Well I inestigated the NMAx a bit (and am going to continue now) and found, that Hopner's memory analyze is a VERY good start, however some things seem to be different than he thought.
A dungeon file seems to be a FIXED size and structure, and the ending "prevent empty directory" texts state clear their purpose: this dungeon file does not contain enough text to fill up the fixed dungeon file structure, so it is filled with that dummy stuff, This likely is to prevent the DOS, the main program or any developer on the original program from scratching parts of the defined structure.
I will soon come up with my interpretation of the dungeon files and with the questions remaining in my interpretation.
8-Bit BTCS - 6502 Reverse Engineering Project
We're about to make big progress. However, communicating via this forum is a bit slow and disencouraging, mind to pm me your ICQ or SKYPE or MSN addys, all who are interested in Darendor's project?
I can clearly see where in a dungeon file the dungeons are chained and can from that tell that a dungeon can contain up to 8 levels. I did NOT yet find out, if it were possible from the main BT engine to have more than 16 dungeon levels. If it were possible to have more than one city I cannot tell yet, because I haven't checked if the city is loaded with the main program OR is loaded from the city disk. If the latter, it might be possible that there is a second table in the main program for the cities. However I doubt, that there is handling for "wilderness" in BT1, so that cities could only be connected via dungeons, but for that I have to verify that cities are loaded from a file sort of city disk and where in a dungeon it is encoded, what city is loaded upon a leave. NM00 is not it, lol, that contains the so easy to patch character roster.
I can clearly see where in a dungeon file the dungeons are chained and can from that tell that a dungeon can contain up to 8 levels. I did NOT yet find out, if it were possible from the main BT engine to have more than 16 dungeon levels. If it were possible to have more than one city I cannot tell yet, because I haven't checked if the city is loaded with the main program OR is loaded from the city disk. If the latter, it might be possible that there is a second table in the main program for the cities. However I doubt, that there is handling for "wilderness" in BT1, so that cities could only be connected via dungeons, but for that I have to verify that cities are loaded from a file sort of city disk and where in a dungeon it is encoded, what city is loaded upon a leave. NM00 is not it, lol, that contains the so easy to patch character roster.