Note: This post is about a video game.
A Wondrous Discovery #
Last week, as I was falling asleep, a word bubbled up from my unconscious mind: Tiltowait. I knew this was the name of a spell from a game I played decades ago. I couldn’t, however, remember what it did or which game it was from.
I looked it up the next morning. It was from Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. It was also the best spell in that game.
As one does, I googled the game to fall into an old favourite rabbit hole. Doing so, I nearly fell off the couch.
The game was remade!
I don’t think humankind has yet found a small enough increment of time to measure how long it took me to purchase the game.
Downloaded and installed, I figured I’d fire up the game to check it out. Two hours passed before I exited the game.
A lot of memories came back as I was poking around the game. The memories are from an experience that I don’t think will ever be possible again. Because of this, I figured I’d share the stories for posterity.
Yes. Okay. Fine. Also, for my own amusement.
The Game #
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a “dungeon crawler” developed by Sir-Tech Software, was released for the Apple II in 1981. A time long before Smart Phones and the Internet.
The game was later released on various platforms including the Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and the TurboGrafx-16.
The game entirely consisted of a tiled screen layout. Your characters were listed at the bottom and various other information, such as monster images, commands and active spells, were in boxes around the screen.
There is much additional information available on the Wikipedia page, which you can explore if you’re interested.
One thing that I want to point out, that is a little buried on the Wikipedia page, is the use of graph paper. The dungeon layouts were always the same, but there was no way to see this in the game. Remember, there was no Internet to just go and find a copy of a map. You had to create a map on graph paper.
And I was absolutely about it.
The Richmond Public Library #
In the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time at the Richmond Public Library. More than a few Richmond kids did, in fact. It was a place to get lost and find all kinds of treasures. The original brutalist concrete building had a massive amount of stacks, split between two areas, Adult and Children’s sections. The lower Children’s area, was my home away from home. Particularly, the computer lab.
The computer lab featured half-height glass walls and housed several (approximately a half-dozen) Apple II computers. You could book an hour on the computer, but only one hour at a time. You had to finish your hour before you could book another. The room had all of the computer programs displayed on the wall. You signed out the program’s 5 1/4 inch floppy disks to use on the computer.
I made my way through all kinds of programs, mostly the games. Pulling down Wizardry one day, I was hooked. I brought in my own disks to make copies of the game and data disks. Countless hours I would spend on the game. Usually the hour after mine was not booked so I could game for multiple hours. Sometimes, there was no free spots, so I’d be kicked off until I could get another hour.
During my downtime without access to the computers, I would pore over Dungeons and Dragons manuals and talk with the other kids. They weren’t really into Wizardry, but some like Dungeons and Dragons so that was a fun topic.
Wizardry Stories #
It should be mentioned emphatically that Wizardry was brutally hard. If your entire party died, they were left in the dungeon. You had to build another group to go down and bring them back. The rub, you could only have six characters in your party at a time. So you are not bringing them all back at once.
This frustration lead to me finding ways to cheat.
As noted earlier, the computer lab was like a fishbowl, allowing anyone in the library to see what users were doing on their computers. This lead to kids seeing me play Wizardry and coming in to talk about the game. Tips, tricks and cheats were shared.
I’m not sure if this was a bug or intentionally built into the game, but there was a way for a specific character type to improperly use a talent and acquire a bunch of experience points. I learned this from and promptly exploited the heck out of this.
Real Nerdy stuff #
Once I had these characters, another kid traded me a copy of a hex editor for my beefed up characters. This software allows you to change data inside of a binary file.
Hex because Hexadecimal is a base-16 number system. It uses 16 symbols: 0-9 and A-F. 2 Hexadecimal characters equal 1 byte on disk. This is important in a second.
In my case, I started using the hex editor to modify the Wizardry save game files. This became a game in, and of, itself.
Let’s say you have a character named “El Cid” that is the class ‘Fighter’. He has a strength of 14 amongst his other characteristics. El Cid also has a Long Sword in his possession. Fighter, Str 14 and Long Sword all need to be recorded somewhere in the save game for El Cid. To save space, they would use 2 character Hexadecimal byte to record a value.
What I would do is use the hex editor look for my character’s name as a string in the binary file. I would then look for 14 (E in Hex) near his name. I would then change the E to something like 12 (Hex for 18), save the file, boot the game and load my save game. If the game didn’t crash, which it did a lot, I would see if 14 was now 18. If so, Huzzah! I have a character with 18 strength now.
And so it would go. I would look for everything related to the character. Level, characteristics, and even inventory. Say a long sword is 3F on disk. I’d change it to 4F and see what happened.
This lead to other experimentation. In the game a character’s max Strength, Intelligence, Vitality, etc., was 18. I would set it to FF which is Hex for 255 and see what happened. Turns out, I could have characters with 255 characteristics and the engine would happily accept them in the math equations. This lead to very very overpowered characters in combat.
Another trade #
One day while playing my highly powered-up Wizardry characters in the computer lab, a random older kid came and sat with me. He noticed these characters and wanted a copy of them. He was playing one of the newer Wizardry games at home and wanted to import my characters to use. He offered to trade me the name of the arch-villain in Wizardry for my characters. I obliged. And so we went copying each of the six characters one by one. Trading one letter for one character until I had a name and he had his characters.
Hex Editing at school #
One story that I still remember vividly is from Elementary school computer class. I think I was in Grade 5 at the time and our class was taking turns working in the schools ‘computer lab’ of Apple II’s. I quote ‘computer lab’ as it was a dozen computer in an out of the way hallway.
Richmond needs to do better at building schools. But, I digress.
We were able to work on any of the various software that was available to us at the time. Of course, I had my diskettes with me, so I popped in my Hex Editor and started messing around with something. What it was is lost to time.
As I was messing around with the Hex Editor the teacher was walking behind overseeing the children. As the teach passed behind me, they said, “Matt, reboot your computer. You have garbage on your screen.” I remember not saying anything and just continuing to work on whatever it was. I remember the teacher left me alone after that. Thinking about this as an adult, I assume they figured out I was working on something they didn’t understand and let me be. Kudos to that teacher.
Thinking back on this over the years, I always got a chuckle at what the teacher must have initially thought of me. Young Matt sitting there intently staring at a screen of “garbage” output. “Daaamn. Maybe we should put this kid in a remedial computer class.”
But, again, kudos and thanks to that teacher for leaving me alone to do my thing in class.
Conclusion #
My days in the Richmond Public Library’s computer lab came to an end Christmas 1985 when my parents got a Commodore 64 for my brother and I. They opted for a Commodore over an Apple, as the neighbour across the street was an enthusiast and helped my parents with their purchase. He even soldered in a reset button, I only realized was non-stock years later.
Sadly, with the migration to Commodore, I couldn’t import my Wizardry characters into my Bard’s Tale adventures as the Apple disks were not compatible with Commodore systems. This also meant I was without a hex editor.
Looking back, I believe the lack of a hex editor turned out to be fortunate. It allowed for years of enjoying the Bard’s Tale series as was intended. Crawling through dungeons and drawing little maps on grid paper.
Halcyon days.