User:K
- Real name: Klaus Reimer
- Country: Germany
- E-Mail: k@ailis.de
- Homepage: http://www.ailis.de/~k/
My Wasteland History
My first contact with Wasteland was in the year 1990 when I was 13 years old. Back then I used a Commodore 64 and a friend borrowed me his copy of Wasteland. Four master disks which must be copied to four game disks to be able to play. My school english was pretty bad so it was hard for me to understand the game but nevertheless it managed to become my favourite game.
In 1993 (Looks like I already was some kind of hacker these days) I started hacking the game with the help of the Action Replay Cartridge which provided a memory monitor and disassembler during runtime of the game. I found the memory location where all the party data is stored and was able to edit all the character data, found the Red Ryder rifle and could even teleport the whole party to any location in the game. My goal was finally finding out if there really was a Phobos map as mentioned in the paragraphs. Well, there wasn't... I sent all the info about cheating the game to the German 64'er magazine and it was printed as Tip Of The Month in issue 05/93.
Two years later I wrote a full walkthrough of the game and also sent it to the 64'er magazine to be included in the Longplay section but unfortunately the magazine was discontinued at the same time. It was definitely time to switch to a new computer system. So I bought my first PC.
In the following years I nearly forgot about Wasteland which is really a shame. Some day I stumbled over the PC edition of Wasteland and played it extensively every few years.
In 2006 I came up with the great idea to write a Wasteland clone because I wanted to play Wasteland natively on Linux without a DOS emulator. So I started to decode the game files and quickly found some people with the same interests at the Wasteland Deconstruction Wiki. I joined the project (I'm kayahr there) and concentrated on decoding the graphics files of Wasteland which are now fully documented on the Wiki. During this time I wrote the Wasteland Suite, a set of Java programs to decode and encode all the data of the game. But unfortunately I never really continued with the original plan of writing a new Wasteland engine.
In 2007 I created my own Wasteland Wiki because I missed something like that on the Internet. A wiki which contains all information about all the items and areas and monsters. With over 500 articles I think it is already quite informative but unfortunately it never got enough attention to be maintained by more people except me.
In 2008 I tried again writing a new Wasteland engine and this time I wanted to do it in good old C. So I started rewriting the Wasteland Suite as a C shared library. Current state is that it can read all the graphics data but not the map files. I hope that someday I find the motivation to continue this project.
Wasteland stuff created by me
- WasteWiki - The Wasteland Wiki.
- Wasteland Animations - A page with all the encounter animations of the game exported into multi-layer GIF animations in various sizes scaled with different scaling algorithms.
- Wasteland Suite - A Java software to decode and encode the Wasteland game files.
