The Adventurers' Guild

ZeroZero · Joined: 10 Mar 2009 Posts: 197 Location: Germany

Here is the roster file decoded as far as I came yet. Anyone can fill in the missing things, marked by ????

Darendor · Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 12:56 am Post subject:

Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh. Megatron will be pleased.
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Twoflower · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 92 Location: Haarlem, NL

Zerozero:

The last byte is the generated checksum. :-9

How do I know? First of all I recall that it was mentioned elsewhere in some thread here, but I got it confirmed when I found an outrageously good source of information. Have it ever occured to you that people did almost the same thing we are doing when these games were all the rage? And that people have started to put things online?

Just check out http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/tarnover.org/computist/Hardcore.Computist/Issue.36/Page-16.jpg and on the following pages for a complete description of how a character editor for BT I was made. This was done in 1986. You just got to love it.

All articles are indexed and searchable aswell. Through the issues are essential information on the format of all three games. Need I mention what a goldmine this is?
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Darendor · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 4:07 am Post subject:

ZeroZero · Joined: 10 Mar 2009 Posts: 197 Location: Germany

Hmmm I do not see anything new in this article, in fact we know more about the character files used by BT1 and BT2 than that article. See the list above.
On the other hand I got it straight from the horses mouth, that BT3 in fact was using a port of Apple's PRODOS for the CBM64, and it was selfmade by one person at Interplay. I apologize to Darendor for not believeing him. Now is the q: how do we get that PRODOS version to work with the BT3 files? Or shall we try to make up BT2? The track/sector tables are supposed to be within the main code and the main engine of BT2 uses direct access to the tracks. I was also told some more info about maps and gfx, even if not too much. If you are online on Easter Sunday, when I am back, I will share this info.

EDIT

Oh I see now... a lot more articles there, sorry being hasty, there is more sources

EDIT 2

Unfortunately I didn't find issues after #52. The articles until #52 have no information we don't have already or even we have more on Sad

Twoflower · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 92 Location: Haarlem, NL

Here are the issues you are looking for:

http://computist.textfiles.com/

Some more interesting information there, especially when it comes to the BT III character format and the codewheel-removal. Noteble is also the articles on the dungeon-editor, which seem to be like Darendors one, although a bit visually worse.
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ZeroZero · Joined: 10 Mar 2009 Posts: 197 Location: Germany

The more interesting stuff you mention is published in the issues AFTER #52, that collection only has the issues up to #52 and that last issue

Twoflower · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 92 Location: Haarlem, NL

Sorry - gave you the wrong link:

http://www.computist-project.net/hcomputist/thumbs/computist.html

Some interesting stuff on BT I and II:

Darendor · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 2:54 pm Post subject:

Darendor · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 2:57 pm Post subject:

Darendor · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 3:06 pm Post subject:

The documents take too long to load. Confused

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ZeroZero · Joined: 10 Mar 2009 Posts: 197 Location: Germany

Ah there we go... I will check, if any of that articles has information beyond our own research results

EDIT

Ok, the articles beyond #52 will give us a very good start for the roster file format in case we decide to go with BT3 engine.
Apart from the roster I only saw cracking info for the Apples, which cannot be used as is for the C64 I think. Also we must find out about the differences in the structure of Apple II and C64 disks to interpret the given information properly. An excellent Apple source.

Quantum Reality · Joined: 15 Mar 2010 Posts: 86

Apple DOS is fundamentally different from Commodore DOS. The BASIC code will still work, but not the machine language routines used to directly acciess the floppy disk.

I don't know the C64 calls, but I do know the Apple DOS RWTS calls basically say "get me this track, this sector, and dump it *here* in memory". And off RWTS goes and grabs 256 bytes off the disk and pops it into RAM for you. You edit that RAM, and then you can tell your RWTS caller, "grab this memory and write it to this track and sector".

Bingo, the kernel of a character editor. Wink

(I'm actually trying to write one under an Apple //e emulator as we speak, so this lookup table showing information I thought I had long lost to the mists of history is a godsend. Last time I saw the exact information storage for character attributes was in a printout I lost back in the 1990s when I sold all my Apple stuff.

Incidentally, if anyone cares, I can write a routine in machine language to AND/bit shift the attributes to make sensible numbers out of them. Gimme a day or so to play with it, then I'll put the 6502 source here.)

((EDIT TO ADD TEXT BELOW))

I just noticed the Bard's Tale 3 situation.

I can verify that yes, in fact the Apple ][ version of BT3 used a ProDOS-like disk structure for the editing of characters and did not use any encoding unlike BT2. I had, in fact, embarked on the ambitious project of trying to write a character editor for BT3 but just got bogged down in trying to make it cool instead of workable and abandoned the project.

If anyone wants to see how far I got, I can put the program up somewhere in text format. Unfortunately I outsmarted myself a little and at the time, stored off all the variables in a special variable format under ProDOS (mainly lists of items, character classes, things like that). I can't reconstruct those yet so there's some "from scratch" work it looks like I'll be doing.

Long story short, it worked when I tested the MLI calls and everything so I know it's feasible to write the Apple ][ version of a BT3 character editor. I'd just need a list (which I worked off of) of the Bard's Tale 3 data format.

ZeroZero · Joined: 10 Mar 2009 Posts: 197 Location: Germany

Actually, for the C64, Burgerbecky adapted the ProDOS file structure for the Commodore 64. The C64 BTIII uses ProDOS as well. Of course the sector structure of the disks was physically different, so she changed that on the C64.

Quantum Reality · Joined: 15 Mar 2010 Posts: 86

You'd need some kind of translator for the C64 version then, to translate the sequential block structure of ProDOS to the native track/sector format of whatever the 1541 uses.