{"id":1695,"date":"2011-11-15T19:22:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T17:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=1695"},"modified":"2011-11-15T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T11:50:07","slug":"30-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=1695","title":{"rendered":"30 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thirty years ago Wizardry<\/a>:\u00a0 Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was released. I bought my copy soon after that — unfortunately the invoice<\/a> is not dated. (incidentally, R65 was a lot of money back in 1981).<\/p>\n

I played the living bits out of this game. Eventually beat it, too. In the process I figured out, all on my own, how the characters were stored on disk and of course, how to cheat<\/a>. How? Well, edit a byte on the disk, check what changed, make notes. After all, there’s only about 200 bytes per character, and each byte has 256 possible values… this can’t take long, can it? (Hint: yes, it does…)<\/p>\n

After Proving Grounds<\/em> it was Knight of Diamonds<\/em> and Legacy of Llylgamyn<\/em> after which… life happened. I went to varsity<\/a>, didn’t quite yet discover girls, but… pretty much stopped spending endless hours on computer games.<\/p>\n

Yet I’m still a retrogeek<\/a>, and I follow various<\/a> retro<\/a> websites<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wizardry is now available on iOS. And it’s thirty years better<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If there’s a reason for me to get an iDevice, this is it.

Thirty years ago Wizardry:\u00a0 Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was released. I bought my copy soon after that — unfortunately the invoice is not dated. (incidentally, R65 was a lot of money back in 1981). I played the living bits out of this game. Eventually beat it, too. In the process I figured out, all on my own, how the characters were stored on disk and of course, how to cheat. How? Well, edit a byte on the disk, check what changed, make notes. After all, there’s only about 200 bytes per character, and each byte has 256 possible...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1700,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions\/1700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}