Enhancements

These games have stood the test of time, and the enhancements are designed to respect them and the people who made them. Each one fits seamlessly into the original: the game itself is never altered, and nothing changes the story, the rules or the challenge. They simply smooth over the parts that a 1988 PC forced on you — a code wheel on the desk, a pad of graph paper, a paper journal.

Answer the code wheel once is on from the start, because there is nothing to gain from it unless it is already watching the first time. Every other enhancement is off until you turn it on. The player has an Enhancements panel with a switch for each one, and what you change is remembered with your copy of the game.

The enhancements

Each of these is in the emulator this site runs today, with its own switch in that panel. Where one needs something from you, or is not finished, it says so under its own heading.

Answer the code wheel once

The game asks its copy-protection question the first time you play. Answer it, and it is never asked again.

With this on and the question unanswered, the enhancement does nothing at all: the game asks exactly as it always did, and the seam only watches the program's own comparison. Answer correctly — off your wheel, your manual, or the code generator application the releases sold today ship instead of one — and it remembers that. Every launch after that steps over the call that draws the challenge, so the game goes from its titles straight to its menu. It never answers the question for you, in either state.

This one is on from the start. Turn it off in the player’s Enhancements panel and it stays off for that copy of the game.

Nobody has answered the question here. The watching, the remembering and the skip are all built, on both sides, and no browser has yet been opened on a game that asked — so the first person to play is the first to find out whether the second launch really does go straight to the menu.

Fix the party in camp

Puts a Fix command on the camp screen: the party casts the cures it is already carrying, and then rests off however many days the wounded still need.

The cures are the party's own, spent through the game's own cast driver with one queued back for each one spent, and the rest is the game's own rest with its clock dialled to the days required rather than hit points written into a record. The command is spliced into the string the program draws its command bar from, and the report afterwards is drawn by the game, in the game's font. If a wandering monster interrupts the rest it says so, and does not retry.

How many days the wounded need is worked out from a chosen number — one hit point per member per day — rather than a measured one. And the list of members it could not mend has only ever been drawn over rosters a test wrote: it is reached by the conditions resting cannot touch at all, which a party that survived its fight is not carrying.

Map where you have walked

Tab draws a map of the squares your party has walked, over the roster on the game's own screen, and Tab takes it away again.

It is drawn into the game's own planes in the game's own sixteen colours, at the game's own resolution: a wall in the colour of the tiles the 3D view blits for it, a door leaf where a wall face has been seen shut, and the area's name set in the program's own glyphs. Tab is taken out of the keystroke buffer before the program's key routine looks, so the game observes exactly what it would have observed had the key never been typed, and the panel comes down on its own whenever the screen is not the adventuring one.

It maps the city and dungeon screens; outdoors is the fog of war below, which is a separate switch sharing the same stored map.

Journal entries, on the game's screen

When the game cites an entry, tale or proclamation, it goes on your list, and a Notes command on the party's bar opens that list — newest first, unread marked — and any entry on it as a full screen.

The text is your own journal: your PDF, located and read once — on a button, never as a side effect of showing the file — and then kept in this browser's own storage and nowhere else. Reading it means an OCR engine, about seven megabytes of one, served from this site's own origin rather than from anywhere else and downloaded only when you ask; the reading itself takes minutes, and is not repeated on a later visit. Nothing of your journal ships with the emulator or with this site, and nothing of it leaves your browser. An entry opens as a whole screen in the game's font, paged with NEXT, PREV and EXIT, with an entry that is a drawing shown as the page after its caption; the screen is given back through the program's own composer. Notes is the only way in, because a command on the party's own bar is the one place a whole screen can be handed back. A citation is matched by its shape — the word a numbered section is called by, and the number after it — rather than by any of the game's prose.

Nobody has read an entry off a display yet. A whole journal has now been read by an engine — every entry and every drawing, by the same one this site serves — but only as files checked against each other, and the reader itself has only ever been driven file against file, here as well as in the emulator. The table of journal editions has one row, and a scan this build does not know is refused with its fingerprint rather than guessed at, because the entry positions are true of one file. With the reader on, Notes is on the party's bar from the moment that bar is drawn, before anything has been cited.

Fog over the country you have not walked

On the overworld map, where the party has walked is the game's own picture and the rest is under a fine black haze, which lifts a square at a time as you travel.

The haze is black, laid on every other pixel, so half of what is under it is the game's own map and the shape of the country is still there to be read. Black rather than a grey: grey read as terrain over some ground and as a covering over other ground, and black is the game's own colour for what is not there and is the same over all of it. Nothing is added to that screen that the game does not already draw: no grid, no border, no lettering. Only the square the party is standing on is clear — a radius of nothing, because the window is five squares across and a radius of one fills the map faster than a party can explore it, both of which were measured rather than assumed.

Nobody has played with the fog. Both of its settings — how dark it is, and how much it uncovers — were changed on the strength of a walk across the three wilderness areas, and neither of the new ones has been walked in turn. Forest and roads have still never been under it, and every look at it so far has changed the design rather than confirmed it.

Debug switches

These are not enhancements. They are the switches the emulator’s own developers test it with, they change the outcome of a fight or the state of your party, and they are listed here because the player has them. Its panel shows them only in its debug view, and they are off until you turn them on there.

The party takes no damage

Your party members take no damage. Enemies still do.

Any damage aimed at a party member is set to zero just before the game applies it.

End the fight

Deals 120 damage to every enemy still standing, when you pull it.

A tough enough enemy survives with the remainder. The game ends the fight itself once everyone is down. Pulling it outside a fight waits for the next one.

Wound the whole party

Drops every party member to one hit point, when you pull it in camp.

It makes the write the program's own damage routine would have made for that much damage, on a record the program would accept. It exists because the camp fix's day arithmetic and the exception list in its report had no other way to be driven.

Which games

Enhancements are made for a specific version of each game. Today that is Pool of Radiance; other titles will get theirs as they are added.