Technical aspects of porting Manalink cards into Shandalar

[tazerface]

So Shandalar is like the worst game, it's like objectively terrible. Yet for years and years now every 4-6 months or so I seem to loose a week of my life just farting around the stupid towns, loosing and reloading a lot and generally raging at how much I suck at MTG. Yet time and time again I find myself burning late hours, slowly backtracking a castle to collect each dice hoping for a good bonus to fight the wizard with.

As you might guess this week is one of those weeks. and after beating Arzakon for the umpteeth time I found myself really wanting to go back shove an Emrakul up that Old Man of the Sea's ass (2 unstable mutations and he stole my frickin wurmcoil engine!).

Lacking any further updates I started to wonder what exactly is needed to port cards from Manalink into Shandalar and if I could do it for myself. They all seem to be implemented but Shandalar only has a subset. In this case I happen to have a Korath imbued version: Manalink-3.0-PortalsToTheros so It seems it should be possible. (I can thank having that version for giving Shandalar it's longevity)


I've wandered through a few threads and the files in the directory but can't quite figure out exactly how Shandalar.exe finds it's cards compared to Magic.exe and what would be involved in getting the former access to all the cards that are in the latter.

So if anyone with some technical understanding could point me in the right direction or at least tell me why even with this version it's impossible to cram any more cards in there that would be appreciated.

[Aswan jaguar]

The two programs have different code for cards and use different programming languages, C for manalink C++ for shandalar. Only if you have shandalar source files and establish a coding environment you can code the cards you want and insert them into the game.

[tazerface]

I don't think anyone has the source for the exe, looks like it's been patched via hex editing. Based on file size and what I've read my understanding is that the card implementations are not in Shandalar.exe anymore which is what allows for the increased cardbase, I'm not sure about manalink and the 2000 card limit if that was the same fix or not.

I've found references to all the cards in Magic.exe, but I'm guessing Shandalar.dll is where the card implementations are, unless the compiled versions are way more compact than the source.

Is it that there's 2 calls in that library? one for manalink one for Shandalar? or are there pointers coded into Shdandalar.exe that should link up with the card implementations in the dll?