BT3- ToF C64 Hex Editing

[Lory]

My dear fellow Co-players and lovers of TBT.

In 1988 two friends and me ravaged through The Bard's Tale 3 on Commodore 64.
Marvelous Game, but it took a lot of time grinding UnterBrae for XP to get CON/MAG/SOR/WIZ up tp lvl 13 to finally continue to Archmage/Chronomage.

Short time ago i discovered VICE Emulator and some .d64-images of TBT3.
Well, the guys are Lvl13 now and the mages did their first profession change (2xCON to MAG, 1xMAG to CON).
I know they will need more than those small 230k XP after CON/MAG for Lvl 13 for SOR/WIZ to Lvl 13 and to be honest i'm not willing to grind all those boring XP in UnterBrae again.

So i decided to use DirMaster for a little editing of XP, call it cheating anyways, that's what i call it.

As you know, the BT3 Char disk is encoded with Apples PRODOS, so there are no files for accessing the stats directly.

Via BAM-Editing it's possible to get into the Hex-Data, and that's the point where i do fail - i am common with Hexcode and had some selfmade Datasheets 20+ years ago regarding Char Editing BT1/BT2/BT3 on where/how to find the specific Data. So i remember there was/is a way.

Problem is, i cannot remember and those sheets got lost in the years.

Unfortunately neither DirMaster nor any other BAM Editor i was able to find seem to offer a "search" function for PETSCII/ASCII/HEX - Strings, only access to the raw data on the Disk (bt3char.d64) itself.

Can you help with any info on
a) how to detect the character data on the disk
b) sector/block containing these data (there should be 2 possibilities - 1st is save game, 2nd char data of removed chars in refugee camp)
c) some BAM-Editing-Tool offering a search-function

please?

Thank you so much in advance.

Regards,
Lory

[dulsi]

For doing this sort of thing I typically use a byte diff tool I wrote a long time ago. It was written in pascal so under linux I run it under p2c before compiling the c code. I would make a backup of the character disk. Do one fight and go back to the refugee camp. Use my tool to compare the two disk file. I deally you want a fight without getting hurt or using magic but assuming you should still be able to find the bytes. There is probably a byte diff program out there but I don't know of it.

[Lory]

Thank you.
Your hint led me to a little tool, "compare" and i was able to define the adress of certain values in the memory dump.

Unfortunately i was not yet able to determine the Sector/Track on bt3char.d64 just because of these adresses.

At least one step forward.

[ZeroZero]

Dear Lory,

please look for a tool called 64copy at the developers page. It's the tool I used for my investigations with all kind of editors and search routines, incl. ASS/DASS. It has a Norton Commander like surface.

With the disk editor search for your party name (may find several places, so try and error) on copies of your D64 images.

You might find articles on the data structure in an old Apple II magazine in some archive.

Good Luck!

E D I T
The data in the sectors are identical to the Apple II version. The ProDOS emulation for the C64 was created to use the same disks on Apple II and C64 (save development costs).