Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

1989 was a dark year for interactive fiction: that’s when Activision put Infocom out of its misery.  It’s also the year that Antic released Kevin Sherratt’s Escape from Dispozon as a unique two part “Super Disk Bonus” for the Atari 8-bit computer.

Planetfill, as the author originally called it, was a thinly veiled rip off of Infocom’s well known sci-fi comedy, Planetfall.  The Antic program featured a cynical and argumentative robot pal that insulted you as you entered your moves.  If the parser failed to understand your commands, the robot would insult you all the more….

Back in the day I completely failed to get past even the first puzzle, and I never really picked it up again.  For a long time I couldn’t find a copy, though.  The links to the disks on the Classic Computer Magazine Archive were dead and the Page 6 library only included side A of the program.  Hacking around, I realized that I could move the necessary files from the “zipped” section of the Antic archive to an ATR disk file by using DOS 2.0 to copy from a virtual hard drive– but the files were invisible to the Atari virtual hard disk unless I renamed them from windows.  It only took about 50 Windows commands and 50 Dos 2.0S commands to make the new story disk for the game.  Yee-haw.  (Figuring this out was probably more fun than trying to solve a text adventure….)

Anyway, with this file that I made and the Page 6 file, you can boot up Planetfill yourself on an 8-bit Atari emulator.  Just point your virtual disk drive at my file when the Page 6 program requests the story disk.  (And don’t let the .txt extender throw you– it’s really an ATR file with the extender changed to get past this site’s security restrictions.)  Enjoy!

(Just trying to do my part to preserve computing history….)

I’m still stuck on the first puzzle, by the way….

A-Rogue was published in the May, 1987 issue of Antic Magazine.  Also called “Atari Rogue,” the game is not quite a port of the original mainframe Rogue ASCII-graphic adventure, but more of an adaption.  It is interesting to see how the author simplified the game in order to make it work in BASIC on an 8-bit machine.  (A more serious attempt to implement Rogue on a home computer would have to wait until the original authors could put together commercial versions for the IBM PC, Mac, Atari ST, and Amiga.)

Atari Rogue uses an altered character set to make the graphics.  You can see the typical layout of a level below.  For some reason it took the 6502 processor nearly a minute to randomly generate such a map!  The mazes fit in a 24×12 grid and the player was represented by the standard Atari cursor instead of the usual ‘@’ symbol.  Unlike the mainframe version, you cannot return to previously visited levels, but can only go further down.  The screen is updated by positioning the cursor and programmatically entering deletes and spaces/text, which occasionally makes for semi-animated visual effects.  That technique was not overly exploited, however.

Monsters do not wander in this version and do not remain to block your path if you successfully [w]ithdraw from them.  There are no hidden passages to search for and the items are randomly scattered about more like a random event than as an actual placed object.  There is no “Experience Point” counter on your display, so its not clear that you gain anything by defeating monsters.  On the contrary, your Endurance score (i.e., Hit Points) seems to go up each time you [d]escend to a new level regardles of how many monsters you kill.

Potions are a mixed bag: they can either teleport you randomly, summon a monster, heal you, feed you, or raise your Endurance score.  Perhaps the most insidious one is the one that rots your food supply.  You might think to eat a meal before trying a random potion, but that’s not an option: once you find one, you have to drink it or it completely disappears.  The same thing goes for weapons and armor: if you find a new item, you have to take it or its gone forever.

The simplifications of the game eliminate many of the tactical and strategic options that made the original Rogue so addictive.  In this version, you’re mainly left with choosing when to attack, when to withdraw, when to experiment with weird potions (if you find them), and when to use your limited number of spells.

So far, I tend to die with many resources left at my disposal.  Also, I’m way too reckless in battle and I’m not sure that the risk is even worth it.  I have no idea how far down the dungeon goes, so I’m not sure how close I’ve ever come to completing the game.  I wonder exactly how the experience system works and also what the actual weapon and armor statistics are, but I hesitate to examine the code because much of the charm of the game comes from the slight “fog of war” that ignorance of such things entails.

To run the game, I used the Atari800Win Plus emulator and the files from the Antic Archive.  Be sure to enable the “H” drive from the Settings screen if you try this yourself.  Also, the lines of code referencing the “D” drive should be changed as well once you RUN “H:AROGUE.BAS”.  (It is cool to have an Atari with that much disk space!!)  The code seems to work fine, though I did get an “ERROR 141″ cursor our of range error from line 190 one time….

In conclusion, the game is a cute abstraction of Dungeons and Dragons.  The fact that tunnels and rooms are essentially the same (and also that that objects and monsters are not persisted on the map) eliminates a lot of the point of the randomly generated layout.  While the author did achieve some semblance of Rogue-ishness, one wonders how memory and computing power could have been marshalled to give greater depth and a larger array of tactical options to the game.

Matt Barton has written up a comprehensive account of the development of Computer Role Playing Games.  Autoduel stands firmly in the Golden Age and is noted there for being one of the first “open ended” games.  The only other game like that at the time would have been Firebird’s Elite, which was a sort of computerized Traveller.  (Thanks to The Vintage Gamer for bringing parts I and II of the series to my attention.)

I saw a demo of Ultima I while in elementary school and was blown away.  I played pirated copies of Ultima II and III until the disks wore out.  When I finally could spend money on these things I was sorely disappointed.  A copy of Amber Star refused to run on my Atari ST… and my version of Temple of Apshai Trilogy would crash randomly.  I got completely stuck very early on in a later “martian” themed Ultima game written for the IBM.  I played a free text game on the ST called Hack compulsively and thought a graphical over the counter version would be even better… but the one I payed money for just plain stunk.

The idea of CRPG’s has always fascinated me, but I’ve honestly never really had that good of an experience with them.

One of the things that surprised me about post-ADQ Car Wars fandom was the attachment to the whole armed vehicle genre.  CWIN, for instance, covered news of post-apocalyptic armed autos in all of their manifestations: board games, computer games, card games, and probably even books and movies.  I guess the genre of the game was never that important to me– oh, Boy Scout Commandoes and dangerous pizza delivery runs fired my imagination as much as anyone.  It was highly accessible fantasy to be sure, but the endeavor of playing Car Wars was something much more than all of that. 

Other critics have labeled Car Wars as merely being a “design-a-thing” game, but I don’t think that’s the best category to describe what its all about either.  Car Wars has its feet firmly planted in two contradictory worlds: it’s is part of a family mini-games– inexpensive and relatively easy to learn games that utilize the trappings of older wargames– and at the same time Car Wars is part of a family of monster games… mini-games that raged out of control in a series of contradictory expansions and errata culminating into comprehensive “Compendiums” and “Doomsday” editions.  In other words, the true family of games that Car Wars belongs to includes Battletech and Star Fleet Battles– and genre and even the fact that it uses a design system is secondary to its categorization.

Comfirmation of my approach to “gaming cladistics” can be found in the excellent article, An Introduction to Elegance.  He classifies them as “quasi-RPG wargames” and uses them to epitomize the lack of elegant design in American games.  He then sets up the German games invasion as being infinitely superior in the gaming elegance department… and he uses an example from computer programming to support his argument.

But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare an abstract game to a simulation.  While “Quasi-RPG wargames” can of course benefit from techniques developed by the German designers, they are not inherently inelegant.  It’s more fitting to view Settlers of Catan as a more elegant version of the Monopoly and M.U.L.E. tradition of game.  In this discussion, it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its choice of scope and granularity. 

The Car Wars design system is extremely elegant when judged from the correct vantage point.  The equipment list if finite and colorful… and the exact combination of speed, maneuverability, defense, and offense capability can be chosen at the whim and style the designer.  Complex equations are necessary only when calculating speed and range… simple addition tallies and percentage increases are sufficient everywhere else.  Most importantly, cost is an accurate balancing factor: Battletech and Star Fleet Battles both had to develop kludgy “Battle Value” and “Base Point Value” systems to accomplish the same thing.  Finally, the statistical values developed in the design process impact all of the various rules subsystems in clearly defined and significantly game-impacting ways.

Returning to the programming example… a nifty “elegant” abstraction is only relevant to a project if it can accomplish the same requirements as the “ugly” solution.  Sometimes it is the right decision to simplify things… but at some point the maxim “as simple as possible but no simpler” comes into play.  German games are fun… they are interesting toys… but they don’t even attempt to solve the same problems that we were trying to solve back in the eighties.  And I’m not sure that a “germanified” Car Wars game could come close to capturing the flavor of an effective dueling machine tossed into mortal combat at a funky arena.

Anyways, just a minor quibble with an otherwise solid post.  Check out the My Play blog for more interesting discussion and gaming analyis!

I did end up completing Don and Freda Boners’ The Deadly Dungeon.  It turned out that I didn’t have to disable the combat to play it.  In fact, the combat was the most interesting puzzle of the game.  I really ruined it by analyzing the code first.  I guess that’s the trick with adventure games: if you find yourself getting frustrated it’s either because there’s a bug in the game, the author’s design is completely stupid, or… you’re getting to the good part.  If you go to a hint book or peek at the code every time you’re annoyed you’re going to ruin the whole point of the exercise.  I was surprised to get to the end and actually get all 500 points for all of the treasures.  I thought for sure there was something left in the game to irritate me, but no… I’d managed to accomplish everything.

Moving on to The Revenge of the Balrog, you can really see some growth in the Boners’ creative skills.  There is a much stronger sense of setting and the sparse description text is remarkable evocative: there’s much more cohesion to the ‘rooms.’  The game is set in “Graylockland”– a thinly veiled recycling of the venerable World of Greyhawk campaign setting.  The premise of the game is a bit hackneyed, however, as can be seen in the screen shot below:

Completing the game was not terribly difficult: making a map and examining everything is sufficient to make it through the game.  This makes the game more about exploring… but navigating through each phase of the game is strangely satisfying.  The Boners’ are very far from the level of Scott Adams mastery of the form.  There’s hardly any real puzzles at all beyond that of mapping out what is essentially a large maze and avoiding a half dozen ways to die instantly.  While mapping is essential to solving the game, dropping items to mark the “twisty passages” is unnecessary.  Technically the game has two mazes, but again, there’s no tricks or thief/pirate types to outsmart.  In spite of this dryness, the second maze is probably the most exciting and memorable moment of the game.

The authors included a few cryptic hints that make little sense to me, some things were clearly ’borrowed’ from Zork 1, and the unusual combat system Dungeon is replaced with either sure success (if you have the right equipment), sure death (if you mess with the wrong foes), or what appears to be a 60/40 chance of victory.  The program retains the inventory bug that I noticed in Deadly Dungeon and there are some things (like the Deformed Notman) that make no sense at all.  Of all these things, the most frustrating thing would be the “one-way” nature of the map in many places: if you miss an essential item there’s often no way to go back and get it.

Balrog is notable for demonstrating that playable games with a consistent theme could be created by amateurs and even sold for money as early as 1981.  Games such as Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure and Strange Odyssey and even J. D. Casten’s Advent X-5 have a great deal more depth and strength of design even though they follow similar constraints in size and form.  On the other hand… this game demonstrates that, like Brian Moriarity’s Adventure in the Fifth Dimension, a game can be satisfying even when it is restricted to using only the simplest techniques of text adventure design.

In our next Adventure Gaming post, we’ll take a look at the sequel to Revenge of the Balrog.  The Fortress at Times End was actually intended to be the B side of the cassette and was sold with Balrog from the beginning.  Will it have even one unusual puzzle in it, or will it be another giant maze?  Something tells me there will have to be more to the final confrontation with the Balrog than just more exploration, but we’ll see.  Stay tuned!

Emily Short has just posted some extensive commentary on Second Person.  It sounds like an interesting book as it contains essays about all sorts of games including computer games, board games, collectible card games, and role playing games.  You just don’t see a lot out there on game design, so this sounds like a real treat.  (As a special bonus, you even get a brief description of Short’s actions in a roleplaying game– and it sounds like a very Whedonesque/comic-book type moment, at that!  I love gaming stories….)

There are several nifty things to mull over in her post, but I’ll just pick out my favorites:

“The problems of linear, nonlinear, and multilinear storytelling” are pretty much a dead horse amoung the more critical folk of the interactive fiction community.  She points out several works that explore each of a half dozen major issues of this theme.  It’s interesting how these issues don’t seem to come up in role playing games as much.  I do like the Classic Traveller “Patron” approach to working around it: provide a good collections of situations and/or people that need assistance from the player characters.  Then present about five or six interpretations of the events.  The Referee can then pick the ones he likes and then improvise the events of the session based on the players’ reactions, the needs of his campaign, and on his decisions about what’s really going on.

“In general, it’s possible to let the player make meaningful choices and discover creative solutions in IF, but only within the predefined interaction domain of the game; it’s not possible to let the player invent whole new thematic content or add character nuance.”  It is this observation that highlights why MMORPGs will never be able to replace role playing games.

“Light source puzzles are much less common, but also, in general, IF authors have moved somewhat away from the idea that a single standard world model is appropriate for most or all works.”  This is an interesting remark.  Aside from the fact that I felt like an absolute genius when I first solved the main light source puzzle in Zork I, we’ve seen a similar development in the architecture of role playing games during the same time period.  Third edition GURPS was geared primarily towards “realistic” gaming… while fourth edition rules were rebuilt from the ground up to make things even more generic than they already were.  One component of the learning curve for GM’s new to GURPS 4e is that they now have to delineate the specifications of their world model before they can begin playing.  Even though this mostly amounts to deciding what rules to ignore, this can still be a daunting task.  As tool-kits evolve, they are decoupled from any game-world and genre assumptions.

Short quotes Eric Lang as saying that “collectible card games are at their root combinatorial exercises; players fall in love with possibilities as much as they do with strategies, and no other type of game offers more options.”  I personally would have to disagree with him: Car Wars offers even more possibilities.  Not only do you get to design your car, but all of the combinatorial possibilities are available without having to purchase “rare” cards and so forth.  Also, the number of scenarios and maps that can be devised yields even more possibilities.  Finally, Car Wars retains the possibility of linking scenarios together to form a running campaign and ongoing story.  Car Warstrounces the CCG’s in terms of raw possiblity.

Short also quotes Greg Costikyan as saying that “adventure games tend to be ‘beads-on-a-string’: small areas where there is some freedom of action until some event occurs, at which point a transition to the next bead is opened.”  This is probably my favorite part of good adventure game design, although I see the structure to be one more like the layers of an onion than beads-on-a-string.  The game tends to open with a small area with only a limited number of items… and each puzzle solved results in a steady expansion of the scope of the game.  I’m really daunted by games that open with a huge area to explore: I just dread having to figure out where to begin!  I especially like it when you face a puzzle in a newly discovered area late in the game and you immediately see a use for an object that seemed useless at the very beginning of the game.

Finally, Short asks, “is there anything cool we can do with social negotiations in interactive fiction?”  This is an area that distresses me most about game development over the past twenty years.  I remember as a child [T]alking to the characters of Ultima IV and asking them if they’d like to [J]oin my party.  Also you could ask them about something by typing in the name of a place or a person.  As an adult a friend showed be the new Morrowind game that he though was totally kewl.  You talk to the character by clicking on the hyperlinked text of their speech.  Grrr….  I’d really like to see something more substantial than that.  I must be disappointed because Eliza made us think that this would be so easy….

Interactive fiction author and critic Emily Short has now jumped on the bandwagon and set up a blog on WordPress.  (If it’s good enough for Scoble, it can’t be half bad, eh?)  She has a great deal of content over there and I encourage you to drink from the fire hose.  Her latest offering in a set of comments on Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design.  Note that while her comments pertain primarily to Text Adventures and Koster’s book focuses on video games… Short’s words of wisdom can apply just as much to table top gaming.

On puzzle design, she remarks that “a good puzzle should give the player responses to partial successes, should provide lots of feedback, should be interactive enough that it’s worth toying with until the secret reveals itself.”  Ah… that reminds me of the classic spinning blade room in the Infocom adventure Enchanter.  You know there’s a puzzle there… and that it should be possible to get that scroll somehow.  There are several wrong ways to try it… and all of them lead to entertaining death scenes.  When you get aggravated and logically look at all the options, the solution emerges as something that’s obvious and surprising at the same time. 

Thinking some more on my recent question about making combat in text adventures fun, I’d say there’s several things that can be done to that end.  For some reason, Yuen Woo Ping’s Iron Monkey comes to mind as I mull these things over….

1) Increase the vocabulary of the combat rules.  FIGHT ZOMBIE is just not going to cut it.  A martial arts themed adventure might use various “stances” that yield benefits based on the situation.  (Through the course of the game you should get a chance to learn about various signature moves.  The syntax for these would be exclamations: FLYING SLEEVES!)

2) Integrate objects into the combat in a creative way.  A ninja could use smoke bombs to help escape an encounter that’s clearly going bad, for example.  Definitely try to go beyond the old trick of needing to have a certain object to defeat a foe: that reduces the combat to merely being a variation of a “locked door.”

3) Integrate space into the combat in a creative way.  The locale should impact the fight in some way.  Remember that no finale to a James Bond movie had a fight in a boring location!

4) Combat should not be a mere obstacle to the plot… they should be used dramatically to forward the story somehow.  Also, earlier scenes should be used to allow the player to experiment with a range of combat techniques… and the final confrontation should require the player to be fluent in the full range of combat ideas.  You see movie directors set these sorts of things up all the time: if something’s going to be critical in a final scene it will always be “set up” in an earlier scene so that the audience will understand what is happening.

5) A first principle of adventure design is to have several things for the player to do at any given time.  Combat equipment can be scattered throughout the map and hidden by traditional adventure puzzle techniques.  Non-player-characters can be used to provide hints about combat tactics through rumors and conversation.  And the player should can have a way to experiment with combat maneuvers in a non-threatening situation– perhaps with a trainer or ally.  There should always be something for the player to tinker with even if he gets stuck on something.

All of these techniques can be intergrated together to inject a more textured depiction of combat into a game.  Combat can be something that’s completely integrated into the game world and the plot– and not just something that’s tacked on to annoy players.

In our last post we got an overview of Don and Freda Boner’s “Deadly Dungeon.”  Let’s take a look at the combat system of this old game.  If you play it, you may want to turn it off, in which case a general knowledge of the code will help you.  I’m more interested in the overall design, myself.  Here’s a partial listing:

In each round of combat, you are presented with two choices: you can attack with your sword or shoot arrows.  Your character has a combat rating and the computer also tracks how many arrows you have.  Monsters have a combat rating, but no arrows.

If your combat rating is less than or equal than the monster’s and you elected to sword fight, you go directly to a the routine pictured above, “SwordFight_Disadvantaged”:  You have a one in five chance of killing the monster outright.  Otherwise you are told that you wounded the monster.  This leads to a one in five chance of you being killed outright.  If you survive, “Blood is everywhere!” and you have only a one in three chance killing the monster.  Otherwise, you are dead.

If your combat rating is greater than the monster’s and you elected to sword fight, you go directly to the SwordFight_Advantaged routine.  Here you have a one in ten chance of being killed outright by the monster.  If you survive that you have a one in four chance of killing the monster by cutting it in half.  If you fail that, you have a one in seven chance of having to repeat the SwordFight_Advantaged routine from the start.  Otherwise, you kill him!

Bear in mind that these routines have short waits interspersed with the text in order increase the suspense.  (Oh, baby!)

Finally, if you elected to fight with your bow, you go to the ShootArrows routine.  If you have no arrows, then you are killed outright.  You have a one in twelve chance of being killed, a one in twelve chance of killing it, and a ten in twelve chance on wounding it and therefore having to continue fighting.  If don’t have the arrows to continue shooting, then you’re dead.  Otherwise you fire again with basically a four in nine chance of killing the monster.  If you missed, then you have to start this whole routine over.

If my math is right, you have only a 31 in 75 chance of surviving the SwordFight_Disadvantaged routine.  Given that, you probably want to save your arrows for the tough ones….  But remember that running out of arrows in a fight is instant death, so you don’t want to use them unless you have at least 6 or 8 on hand!

Kind of anti-climatic, isn’t it?  I do give them points for coming up with an unusual system; combat does produce a range of colorful text descriptions even though you don’t have much choice in how things play out.

Does combat even belong in a text adventure?  It sure didn’t do much for Zork I or Zork III.  As far as “Deadly Dungeon” goes, it has mostly been an impediment to me actually playing it.  If I actually attempt to solve it, I’ll most likely disable it.  I may not have to, now that I know how it works… but really… what does it add to the game?

This is disappointing given the percentage of the game’s code that is dedicated to combat resolution.  Things haven’t changed for the combat-laden text adventure in the 25 the years since then: even in the hand of interactive fiction Grandmaster Graham Nelson with his The Reliques of Tolti-Aph the concept is practically unplayable.  A flabberghasted David Whyld asks, “did he actually think this kind of thing was what people wanted to play?”

Is there a solution to the problem of integrating a combat system into a text adventure game?  Dan Shiovitz says, “the solution is, don’t use random combat and skill checks because they’re dumb.”  What do you think?  Can you come up with a premise for adding combat to a text adventure game that actually makes it more fun?  Even better… can you do it in a 16K basic program on the TRS-80?  It wouldn’t be sporting if we didn’t level the playing field with the Boners, after all!

That bizarre world modeling rpg-puzzle hybrid that is the Text Adventure may have gotten its start with the mainframe Colossal Caves Adventure, but it was Scott Adams and the TRS-80 that not only brought the concept home to the masses– and they went an order of magnitude further by opening the way for hobbyists to write their own adventure games. 

My own first exposure to Text Adventures was on a school TRS-80.  (We called ‘em Trash 80’s.)  It was a pyramid themed game… and I remember vividly the rooms and secret passages of it.  It was a somewhat realistically toned game… and I’ve never successfully identified the game as an adult, even with all the resources of the Internet.

As a child, I was fascinated by the concept of computerized adventures.  All of the books I had on constructing them were written for the TRS-80; I didn’t actually own one, though, so I could never type them in!  That tantalizing glimpse as a child is probably what’s held my interest in the things all of these years: the idea of adventure is so much more alluring than the real thing.  Playing the things too often has more in common with debugging incomprehensible computer code than any of the actual genres the medium attempts to emulate.  Even though mazes are decried by today’s “I.F.” insiders, even the most tastefully done one-room conversation oriented art games are at heart a collection of twisty passages, all alike.  The object is still to find an acceptable end game… through grueling trial and error more often than not.

At any rate, here is a particularly obscure cassette title that people probably even paid real money for back in the day:

I vividly remember attempting to translate the type-in code onto my Atari.  I got stuck with the animation code on the above title screen and quickly gave up. 

Yeah.  This is not a hoax.  There really were adventure game authors with the name “Boner.”  I wonder what it was like for them in middle school?  It couldn’t have been that bad, though: I mean, they lived at a time when there not even modules for D&D… and there was only one Dragon in the entire campaign world.  It wasn’t until after TSR released their first expansions to the game that they changed its title from “Dungeon and Dragon” to “Dungeons and Dragons.” (!???)  That’s my theory anyway, and I’m sticking to it! 

Above we can see the all-but-forgotten technique of utilizing a two word parser and a third person ”puppet.”  Scott Adams pioneered this style and it has been little seen since….  It was handy to use this approach back when parsers were so crude that you needed a device to explain why the computer so often failed to understand your instructions: just blame it on the moronic “puppet” entity!

Most modern connoisseurs of high falutin’ “interactive fiction” would not touch a game such as this with a ten foot first edition Chainmail pole.  There’s a pretty fair amount of combat in the game… and getting killed means starting all over.  There are ways to put the game into an un-winnable state… and there are bugs in the inventory tracking system that allow you to pick up the same object more than once in some odd cases– and then you can’t get rid of these non-existent objects!

One unusual thing that the authors did was to break the game up into 3 distinct levels.  The maps, however, have the usual illogical compass directions of the day… and the action ranges from inside to outside, so I’m not even sure why the game is called a “dungeon.”  The combat system is pretty deadly, however: all of my attempts to work on the third level of the game have ended in combat fatality for my poor puppet.

We’ll take a close look at that combat system in our next post.

I’ve been milling around Harshman Memorial during the special gala celebration of Car Wars’s 25th anniversary.  The crowds have been absolutely tremendous here– this could be a sign that autodueling is returning as the top televised sport in America.  Many of them are here to see such relics as Crazy Joe Harshman’s Chevy and what’s left of Mike Montgomery’s Navigator. 

I had particularly good seats during a demonstration match this afternoon.  Here’s a close-up of a Hotshot just after getting nailed by three Laser shots from a team consisting of an Intimidator and a Security Six: 

Note the piles of debris in the Hotshot’s wake…. 

The driver of the Intimidator kindly gave me this read-out from his targeting computer: 

 Finally, here’s a shot from the helicopter cam of the entire furball:

 I’ll stick around the arena here for the full slate of events and keep you posted on any news of note!  Adios for now….