"Death and Drek, you shout!"
What does drek mean anyway you ask? Who knows.
Task #1 in any Bard's Tale game is to get a group of inexperienced
characters up to par to face the challenges that await them. Your
first task is to make it through the day, then to make it through
the night, then to make it in the Starter Dungeon. If you start
from scratch, then your party has barely any gold, and no items to
speak of. Your chances of surviving two fights in a row are close
to nothing! In the beginning, it's almost impossible to stay alive
long enough to do anything. While trying to save up money to buy
some protection against the onslaught of enemies, you're also saving
up money to heal the wounds from the last battle.
This month's article is all about how you can "help out" your party.
The way I see it, they don't get enough rewards for all their hard work.
To help them out in their travels, I like to give my new characters a
healthy supply of gold. To do this, you have to edit the character
files. Is it cheating? You bet. Is it fair? Who cares!
When Bard's Tale 1 came out in 1985, characters were stored separately
in files ending with a TPW extension, and they were 109 bytes long.
Bard's Tale 2 characters didn't need so much space - they were kept in
files with a TW extension, and only took up 103 bytes. In Bard's Tale
3, characters needed more space. All characters were stored in one file
called "Thieves.inf", and each character got 120 bytes.
The files hold everything that makes up your characters, like their name,
amount of gold, experience points, spell points, etc. The name, and other
text values are stored as text. Numbers, on the other hand, are stored
as numeric data, which are stored in bytes. In our decimal system, one
digit can have up to ten different values. In the computer bytes system,
each digit (byte) can have up to two hundred and fifty-six different values.
To store numbers bigger than 256, you put two bytes together, and now
you can store a number as big as 65,536 (256 x 256).
Bard's Tale uses two bytes to store values like Hit Points. On the
screen, you see your hit points, and it uses three characters to
display it. If the number gets bigger than 999, it might say "***".
The byte value can hold up to 65,536, but it has to use that number
to show both positive and negative values, so it can only go up to
positive 32,768. Of course, Bard's Tale wasn't made to display numbers
that high, so it just uses asterisks.
For bigger numbers, like gold or experience points, it uses four bytes
put together. That means that you could possibly have up to
2,147,483,648 experience points. If you use the maximum number, and
then get in a fight and collect more gold, you'll notice that now your
gold now says "***********". That's because the numbers totally rolled
over, and are actually negative.
There are lots of good programs written to edit characters for you.
For a complete list of editing programs, visit the
Adventurers' Guild: Bard's Tale I: Hacking.
We have released our own official BardsTale.com Character Editor as well.
You'll notice the big difference between our version and all the others is
the download size. Most other editors are DOS based, and average about 30K.
Ours is Windows based, and the download is about 1.5 MEGS!
Why is it so big? The code is 65 KB, and that compiled to a 54 KB
executable. However, it was written in Visual BASIC 4.0, and in order
for it to work properly, it must have the VB runtime files. The download
includes a setup program that you must run first to install the program.
The whole process is much more complicated than the other DOS programs.
That's about the only advantage to writing DOS programs: no setup programs,
and no DLL's to install. Windows has also been called "Win - Dose".
The programs are more bloated, you have DLL's all over the stinking place,
and graphics are especially slow. However, all of that is changing every
day, as Microsoft continues to buy out new technologies.
Well, back to DOS, and our discussion. How can you edit the files yourself,
without using a program? All you really need is the DOS program called
"Debug.exe". It's a hex file editor that ships with DOS. Be warned -
it's old, hex driven, and there's not much help available with it.
Here's how you could use it to edit the gold value of a
Bard's Tale 1 character.
The gold is kept in four bytes, starting at byte #74. First, go to DOS,
and move to the directory that your Bard's Tale Characters are saved in.
Then, type "debug". Once debug has started, you see a hyphen prompt.
Type "n" for file name, followed by the character file you want to edit.
So, if you want to edit file "1.tpw", you'd type "n1.twp", and press
ENTER. Type "l" for load, then press ENTER. Type "d100"
to print out the first 128 bytes.
If you count down 74 bytes, you see that it's address is "149".
The only catch with IBM bytes is that they're written in backward order!
If your character has 40,000 pieces of gold, when you convert that to
hex, you get 9C-40, but it reads as 40-9C. Let's add 10,000 gold pieces.
50,000 in hex is C3-50, so we want to write 50-C3. So, in debug, type
"e149", and press ENTER. Type "50", press SPACE, type "C3",
and press ENTER. To save your hard work, type "w" for write,
and press ENTER. To get out of debug, type "q" for quit, and press
ENTER. Now, the next time you start up Bard's Tale, you should
have 50,000 pieces of gold.
If you're not into hacking files yourself, you can pick out one of the
freeware character editors.
In other news, the Review Board is backlogged with applications for
someone to deem as the Bard's Tale 1 Guru. The top 2 contestants thus
far are Origen and Brian Decker. The Review Board will be receiving
applications until May 15th.
We are currently developing Windows Bard's Tale icons.
Look for them soon in the city of Thessalonica.
You can contact me at WebMaster@BardsTale.com.
Until next month, farewell fellow Bard's Tale fans!
Go back to BardsTale.com
or see other BardsTale.com Editorials.