Eye of the Beholder savegames Amiga - PC translations.

[Marcuz]

This thread is for hosting my analysis of the structure of savegames of the entire series of Eye of the Beholder, in Amiga and PC formats for the purpose, among others, of playing the three games with a single party, starting for instance with EoB I on Amiga and ending with EoB III on Pc.

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So far I've detailed to a decent level of depth the differences between EoB I PC and Amiga, that you can find attached here; along two bookmark files for HexWorkshop, that you need to load along the relevant savegame.

I've skipped the areas regarding effects and active / memorized spells, as they are anyway secondary aspects of the character party (with the possible exception of the poisoned status, which could be useful to be know)

17/08/2012:
I've taken the analysis of EoB I savegames to the point that simple trial and error mode is not sufficient to understand more, AFAIK.

I've edited the text with the results more and I've reuploaded it.

Basically, I've tested a complete translation of the party from a 6 characters from a PC savegame set at the end of the game, to a 4 characters Amiga savegame set at the start of the game.

Simply put, trying to add - with all the care - the two characters more by editing them in causes the savegame not to load and request a not-named disk: I think there's some flag to set somewhere outside the character area to make the game accept them, or else some unknown combination of the two bytes preceding a character name.

However, any edit of the two last characters in a savegame with the fifth and sixth members already acquired is possible.

Lastly, regarding the items: as I said, uniques have no problem being imported, while many common objects have their index signify different stuff depending the place where they have been loaded first in the game.
It is possible also, but in these conditions I would not know how to be sure, that some items have a different code altogether in the two versions.

Some screenshots:
(the session in the right of the images is the one I've imported the data from, the one in the left is the one that received the data).
You can see, in the inventory to the left, that unique and valuable items: the long sword + 5, the shield + 3, the platemail, the enchanted rings, the mace + 3, drow boots, wands etc, have been interpreted correctly, not so other common items.

[Marcuz]

Reserved for EoB II

edit: I've started EoB II and already figured that even the imported codes means, in part, different items, as you can see in the figure below.

By the way, in the screenshot, three instances of Eye of Beholders running at the same time: above, the the PC, EGA version of EoB I in Dosbox, with hq2x scale; below, to the left the original SPS version of EoB II ECS in Winuae, and to the right the PC, EGA version of EoB 2 in Dosbox.
EGA/ECS versions are way cooler than VGA imho.



Will continue later!