Characters
The Characters text file is part of the standard DOS 3.3 and ProDOS versions of the Eamon Master and contains records of all the existing adventurers. Records in the Characters file are added during the character creation process and are modified as the player gains weapons, gold, or experience from adventuring, through trades with vendors, or by various utility programs.
John Nelson's Eamon Utilities I collection includes a program called Condense Characters for removing dead characters and blank space from the file.
Structure
The standard Characters file saves each record with a length of 150 bytes, normally sufficient to contain the complete record of an adventurer. The following Characters file record is from the EAG's copy of DOS 3.3 master, showing the standard adventurer Sam.
| Character record |
|---|
1 SAM 24 18 24 65 168 63 122 39 0 36 34 67 25 M 68367 200000 5 STAFF 4 25 3 5 CRYSTAL SWORD 5 60 10 2 DRUINVAL 5 30 4 8 STARFIRE 5 80 10 6 |
In some cases, particularly when the adventurer has a long name or has weapons with long names, the Character record may exceed 150 bytes, causing it to overflow into the next record and potentially crash the Main Hall program. To address this, John Nelson introduced in August 1985 a new version of the file named Characters.Ext that uses a longer, 250-byte-per-record format. Though not incorporated into later versions of the master provided by the clubs, the new file (along with a revised Main Hall named "Village") was available through others including the Big Red Apple Club.
See also