Gold Box Companion - tool for GB games

[Dedup]

Just a bit of a warning for those who want to play Pool of Radiance with the Ranger and Paladin.  Don't get level drained.  Weird stuff starts to happen when you try to restore them.  First the character's gender will cycle from male-->female-->copper-->' '.  Second, the restoration spell won't actually restore the level but give the character, literally, 10,000,000 xp.  This was done just using restoration scrolls so maybe  GBC's Fix-Drain option will work better.

-edit-
I just tested GBC's Fix-Drain option and it seems to work fine for the Paladin and Ranger.  Just don't use any restoration scrolls on them.

[Moonbeam111]

Something has happened. I was transferring saves from one module to another and I got weird multiple items in Frua in my PC's inventory called "one". When I tried to load the save from GBC it told me "number of items out of range". I supposed it has something to do with these weird items that appeared in my inventory. I dropped them but still now GBC wont let me load the save anymore and I definitely can't play FRUA without GBC's help.

[jhirvonen]

Something has happened. I was transferring saves from one module to another and I got weird multiple items in Frua in my PC's inventory called "one". When I tried to load the save from GBC it told me "number of items out of range". I supposed it has something to do with these weird items that appeared in my inventory. I dropped them but still now GBC wont let me load the save anymore and I definitely can't play FRUA without GBC's help.

Can you mail me the modules and save files before / after transferring and I could take a look. Use the email address from the GBC Help.txt.

[jhirvonen]

Something has happened. I was transferring saves from one module to another and I got weird multiple items in Frua in my PC's inventory called "one". When I tried to load the save from GBC it told me "number of items out of range". I supposed it has something to do with these weird items that appeared in my inventory. I dropped them but still now GBC wont let me load the save anymore and I definitely can't play FRUA without GBC's help.

It seems that character Yenros has somehow 17 items already in GAME 10 save slot A. As far as I know the maximum items per character in all Gold Box games is 16.

Try dropping one item in GAME 10, making a save and then exporting characters to GAME 12. I suggest doing the dropping in GAME 10 before transferring so that something won't corrupt the character or item data.

I didn't try with UAShell, just plain FRUA but after dropping one item GBC loaded the save slot fine. Don't know if those designs are hacked designs or not.

Btw. should the character Hordak be dwarf? He has dwarven bonus effects on him but his race is currently human.

[Moonbeam111]

Something has happened. I was transferring saves from one module to another and I got weird multiple items in Frua in my PC's inventory called "one". When I tried to load the save from GBC it told me "number of items out of range". I supposed it has something to do with these weird items that appeared in my inventory. I dropped them but still now GBC wont let me load the save anymore and I definitely can't play FRUA without GBC's help.

It seems that character Yenros has somehow 17 items already in GAME 10 save slot A. As far as I know the maximum items per character in all Gold Box games is 16.

Try dropping one item in GAME 10, making a save and then exporting characters to GAME 12. I suggest doing the dropping in GAME 10 before transferring so that something won't corrupt the character or item data.

I didn't try with UAShell, just plain FRUA but after dropping one item GBC loaded the save slot fine. Don't know if those designs are hacked designs or not.

Thanks that worked! Yes they are hacked designs.

Btw. should the character Hordak be dwarf? He has dwarven bonus effects on him but his race is currently human.

Yes Hordak should be a dwarf. Thanks for catching that, I don't know what the cause for it could be. Should I just go into the editor and set him as a dwarf again?

[jhirvonen]

Yes Hordak should be a dwarf. Thanks for catching that, I don't know what the cause for it could be. Should I just go into the editor and set him as a dwarf again?

Yes.

[Moonbeam111]

How do I get past this error I'm having? It's saying "ERROR: Name for character does not match! (character record at $0)".

The save I have works on the old GBC version but the new one shows the aforementioned error.

[jhirvonen]

How do I get past this error I'm having? It's saying "ERROR: Name for character does not match! (character record at $0)".

The save I have works on the old GBC version but the new one shows the aforementioned error.

What game? If you can send me the save (+ design if FRUA) + some info, I'll take a look.

[Moonbeam111]

How do I get past this error I'm having? It's saying "ERROR: Name for character does not match! (character record at $0)".

The save I have works on the old GBC version but the new one shows the aforementioned error.

What game? If you can send me the save (+ design if FRUA) + some info, I'll take a look.

Game, save and info sent to your email.

[AV8R]

jhirvonen,

Thanks for your excellent work on GBC, it makes the Gold Box games so much more enjoyable. I have a question: seeing that you've extracted the DAX character icons (mostly enemies) into a folder called DAX-Icons, is there a way to assign some of these icons to your own player characters? For example, I have a female fighter I'd like to assign the "Vala" icon to so it shows in-game. Is there a way to do that using GBC?

[jhirvonen]

I have a question: seeing that you've extracted the DAX character icons (mostly enemies) into a folder called DAX-Icons, is there a way to assign some of these icons to your own player characters? For example, I have a female fighter I'd like to assign the "Vala" icon to so it shows in-game. Is there a way to do that using GBC?

When figuring out DAX-file encoding I did something like that:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/screens.html

Start IconMod.exe from the GBC-folder. Some documentation can be read from IconMod.txt.

It's experimental at best. Can only be used on some of the EGA-games and the color palette is not accurate. As player icons are made of a head and a body icon, you have to replace the head graphics with an empty transparent image (CLEAR ICONS button in IconMod) and use the body graphics for icons. There's the RESTORE ORIGINAL button to restore the original file if something goes wrong.

[AV8R]

From the Help-file:
You can use custom combat icons by putting them into the corresponding game's data folder found under the GBC-folder.
For example, for a character named Wulfgar, create two 24x24 bitmaps named "Wulfgar_1.bmp" and "Wulfgar_2.bmp".

Gold Box Explorer can extract FRUA icons.

So I downloaded GB Explorer and was going to use the method described above to make copies of my existing character icons. I used GBE to poke around the various DAX and character files but couldn't find my existing character icons (I was going to use the Export feature in GBE to extract those character icons). In what file(s) are your existing character icons stored? Or do your character files simply have pointers to the CBody and CHead DAX files and generate your character icons on the fly during battles?

EDIT: Nevermind, I did it the hard way. I exported the original game icons from the CBody file with GBE and just tweaked the icons in MS Paint (after setting EGA colors on Paint's custom color bar per your EGA-Palette bitmap) to match my character icons in-game. After creating each icon (Ready and Action), I saved them per your instructions: Character_1.bmp (Ready icon) and Character_2.bmp (Action icon). I then discovered that Paint only saves BMPs in 24-bit format whereas 32-bit format is required to have the file sizes match. So I had to save each file as a PNG (to get 32-bit format) and then use a downloaded utility to convert the 32-bit PNGs to 32-bit BMPs. Whew, that was fun.

Now to import them into the CBody.DAX file so I can actually use them....

[AV8R]

So the character icon experiment was a success (at least in Pool of Radiance). I finished PoR and moved my characters and their custom icons to Curse of the Azure Bonds but am having trouble getting GBC to work with it. I am using the GoG version of CotAB, but when I start GBC version 2.32 it says in the dialog box the START.EXE and GAME.OVR files are the wrong size. Whether this is the problem or not, GBC cannot load the characters from the saved game. If I use GBC version 2.01 it will load the characters just fine.

Am I doing something wrong?

My DOSBox version is 0.74.

[jhirvonen]

I just checked GOG's Curse-files:
START.EXE ... 57 789 bytes
GAME.OVR ... 272 137 bytes

Are you sure you have pointed GBC to the right folder?

Can you post an in-game screenshot of the custom icons you used?

[AV8R]

Odd... my file sizes are:

GAME.OVR - 271,731
START.EXE  70,308

I reinstalled the GoG version just in case (I was using an Abandonia hacked version before, which I deleted. That one wouldn't load either with the same file size error).

Pic of custom icons in-game (a couple of these I just stole from the DAX-Icons bank, the rest are kinda standard but just tweaked a bit). If they seem a bit smooth or smudgy around the edges, it's because I use the HQ2x setting in DOSBox so the text/icons appear less blocky/pixelated.