Dungeon Master Forum

Is there a listing of the champions that can be easily imported into a spreadsheet or other program so I can sort them based on say carrying capacity or strength?

I made an AppleWorks 2.0 spreadsheet doing just this around 25 years ago give or take a year or two (probably longer, I think I did it closer to 1990), but my Apple IIGS is in mothballs at my mother's house, and with my Mac dead, I'm not even sure if I can import it into Excel (the Mac could use ClarisWorks 4.0 to convert it into a format Excel can read) if I could even access the file.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I thought I'd ask if anybody else had one available for easy download. It's not hard, just labor intensive.

Well, can you access the file?

The state of IIgs emulation is quite good, so if it's just a matter of needing something that can run AppleWorks, that's certainly doable.

That's probably not the solution you were hoping for, but it's what I've got.

Not until the next time I see my mother. The IIGS is in storage, and well packed so the dampness of her basement doesn't wreck havoc on the hard drive I bought back in junior high. It would be a royal pain to get it up and running again just for the one file.
Hence why I asked if anybody had one handy. I found [URL=https://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vi ... 27&t=28416] this link [/URL], but the website mentioned is dead.

Interestingly, if you simply select the whole text on DM Encyclopaedia (http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/199) from "Portrait, Name, Gender" to "Load 44" (for Elija), Copy it, and then Paste into Excel, the result would be somehow garbled as far as the images, skills and equipment (left side of the page) are concerned (everything in one cell), but the statistics (right side of the page) would be exported quite fine (one item per one cell). If you then play a bit with the data and reorganise them, you'll get what you want in a couple of minutes. Trust me, I tried that now.

Excel 2003 and 2007 give a bit of a mess, but the statistics are indeed in individual cells, even if they are in rows when I'd rather have them in columns. It will take some work, not just "a few minutes", but less work than it did back when I was a kid.

slickrcbd wrote:even if they are in rows when I'd rather have them in columns

First of, sorry for the following terminology - I only have Czech Excel (2003) and don't know the exact English terms.

Excel can convert rows to columns. The function is called something like "Transpose". Copy the table you want to transpose, go to a new area where you want to have you new table, right click, and then, depending on the version you use, either click on Transpose directly (the icon shows it quite well), or (in older Excels) use "Paste like" (or something like that, don't know the exact term) and in the table that appears select "Transpose" in the bottom right corner. And Bob's you uncle !

slickrcbd wrote:Not until the next time I see my mother. The IIGS is in storage, and well packed so the dampness of her basement doesn't wreck havoc on the hard drive I bought back in junior high. It would be a royal pain to get it up and running again just for the one file.

It was unclear to me from your initial post whether you actually had the file and just had no way to access it, or whether the file itself was stuck on your Apple IIgs. In the former case, I was suggesting that an emulator would be able to help you. In the latter case, that won't work, of course.

slickrcbd wrote:I found this link, but the website mentioned is dead.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much of that thread you read, but the person who made that site was a... rather interesting person...

That's no big deal to remake that file from scratch. Jan gave a good way to speed this up.

This isn't a 'labor intensive' task. 24 champions, 10 stats and 4 skills. The info is all on DMweb already. It would take 30 mins tops, far quicker than the effort that seems to already have been expended just thinking about it. To quote Nike,just do it!

Alright, but this is the nature of humans and sort of a driving force of all progress, isn't it? Why would one work for 30 minutes when he can think for a couple of weeks and as a result invent a tool that would speed up the process to about 25 minutes? To quote myself, just think about it! Or, alternatively, just don't do anything and wait for the others to do it for you!

Well, I HAD searched first and found a dead link from 7 years ago, I thought maybe the file was available elsewhere and so I thought it couldn't hurt to ask before I wasted the time re-doing it from scratch.

Sorry if that was a mistake.

Hey slickrcbd, sorry for my snarky response. Of course it wasn't a mistake to ask. I just found your use of the phrase 'labour intensive' a bit peculiar, because in my mind I don't think the task is at all labour intensive.

I'm remembering from junior high when I wasn't as skilled with a block editor (like a hex editor, but works on the blocks of a disk, ProDOS is similar to FAT but calls the clusters of sectors blocks), and I wouldn't get the advanced version that could automatically follow a file for at least another year. I think it was the same program that added the feature) and couldn't find the game data, so I had to write down each champions stats onto index cards while holding down the mouse button on the eye with one hand, then when I was finished reboot into AppleWorks and make the spreadsheet.
I took a lot more than 30 minutes and even though the computer was only 2.6mhz AppleWork's text interface was generally as fast as Excel is today unless doing major recalculations. I swear it ran on a 1mhz Apple IIe with 128K of RAM (standard for the IIe and what AppleWorks was designed for, got to use it that way a lot at school) faster than Office 97 on a 486.

Yeah, lots of ancient equipment, and I might not have even gotten my hands on a block editor yet. I had to get freeware and shareware via mail order, and $3.50 a disk or $2 + S&H was a crimp on a pre-teen's budget circa 1990.

Slickrcbd - I have such a spreadsheet, though it lacks the Load stats. If it would be of use I'll be happy to e-mail it if you PM me an address.