Tower of Doom - True Colors Patch

[+wavemotion]

I'm a huge fan of the first two AD&D games for the Intellivision - with Treasure of Tarmin being my favorite game for the platform.

 

I do enjoy the third "unofficial" AD&D game - Tower of Doom but one thing that bothered me was the adventures that randomized the colors.

 

From the ToD Strategy Wiki we see there are 8 colors with Gray being the low end and Magenta being the high end:

 

 

For the Novice and Tower adventures, these colors are consistent. That is, the best weapons will render as Magenta and the weakest will render as Gray.

 

But for the Catacombs and Fortress adventures, these colors are 'Different' - though not really random so much as shifted/obfuscated. What the game does is randomize along the same color spectrum and just applies a shift (wrapping Magenta to Gray). So in one game, maybe Pink is the weakest with Lavender, Green, Magenta, Gray, Cyan Orange and finally Brown get stronger (with Brown being the strongest).

 

Moreover, since each character starts with the same known equipment, it's not that difficult to know what the color shift is. For example, the Warrior always starts out with the Grey (weakest) weapon and two Magenta potions. If you play a game where the Warrior starts with an Orange weapon and Cyan potions, you know that the color skew is simply 2 on that chart above (wrapping as needed).

 

It bugs me that it's so easy to figure out but doing that mental math (or, more likely, printing out the color chart in 8 different orientations or using some kind of color-slide-rule) adds nothing to the enjoyment of the game. So I tend to always play The Challenge which doesn't randomize the colors but otherwise provides different mazes each play-through (The Tower is too easy and the mazes don't change so once you've beaten it, you won't go back often).

 

My goal was to find a hack that allowed the use of 'true' or 'consistent' colors for the Catacomb and Fortress adventure levels. 

 

In short, I wanted this change:

 

Thanks to @intvdave who was kind enough to do a friend a favor, he poked around (pun intended) in the ROM for Tower of Doom looking for the randomization code and adding a patch to keep the colors consistent.  It comes down to this macro which works in jzintv (in the .cfg file for the game) and has been adapted for my Nintellivision emulator:

 

(you could also use your favorite HEX Editor to poke these new values directly into the rom provided you understand how the binary ROM is mapped into memory)

 

And can be easily selected from the latest Nintellivision cheat database once the game is loaded up:

 

 

 

This is Catacombs 12 levels with the warrior... those are the correct "true colors" of the starting equipment (gray weapon, 2x magenta potions, etc):

 

I share this hack (with permission) in the hopes that it improves an already great game for some of you who, like me, didn't care for the mental gymnastics regarding the colors. I've only got about 4 hours testing on this patch but so far, it seems to behave as expected. As with any patches to original games, it's possible that it has an unintended consequence so if you use this patch and discover something not-quite-right, do let us know.

 

All thanks go to @intvdave for his master hacking abilities!!

 

 

[Eisengrim]

I tried this for the first time tonight, enabled the cheats in the menu, and chose Catacombs 12 Levels. It froze up on Level 3. Anyone have problems using the colors patch?

[+wavemotion]

Just played three games on Catacombs 12 with the “cheat” enabled with three different starting characters and made it down to level 4 or beyond on all. No issues. Maybe a glitch? If you save your game near where you crash you can send me the .sav and I’ll try to debug. 

 

 

[Eisengrim]

Thanks, I'll let you know if it happens again.

[Eisengrim]

Probably just a glitch. I played Catacombs 12 all the way through with no issues. Thanks for this improvement to one of my favorite games!