Arqade Asked on October 19, 2020
The Interbank Incident was an early adventure game for the Tandy Color Computer. Among its various innovations, you could select from seven different characters with different listed strengths and weaknesses, which may or may not impact gameplay (for example, one character was described as strong enough to kick down certain doors, another was well-dressed enough to get into certain establishments without a ticket, and a third was military, and could enter the base without hassle).
The choice of character apparently also shuffled the locations of the items. This FAQ notes that the manual claims any character can complete the game, but they’ve only found solutions for three of the characters (and the walkthrough notes that some items are randomized, and I remember some other items also consistently did not show up in your inventory or in certain locations, based on the character picked, further complicating a single solution).
So, does anyone have proof that it’s possible to complete the game with all seven characters? Or, alternately, proof that it is not possible?
This should be possible, because the winning conditions and locations can change when a new game is started. Playing with a character in a new game may have a totally different solution / hideout location, and conditions for winning than the last time you played that character.
When the game is running, it keeps track of the character's attributes, such as which character it is, the money they have, and the particular solution for the game. I'll show an example with a screenshot (Bytes.jpg).
I've highlighted with a small red rectangle and blue rectangle in the upper left, which are the actual bytes of the game in hexadecimal. The blue one corresponds to the character you're playing, and the red corresponds to the solution for that particular game (hideout location). For example, the 06 in the blue square corresponds to Allen. 00 would be for Karl, 01 would be for Bob, 02=John, 03=Jackie, 04=Alex, 05=Mick. The 0A in the red square is the solution, which for that particular game happened to be in Seattle.
The important point though, is that this value in the red square seems to be selected randomly when you start a new game with the same character. I had a game with Allen where I won in Rio (the byte vaue was 02) and the following game I won with Allen in Seattle, with that value in the screen shot 0A. (It wasn't at the submarine though, that just happened to be where I took the screenshot).
Fun fact - the other rectangles I drew on the screenshot, green and purple correspond to your money, on hand and in the bank respectively. You only see the bank balance in the screenshot since its covered, but compare $6552 to the hexadecimal number in the purple box. 1998 in hexadecimal is 6552. This byte value can be changed in MAME ;-)
When I ran it in MAME64 machine, it was located around memory location 084C - 08FC (you see that in the screenshot), but this may be different on other machines or architectures.
Answered by Aoi on October 19, 2020
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