Stan PM'd me and told me which game it was. It's one of those e-magazine compilations released on +3 disk. There's a bunch of menu stuff written in +3 BASIC. There's a main menu that loads a menu program for each game, and then that menu runs it or reloads the main menu again.
The good news is that particular game only has two files, the BASIC menu and a code file. It could be very easily re packaged for TAP instead of disk, and in fact probably was like that when it was submitted to the e-Magazine.
Sticking with the +3 disk version (run from the .dsk file, not an .szx), If you go to the game's menu (the one that says "{R}un {C}ontents Page {B}oot" at the bottom), you can press BREAK then look at the program in the +3 BASIC editor. Line 8910 will be:
Code: Select all
8910 IF K$="R" THEN POKE VAL"40290",VAL"20":POKE 23611,205:RANDOMIZE USR VAL "4E4"
The good news is that that "20" there is your number of lives, and this BASIC line is what is resetting it every time you start a new game! The Poke Finder stuff is only half the story, as it's not looking inside the BASIC program in a very meaningful way.
Change that part of the line to VAL"3" then resave the program to the disk with
I didn't say here what the name of the program is (xxxxxxxx), because you haven't revealed what the game is publicly. But it's the 8 character name of the game, with no spaces
in fact, if you remove the POKE VAL"40290",VAL"20" statement completely, you can see that the game loads with 4 lives rather than 20. So we can speculate that the author wrote it with 4, and the person preparing the magazine disk decided to change it to 20 for whatever reason.
If you're happy with 4, it would be very easy to package up this game as a standalone TAP. If you wanted a number other than 4, we need to find the 4 inside the code file (xxxx.C on the disk), and change it in the code file before packaging up the TAP.
