Shandalar card limit of 500 -- is there a fix or workaround?

by **Pyrrhonic** » 10 Jul 2010, 06:13

This is driving me up the wall. Like, seriously crazy.

Is there any way to remove or work around the limit of 500 cards in your wizard's collection in Shandalar?

I mean, I work hard to get these great cards, but then if I want to build a workable deck around them, I need to sell off all the OTHER great cards that I want to build workable decks around. :cry:

I searched on these forums, and on google, and I couldn't find anything that even refered to this... (and, self-indulgent though it may be to think so, this is infuriating ME so much that I can't believe no one else has ranted about it before, heh.)

So please do me a favour (you'll be doing me one, either way): If there's a fix, sooooo awesome, thank you for saving my sanity and my time, and if not, well, no big deal, I just can't afford time-sinks like this in my life, and I'm better off now, knowing it, so thank you for saving my sanity and my time

by **stassy** » 12 Jul 2010, 04:34

Unfortunately no current Manalink dev has modified Shandalar, except the utility that can edit your deck.

by **aww1979** » 12 Jul 2010, 06:10

As far as I know, there is no way around it. It's driven me nuts on occasion, too, but that's because I'm a packrat! If someone can find the static variable (I think that's what it's called in C++) that stores the value (in this case 500) then they could theoretically change it to any value in the object range. (depends on what microprose used to store the value, i.e. double, int, etc) Finding that number, though, would be like finding a needle in a haystack, and it might appear in more than one place.

by **stassy** » 12 Jul 2010, 07:08

From the old patch notes, it seems to be more a coding problem, going past 500 would crash the game or something like that (it was Mok who warned about the 500 limit if I remember well)

by **Pyrrhonic** » 13 Jul 2010, 10:53

Thanks for the replies, guys.

I'm hardly what one would call a proficient programmer, having failed the same 1st year university C++ course three times (although that might qualify me for the rank of "pig-headedly determined proto-programmer"), so apologies if what follows is moronic.

I just remembered that when I was younger, playing dos games, there were a couple programs available (pretty sure they weren't just hex editors, but my memory's nearly as weak as my Assembly) where you just typed in the current value of whatever you wanted to mess with, then modify that value in-game, and do a cross-referenced search for the new value; sometimes repeating this procedure a few times before you narrowed down whatever stat you wanted to change (and even then, I think you often needed to try changing a handful of identical references one by one before you found the one that actually stuck in-game). I remember doing this for tons of different games, and mostly successfully, and that's saying something considering my ... blue thumb? (you know, from static electricity...?)

So is this just not relevant to the issues with Shandalar? I can't but assume that loads of people would have already tried this if it was possible, because I don't think these editors were particularly uncommon.

Most likely, I'm remembering something wrong :roll:

Like, that it only worked on the family TRS-80, or something. #-o

by **stassy** » 13 Jul 2010, 11:10

If I recall it was a problem with the executable, there was a specific area dedicated to the cards which was limited, so you had to make a complete reverse engineering in order to raise this limit...or use pointer to external dll, which was done for Manalink but not Shandalar.