*The Adventurers' Guild

So what info about the items are we missing?
How much they cost at Garth's, at which dungeon level they drop,...?
in the unpacked bard.exe the info can be found at:

$26279: Special attack and Item type
$26379: Item effect
$26179: Base damage
$261F9: AC bonus and Magical plus
$262F9: Who can equip it?

Just an FYI

All the FF's in the code of my previous post is in fact the Items file that gets loaded at that location. If you modify the items file and take a memdump, your modifications will show there.

Not much valuable in that info, but nevertheless interesting to know.

There's another table probably around 039C:2E812 that has current HP of each of the monsters in the first group. The other three groups follow. I just started an encounter with 66 Skeletons, or 69 Wights or 396 Berserkers, pulled the array of HP out of memory, and found the lowest and highest value...

Hi Maven. Not sure how you calculate min-max hit points. 01 40 00 12 00 00 00 00 Kobold Kobolds 02 60 00 12 00 00 00 00 Hobbit Hobbits 03 21 01 22 00 00 00 00 Gnome Gnomes For Kobolds, 2nd column (40): wouldn't it just be first byte as minimum hit points and 2nd byte as AC? How do you figure out it ...

Found the following in my memdump: at $039C:2E1CE 2A D4 09 00 00 00 [u]02 03 03 04[/u] 00 00 00 00 00 00 BB 0E 05 00 12 00 68 01 BB 0E 05 00 17 00 34 03 BB 0E 05 00 1A 00 3C 05 BB 0E 08 00 1F 00 1C 09 BB 0E 08 00 25 00 BC 0D BB 0E 08 00 2B 00 1C 13 BB 0E 09 00 30 00 DC 19 BB 0E 0C 00 3F 00 AC 25 BB ...

@Caracas, one interesting thing to look at after you have decoded the levels... Text has the high order bit set. If you look at the data you dumped from the third level of the Castle, and drop the high order bits, you can see the text messages that appear when you enter certain squares. C1 A0 F3 E9...

I'm first going to focus on CITY.PAT file, which is the map for the city. The Huffman tree I posted earlier seems to be correct. I am able to completely decode the file with that code. That means I should be able to modify the city, but only in a limited way. If I look for example at the different s...

That's pretty amazing, Maven. Thanks for posting! :D I tried the same with the CITY.PAT file (since it's not such a big file) so,... 00 00 03 84 00 00 08 F8; 900 bytes decompressed and 8F8 bits long Huffman tree next: translate 10 34 08 80 82 D0 35 0D 08 C4 B0 26 6D 91 58 04 48 23 88 59 78 4A D7 14 ...

If you open the dosbox debugger you'll get 2 screens: the debugging screen and the actual DOSBox. If you mount your gamefolder in DOSBox and then type: > debug bard.exe you enter a debugging mode. Now you switch to your debugging screen and you type the following: > log xx (where xx is a value of ho...

Managed to open the extracted bard.exe with:

http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro/

Seriously need to learn assembler language

Just like the LEVS file, the BIGPIC file starts with an offset into itself. This time it's 63 offsets of 4 bytes, pointing to address locations within the BIGPIC file.
Each offset starts with an 8-byte serie, starting and ending with 2x 00 bytes and in between different data.

So, that leaves us finding a way to decode the various files. Preferably, the BIGPIC and LEVS file. incidently, I took a memory dump of the game just before entering the city and one just after entering the city. I ran a file compare on both memory dumps and there were some interesting differences. ...

If I start the game and take a memory dump before I enter the city, the map isn't loaded into memory yet. If I enter the city, my debugger tells me following files are accessed: bard.exe K:\BARD.EXE bard.exe CITY.PATH bard.exe CITY.NAME BIGPIC Strange thing, CITY.PATH and CITY.NAME do not exist in m...

When entering a dungeon it calls for bard.exe and the LEVS file. In the decompressed bard.exe, I can find all the texts for all the dungeons, so it certainly requires that. The decoding information for the LEVS file is probably also in the bard.exe file. I haven't checked the BIGPIC file yet. A firs...

I'm using this:
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=7323