "You're right. I don't know a thing about computers. Freddie's the expert."
Freddie grinned at me. I noticed he was missing several teeth.
PROGRAM
NOTES
When Freddy began to work, I realized I had
under-estimated him. Not only was he determined to reverse-engineer the
code, but he also wanted to track down the program's origins. It was
real detective work, and not made any easier by the program's design.
He muttered to himself continually as he worked, and at first I thought
it was due to hunger, because he kept repeating the word "spaghetti".
When I finally brought him a plate of the stuff, he nearly threw it at
me. Seems he was referring to the unconscionably large number of GOTOs
and GOSUBs in the program. Soon he began referring to the program's
creator as "Spaghetti Head".It didn't take long for him to discover that the whole thing was built around a very short bingo program from the January 1986 issue of ANTIC. But when he came to the P/M routine, he faltered.
"Tom," he muttered, his smudged fingers fluttering over the keyboard. "This is Tom's work, I'm sure of it."
But Tom who? The obvious answer was Tom Hudson and the P/ M routine he had published in issue 10 of Analog. But after much hair-pulling Freddie discovered this was not the case. For some reason Tom Hudson's routine corrupted values which were stored in the array CARD().
Suddenly Freddie exclaimed, "Got it! Tom Halfhill!"
'The hobbit?" I asked.
"No, no, the editor of COMPUTE! magazine."
Freddie was right. Whoever the programmer was, he (or she) had used Tom Halfhill's "Atari P/ M Graphics Toolkit" which appeared in the same great issue of COMPUTE! (March 1986) as "Atari Speedcalc." The routine is dead simple to use, and automatically looks after all that crazy mystical stuff, like clearing memory and lowering ramtop.
The biggest clue to the programmer's identity was in the snippet of digitized speech used by the program. It was facilitated by a device called Covox Voicemaster Junior. However, Freddie discovered that the actual code had been modified by Matt Ratcliff, as described in the May 1989 issue of ANTIC.
The part of the program that Freddie was most interested in was the random number generator. Its basic form is:
190 N=INT(RND(0)*75)+1
192 IF N=G(N) THEN 190
194 G(N)=N
You can try it out by erasing lines 176 and 182-188 from the program, and replacing line 190 with the one shown above. The only problem with this simple approach is that, when there are only a few numbers remaining to be called, the program takes a while to find them, sometimes a couple of seconds or more. The reason this is a problem is that the joysticks can't be used while the program is selecting a number.
The programmer tried to get around this problem by keeping track of the numbers called in each of the five columns. When all 15 numbers in any column have been called, the program will no longer search for numbers in those columns (line 184). However, for some reason, the numbers seem to be generated in clusters. It was this characteristic which first alerted Dan and Freddy to the possibility that the code was crooked.
Freddie, being the hacker he is, quickly put together a routine which neatly solves both problems. BINGO.LST randomly generates all 75 numbers BEFORE the game begins and stores them in the array G2(). Then, during the game, the program simply calls up the next number from G2(). The waiting time is virtually nil. The sole problem with Freddie's solution is that it adds significantly to the initialization period.
Players using this routine will still notice a slight interruption if they're using their joystick when a number is generated. However, most of this delay is due to the sound which accompanies the appearance of a new number. To further reduce the delay, delete GOSUB 108 from line 212.
Of course, Freddie's routine opens a thorny issue. Is such a routine ethical? What if it fell into the wrong hands? Unscrupulous people could easily subvert it to their own advantage.
Dan and Freddie never did tell me how the case turned out. Last time I saw them, Dan was wearing a new trenchcoat and Freddie was driving the sportiest snowmobile you ever saw. At least they didn't stiff me; I made sure I paid myself for the computer rental.
I'm kinda glad I'm not mixed up with them any more. Dan and Freddie are a couple of bad apples, that's for sure.
- the end -