operator-console KB: record what survives of the 1995 console (BTCNSL.CPP message defs; the Macintosh clue)
The changelog line in game/original/BT/BTCNSL.CPP -- '06/03/95 GAH Added
corresponding Macintosh message definitions' -- implies the 1995 sysop station
was a Mac application in a separate codebase, which explains its total absence
from the pod-side archives. Recorded so the provenance question ('is our
console a port or a recreation?') has a durable answer: wire-faithful
recreation, from the surviving parser side.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Claude Opus 5
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@@ -16,6 +16,17 @@ open_questions:
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The system-operator station: build a mission, run a session, watch pods arrive, launch rounds.
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This is the piece the 1995 archive lost and we rebuilt.
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**What survives of the original, and why so little:** the console APPLICATION is absent from every
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archive (and Route A is closed). What we have is the pod's half of the conversation --
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`game/original/BT/BTCNSL.CPP` (orig. `cnslmsgs.cpp`, one of the ~10 surviving BT game `.cpp`),
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defining the Console* messages the game sends TO the console (MechKilled / MechDamaged /
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ScoreUpdate / TeamScoreUpdate / DeathWithoutHonor / EndMission) -- plus the engine's receive-side
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handlers (egg / RunMission / StopMission). Its changelog line *"06/03/95 GAH -- Added
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corresponding Macintosh message definitions"* implies the 1995 sysop station was a **Macintosh
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application**, a separate codebase that was never in the pod build tree -- which is why no archive
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has it. `btconsole.py`/`btoperator.py` are therefore a wire-faithful RECREATION built from the
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surviving parser side (+ BT_NET_PROBE against the real exe), not a port of the lost program.
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> **Sysop-facing instructions live in `docs/OPERATOR_GUIDE.md`.** This file is the
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> engineering description — how it is built and where it breaks.
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