“Chaining” w/ Load and Retaining variables?

CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH...

Halfway through the manipulator program and it’s “smaller” than the loader, at least. I think I can split the loader into a small intro program (with no variables) which can call the loader program. The loader will wipe it out along with any variables it uses, but it won’t use any that need to be retained, so that falls under “who cares?” I think if I do that split the loader program can be made to work within the memory limits, but I dunno— there are a lot of large string variables to pass on (it’s a text adventure game)— 25 room descriptions of roughly 180-200 characters each, and 209 command and object words, with 73 of those having additional description strings (30 characters each, as an average) and alternate “things have changed” strings in the mix. Yikes.
And until I get all this resolved, I won’t even know if the manipulation program works or not!

The funny thing is, this was meant to be just a simple test version prior to a truly big, Zork-level game. But I’m already seeing that’s going to have to be a different animal, probably calling data on-the-fly from the disk drive for use “as needed.” Which at this stage is a bit above my rusty BASIC skills... but I’m getting better at it as the work goes along.

On a side note, I find it a bit amusing that the various programming manuals and books seem to focus in graphics and sound rather than the processing of text data. Understandable, but it seems the concept of recording and processing written data (essentially database manipulation) would get more than just the short shrift I’ve seen so far!