5 hours ago
- The REM statement in The Wizard's Castle contains hidden Z80 machine code for seeding the random number generator.
- The code uses the Z80 R register, stores a random value to screen memory, and BASIC reads it via PEEK.
- The listing displays non-ASCII characters due to tokenization and high-bit mapping.
- Typing the REM as shown in the magazine would not work; the author likely POKEd the bytes directly.
- The article demonstrates reverse engineering and hacker curiosity about retro computing.