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So, I found my name while googling....
I wanted to respond to the post:
But, apparently it's too old or something.... Anwyays, I thought there might be some (very, very) small historical interest in my response:
Hah, I'm amused that I'm mentioned here -- I'm the Justin Anderson who contributed the "TC++ Color Code". To make that clearer, I (who was just learning how to program at that point) was the first person who contributed a change that made most items and monsters appear in different colors...but only if you compiled in Borland's Turbo C++ compiler for DOS -- it was a lot easier to code than term-agnostic colors....
I certainly can't date the version the original poster had, but I can say that it was definitely late '92 or later. I suspect that there were multiple PC versions floating around at that point (the fact that my amateurish attempts to colorize the game got out to something like the wider public kinda proves that). I know the (vague) dating because I made the changes in "my" computer room where all of my roommates had their machines in the '92-'93 academic year at Virginia Tech (what civilized adults might have called our dining room). I definitely remember downloading versions of the game after I uploaded it that had my colorizing in it before the end of the year (~Jun '93). Given pelpel's note above, I'd definitely assume there was cross-pollination of PC and UNIX versions before they got folded back into the...fold. It was the nineties, y'all. Everything was frog-knows (I had no idea how software versioning worked -- it never occurred to me to change the version number when I submitted a change).
The vast majority of the "code" I wrote was just adding a color flag to existing data files. (To be clear, a complete overhaul of the code one or two versions down the line actually made a good job of colorizing things...although if I remember correctly, at least a couple of items had clearly erroneous colors that I had assigned them, either out of homage or...were they stealing from me?! I'll suuuuueeee! (Kidding. Really...wait, there's nobody to actually sue?).
I only came looking for this ancient history because I honestly couldn't remember if I was modding Moria or Angband (although I was nearly positive it was Angband).
It was 30ish years ago! I'm happy my very, very small contribution is memorialized here.
Holy crap, I just noticed I'm commenting on something more than 18 years after the last comment. Well, archive.org is forever, right...?
Anyway, I can definitively state that this version was from no earlier than September 1992, but I'm almost certain that "Targetting based on code by Chris Wilde" had already been added, because I remember looking at it and not understanding it at all (probably because it involved actual code...).
But, apparently it's too old or something.... Anwyays, I thought there might be some (very, very) small historical interest in my response:
Hah, I'm amused that I'm mentioned here -- I'm the Justin Anderson who contributed the "TC++ Color Code". To make that clearer, I (who was just learning how to program at that point) was the first person who contributed a change that made most items and monsters appear in different colors...but only if you compiled in Borland's Turbo C++ compiler for DOS -- it was a lot easier to code than term-agnostic colors....
I certainly can't date the version the original poster had, but I can say that it was definitely late '92 or later. I suspect that there were multiple PC versions floating around at that point (the fact that my amateurish attempts to colorize the game got out to something like the wider public kinda proves that). I know the (vague) dating because I made the changes in "my" computer room where all of my roommates had their machines in the '92-'93 academic year at Virginia Tech (what civilized adults might have called our dining room). I definitely remember downloading versions of the game after I uploaded it that had my colorizing in it before the end of the year (~Jun '93). Given pelpel's note above, I'd definitely assume there was cross-pollination of PC and UNIX versions before they got folded back into the...fold. It was the nineties, y'all. Everything was frog-knows (I had no idea how software versioning worked -- it never occurred to me to change the version number when I submitted a change).
The vast majority of the "code" I wrote was just adding a color flag to existing data files. (To be clear, a complete overhaul of the code one or two versions down the line actually made a good job of colorizing things...although if I remember correctly, at least a couple of items had clearly erroneous colors that I had assigned them, either out of homage or...were they stealing from me?! I'll suuuuueeee! (Kidding. Really...wait, there's nobody to actually sue?).
I only came looking for this ancient history because I honestly couldn't remember if I was modding Moria or Angband (although I was nearly positive it was Angband).
It was 30ish years ago! I'm happy my very, very small contribution is memorialized here.
Holy crap, I just noticed I'm commenting on something more than 18 years after the last comment. Well, archive.org is forever, right...?
Anyway, I can definitively state that this version was from no earlier than September 1992, but I'm almost certain that "Targetting based on code by Chris Wilde" had already been added, because I remember looking at it and not understanding it at all (probably because it involved actual code...).
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