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Fixing "bad" versions

Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:54 pm
by misterhamtastic
Has anyone thought about fixing the dos and amiga versions so that slayers slay, breathers breathe, and bosses put up a fight? If someone could start me off somewhere,ie-what language is it in, what do I need to edit said language, I'd start looking into it myself.

Slayers and breathers look like they should be simple enough. I'd think it was a 1 or 0 in reference to breath or crit hit. The bosses may just need to be assigned a 'stance' or something. This may be really easy, once you find the issues.

Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2011 3:51 pm
by tpth
I'd be interested to know this, too. The DOS version is such a disappointment.

Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 2:29 pm
by misterhamtastic
I'm going to play through the amiga versions, then see if maybe I can open them in the construction set. If you know anything about doing this, let me know.

Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 8:18 pm
by tpth
I have no idea, I'm afraid. But there are people who frequent these boards who seem to know a lot about such things - dulsi and ZeroZero spring to mind. You could try DMing one of them

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 2:24 pm
by ZeroZero
@ tpth:

Thank you very much for your high opinion of me! However I did only SOME disassembling of the C64 Version of BT 1. Dulsi is a lot more into the DOS version than I ever was, and afaik he concentrated on the DOS construction set only.

The DOS version seems to have runtime compressed files and I never tried to decode them. Dulsi may know how to.

For all versions is very likely that they have been written directly in assembler or have been compiled to plain assembler by a good compiler.

For the C64 version I can confirm that it is written in plain 6510 assembler.

I do not know anyone who tried to disassemble the Amigi or Atari or CPC versions. I dunno how far Quantum Reality went with the disassembling of the mother of it all, the Apple II version.

Anyway gl for you in your goal!

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:30 pm
by misterhamtastic
Where would I get whatever tool I'd need to work on the Amiga version? Or at least, what tool would I need?

Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 3:02 am
by dulsi
I've used to have information about the character file formats for the three games. I never tried to decode anything else in them. I've decoded most of BTCS file formats but never got the animation files.

Fixing older versions is going to be difficult. Personally I feel btbuilder is far enough along that it is a better platform to start with but I am biased.