Times of Lore (maps)

A few years ago I wrote a program to spit out the maps from the PC version of the 1988 game Times of Lore, which I loved as a youngster.  This is the first game I ever cracked (with my handy Turbo Debugger) so that I could play it from my hard drive.

Where there were cities mostly show up in the dumped map as bright green grassy areas. Thanks to Andrew Schultz and his site for inspiring me to dig up and post these images. Oh, and check out Kenn Rice's site too.  Check out this walkthrough by David Eaton as well.  Dave added the buildings and other areas where dynamic tiles were overlaid on to those grassy spots, and added labels as well.  Dave did a great job cleaning up the map.  I couldn't quite figure out how the buildings were encoded.  If anyone can tell me that, that would be awesome.  Someday maybe I'll return to it.  

The world from Times of Lore was huge -- 16384x16384 pixels.  The game screen itself was 320x200 pixels on PC and, of that, the actual window into the world itself was probably 256x128 pixels or less.  That would yield 64x128 or 8192 screens of the world.  They fit this whole world onto a single 360kb floppy.  Unbelievable.

The encoding was genius.  It was hierarchical.  Tiles were 8x8 pixels.  Those were grouped into 4x4 (32x32 pixel) meta-tiles, and those were then grouped into 4x4 (128x128 pixel) super-meta-tiles.  The world was then composed of those.  Everything then was LZW compressed.

The PC version of the game:

and the original C-64 version:

The paper map that came in the box.  Sadly not a cloth map like the Ultima games.  I got this from Times of Lore on the C64-wiki:

The world (scaled down):

Dave Eaton's annotated map (including buildings, names and paths through the forest labyrinths):

The full, 16384x16384 pixel, edited world map as a 16mb PNG on github

The full, 16384x16384 pixel, unedited, raw world map as a 16mb PNG on github.  This includes the dungeon as part of the overworld and other possible easter eggs. 

Note that as you zoom in to the full 16384x16384 map, you can see the full pixel detail that was in the game.  A small section looks like this:

The dungeons, full resolution 2048x2048.  If you zoom into this you can also see the full pixel detail:

Here's a zoomed in view of the Wizard's Tower from the lower-right of the above image:

The base tile set, scaled up by a factor of 2

The 4x4 "meta-tiles"

The 16x16 "super-meta-tiles" composed of 4x4 "meta-tiles."  Note that these don't include building tiles other that city walls and dungeons