Catacombs: Looking Upon the Angel of Death

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.) The disk copies we have are for the “4040” edition of the game. This is referring to a disk drive pair by Commodore; image via the Centre for Computing History. While the predecessors (2040 and 3040) were for the US and Europe respectively, this one seems to have gone international; it gets mentioned in an Italian book, for instance. Catacombs was more frustrating to get to the finish than I expected because some aspects got changed, the fact I hadn’t put together a “full run” of the game before, and one extremely nasty bug. Regarding the second point on making a “full run”, there are some things that need to be done in a particular order, otherwise a softlock can happen. The easiest to point out is simply that you can’t drain the lake and enter Poseidon’s realm (an action that never even worked on the DOS version) until after…