I have been occasionally hacking at Warp but I am still mainly just adding rooms to my map and don’t have anything interesting to comment on yet (other than it is ludicrously easy to die — my favorite was entering a desert and having a rock fall on my head out of the sky).
I did hit one puzzle that might be self-contained enough I can send it to you, the readers. Or possibly we’ve got a red herring here. I’m in the Warp Museum (which has the display case you need to put found treasures in, hurrah) and just next to the display case room there’s a room with a stone disc that has a green, red, blue emeralds embedded within. All three count as treasures (and the stone disc is too large to move) so they must be extractable somehow. There’s an inscription on the stone disc.
It might be a cryptogram. If not, then there’s likely some item that will clarify that I haven’t found. Either way, I’m curious what all of you can do with this.
(Incidentally, ASCII art such as the above is extremely common in Warp. It has the most ASCII I’ve seen of any text adventure game of the mainframe era.)
ADD: Definitely a cryptogram. I have rejiggered letters to put it in more traditional form if anyone else wants to have a go.
ABYC VECCEOH GISKNQC KISX AK BH DBK CKSFHC ABH CHNJHA KM ABH CAKIHC
I solved it with this website which is not an autosolver but lets you easily make substitutions and have them automatically carry to all letters.
Also, thanks to Tjeerd who has the solution in the comments.
Renga in Blue 
It looked like a subsitution cipher (or cryptogram) to me, and some puzzling (with the help of online tools) yielded the following message: THIS PASSAGE UNLOCKS ONLY TO HE WHO SOLVE THE SECRET OF THE STONES
I’m not sure how this helps you figuring out what to do with the emeralds though.
Hello
If you look at the curator’s door you see the legend “Flow Whest Orftrfoureiil Ityf Pierc”
I’m sad enough to have realised that this translates to “This Space Intentionally Left Blank” merely by looking at the number of letters in each word.
This game is enormous and must be far bigger than Acheton (403 locations) and Mike Arnautov’s Adv770 (478 locations).
I found the edition of PlayWarp magazine hilarious; I don’t think you’d get away with that ASCII art these days.
I have also only found three treasures so far but have despatched the mugger at least.
BTW Dan Hallock has now packaged a new distribution file for the HP3000 emulator including Kermit and the adventure games plus Sahara, Mystery Mansion etc.and more than doubled the available disk space.
http://www.xyfyx.com/files/hp3000Sim.zip
I do plan on getting back to Warp fairly soon! If you haven’t seen yet, you can use the tag to get all my posts in chronological order:
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/warp/?order=ASC
Oho, I see he has the menu with Adventure, Trek, Mansion, and Warp, but if you exit to prompt you can still RUN SAHARA.
Is there a way to list all the files? LISTDIR or DIR or various permutations aren’t working.
UPDATE: Ah, LISTF @.@
ACOM, ADVDATA, ADVENTI, ADVENTJ ADVENTS, ADVENTUR, ALINES, BGAMMON, GAMEMENU, HAMRBI, LANDER, MANSION, THELLO, SAHARA, TREK73, UDC, WARP, WARPADAT, WARPBDAT, GAMES
Yes it was very decent of him to go to so much trouble Jason.
I’ve now managed to get to 144 points and found two more treasures which, the game wrily suggests, means I could be the next governor of California. My euphoria was somewhat dampened soon afterwards when I had my appendix removed without anaesthetic by a mad doctor, not surprisingly dying as a result. The sudden deaths in this one could give the Phoenix games a run for their money!
Incidentally, have you tried typing xyzzy? Very amusing.
Just an update on Warp. I have inched forward to 187 points and managed to rid myself of the mad doctor. Private health care in the UK is the best option too.
One heads up is don’t let the curator see you carrying the scarab ring or he slams and locks his door, thereby preventing you from entering his cluttered room any more.
Like the “It’s Me” poster I finally managed (after endless shark devoured deaths) to swim to an island where I found something which will stop those rocks falling on your head. BJ Thomas thought he had problems.
I am not sure yet how to ferry objects backwards and forwards from the island to the Warp mainland and I too have found the dark cave with no light source.
I am still stuck on the caged gorilla (oh dear I tried giving him the cuddly bear, don’t copy me) the unsailable boat, the bathing ugly and so on and so on far into the darkness…..and surely I shouldn’t have my crinkled copy of PlayWarp confiscated by the Copper? Maybe he’s a single man.
I love the mordant humour in this one. I have currently mapped via Trizbort 204 locations which I think is 13 more than the original mainframe version of Zork with much power to add.
Thank you for putting me on to it.
An update in Warp….I now have 242 points. eleven treasures and have earned my sailing certificate. There are two objects, both valuable, that kill you if you hold them for more then one move (Uranium-238 and Warponium) even if you are wearing a pair of lead lined gloves.
I had the bright idea of moving them side by side and see if they neutralised each other (like the two black spheres in Level 9’s Adventure Quest). After much tedious taking and dropping (like the cheese in Philosopher’s Quest) I got them to the same location and….
“A strange sizzling sound begins to eminate (sic) from the container (what container?) as the U238 and Warponium come within fighting distance. Upon taking a closer look, you see an intense purple glow interspersed with lightning-like bolts of energy being exchanged. As you watch, the two elements melt, run together and reach critical mass. You are really quite fortunate, as not many people get to see the beginnings of a mushroom cloud from this close…”
And of course I died.
This was followed by the only bug (apart from the odd misspelling) that I have come across
NOUNENTRY: Changing sign of argument (becomes -425)
NOUNENTRY: Argument out of range (425)
Anyone have a degree in Nuclear Physics or a clue sheet?
I do have a walkthrough (although I haven’t actually looked at it to determine how good it is).
I think I’ll avoid clues or maps at this stage Jason TBH. I tend to take ages at these things but never cheat. I have made a map using Trizbort (and boy do you need it for navigating the boat between the reefs). I believe you can also dial a hint from the phone box on Easy Street but it costs you a point each time).
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i’d really like to play this again but the link to the emulator seems to be 404 now, anyone know an alternative location for this download? i played it a lot i never fully completed the game but did find that by upshifting (or was it downshifting?) one of the data files B i think and giving the warp master the box with the spider and opening the box while in the warp masters bag avoided getting bitten the parser then gets confused and starts dumping the decoded database while complaining its attempting to transfer the spider to your possession. once you meet the warp master tell him to “follow” or “stop following” as need be and give him all your objects to carry which solves the inventory problem. i spent many hours trying to find the purpose of the oracle with the carpet without success there are many red herrings in the game. what made the game for me was the parser and macro writing features i’m sure it would give siri a hard time even now.
Try:
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/mainframe/
i got stuck at the frameastat and the cables puzzle second thoughts it was the dataA file larger of the two in my previous post i used qedit to do the upshift/downshift hack.