Nice! I have never seen the Crystal Plate before! :o)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent" <bstocking--gmail.com>
To: <<Address Masked>>
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 10:53 PM
Subject: Atari 8-bit City hex junk


> For no particular reason I've been goofing around with the values in
> the City with Atari++, my new favorite 8-bit emulator.
> (http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~thor/atari++/) Partially out of
> curiosity to see just what some of the item properties actually were,
> I guess. Anyway, some initial findings for anyone who might be
> interested:
>
> Weapons: Your weapon inventory starts in the neighborhood of 0x8d60.
> The first part of an individual weapon record is the weapon name in
> ATASCII, padded with 0x20's. The rest goes like this: what I call
> byte A, B, C, a lot of dead space (six 0x00's), then bytes Y and Z.
>
> Values for items are: (these are all hex, even if only one differs
> from its decimal value)
>
> A B C Y Z name
> ------------------------
> 1 1 3 0 0 Bare Hands
> 1 2 2 2 1 War Net
> 2 1 2 0 1 Stiletto
> 2 2 2 0 0 Whip
> 2 2 2 0 1 Dagger
> 2 3 2 1 1 Shortsword
> 2 4 2 2 1 Sword
> 3 2 2 1 1 Flail
> 3 3 2 2 1 Longsword
> 3 3 3 1 1 Battle Hammer
>
> 5 5 26 0 5 Magical Flamesword
>
> 0 0 2 1 1 Small Shield
> 0 0 2 2 1 Shield
> 1 1 2 3 1 Spiked Shield
> 0 0 2 4 1 Tower Shield
>
> You may note the Flamesword has a 26 for C: this is hex 26 (00100110).
>
> Magical items give +1 to A, +4 to C for weapons and change Y and Z in
> apparently random ways, e.g. a Magical Battle Hammer is 4 3 7 0 1, a
> Magical Stiletto is 3 1 6 0 0.
>
> Magical items give +1 to Y and +2 to Z for shields, e.g. a Magical
> Tower Shield is 0 0 2 5 3 and a Magical Spiked Shield is 2 1 6 4 3
> (with the +1/+4 A/C too).
>
> Cursed weapons seem to be uniformly 1 0 6 0 0 no matter what kind they
> are.
>
> Based on these numbers, I assume A is damage rank, B is to-hit rank,
> and C is probably a special-property flag depending on which bits are
> on. My guesses:
> C bit 1: 2-handed? (only battle hammer and bare hands are 1)
> C bit 2: normal weapon (always is 1)
> C bit 3: magical? (only magical/cursed items are 1)
> C bit 4: unknown
> C bit 5: unknown
> C bit 6: unknown, but probably good.. flame-element type, perhaps?
> (only Flamesword)
>
> Y seems to be defense rank, Z perhaps a parry factor? It's hard to
> tell at this point with the inconsistent modifiers magical weapons
> get.
>
>
>
>
> Armor hangs out at 0x8ad0 and is the name in ATASCII, followed by 11
> bytes, which I name A, B, C7, Y, and Z. C7 is 7 consecutive bytes that
> always seem to share the same value.
>
> Y is not listed because it is usually a random value between 61 and 7f
> (except Skin, which has ff) -- I figure this is the condition of the
> armor. I don't have save states farther enough apart to check if this
> deteriorates over time, but I suspect it does (except for Skin,
> obviously).
>
> Z is potentially a flagged byte, but the only variation I have seen is
> that it is 01 for cursed items and 00 for all others.
>
> A B C7 name
> ---------------------------
> 00 00 00 Skin
> 43 72 79 Padded Armor
> 01 00 00 Leather Armor
> 01 01 00 Studded Leather
> 02 01 00 Ring Mail
> 02 02 00 Scale Mail
> 03 03 00 Chain Mail
> 04 04 00 Banded Armor
> 05 05 00 Plate Mail
> 03 07 00 Crystal Plate
>
> 01 01 01 M! Leather Armor
> 02 01 01 M! Studded Leather
> 03 07 05 M! Crystal Plate
>
> 10 10 10 C! Leather Armor
> 12 11 11 C! Splint Mail
> 13 15 13 C! Elfin Chain
>
> I tend to think that each byte corresponds to a damage type, i.e. A =
> blunt defense, B = sharp defense, C7 = various magical type defenses
> (power, air, etc?) but I'm not sure how to resolve the padded armor
> values. It doesn't even really look like a two's compliment negative
> over a subset of the bit range (and even if it was I wouldn't think
> padded would be _worse_ than skin).
>
>
> Anyway, this is just some stuff to play with if you're interested.
> If nothing else it is possible to name a character "Bruce Lee", wait
> to jump on a good SKL at the gate screen, then once you're in-game hop
> in the monitor mode and edit your Bare Hands to give yourself Fists of
> Fury. ;>
>
> -brent
>
>
> --
> "It's embarrassing to the whole Steve organization!" --Tom Jackson
>
>
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