Posted May 16, 2017
Goal: Transfer my saved characters from Shattered Lands to Wake of the Ravager on Mac OS/X
Ok, so this was a very tricky thing to do and took me a couple of days to figure out. I figure that I will post a (hopefully) helpful article here documenting my journey. I’m not the most computer savvy person so this took quite a bit of trial and error on my part.
First things first, install Wake of the Ravager on your Mac and run the game. It will prompt you to go and grant the program privileges in the Security settings of OS/X. Do this. Once the game starts, you can push shift a bunch to skip the intro video. Click on ‘Create Party’. Notice that only the default characters are there. Go ahead and exit the game. If you don’t do this step before altering files then OS/X will fail the app when it runs its checksum and prompt you to reinstall it.
Now we will be working in the Terminal. It’s not that scary, and you are going to have to do so if you want to use your pre-existing characters. The Terminal is located under the Launch Pad and ‘Other’. If you have not already done so, install Home Brew on your OS/X. You can do an internet search to learn more about this. I use the VI text editor. Once you have Home Brew setup (It’s one command you copy and paste from their website), you can type into the terminal
brew install vi
If you have a different text editor you prefer like nano or emacs, then by all means use that instead.
The first thing you need to do is copy your Shattered Lands info into a folder. This is located under your home directory. Type the following
cd “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun/Current.boxerstate/C app.harddisk”
Please note that spaces and capitals matter in UNIX based operating systems. Notice the quotations. Sometimes dealing with spaces in file names is a pain on UNIX based operating sytems. Now type
mkdir DSUN
This makes the folder that will carry your save info. We will copy all the information in this current directory into the newly created folder.
cp .* ./DSUN
The dot is telling the computer “right here” and the star is saying “everything”.
You can double check everything is there by typing
ls
and then typing
ls DSUN
Now we have to move this folder to where the Ravager character transfer program can see it. Please note that the directories and sub directories get convoluted and repeat themselves here on out.
mv –T DSUN “/Applications/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/game/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.boxer/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
Now we will move over to that directory and double check everything is there
cd “/Applications/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/game/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.boxer/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
Now that we are here, take a look inside and see what’s what
ls
This directory, for all intents and purposes, is the emulated C drive. You should now notice that your DSUN folder you made is here. You need to make another folder so that the transfer program will work properly.
mkdir RAVAGER
I had to figure out by trial and error which files were needed and where. We will now move the files that CHARTRAN.EXE looks for. It is always a good practice to make backup copies of files before messing with them in case something goes wrong somewhere.
cp –p OBJEX.GFF OBJEX.GFF.bkup && cp –p CHARSAVE.GFF CHARSAVE.GFF.bkup
Now that we have the original files preserved as backups, we move them into the newly created RAVAGER folder
cp OBJEX.GFF ./RAVAGER && cp CHARSAVE.GFF ./RAVAGER
You should now see those 2 files in there if you type
ls RAVAGER
Moving right along, we will now get ready to tell the program to use CHARTRAN.EXE. But first, back it up!
cd ..
cp –p “Game Info.plist” “Game Info.plist.bkup”
Now we are going to get into the text editor
vi “Game Info.plist”
There isn’t very much here. You will notice a path name that leads to START.BAT. Use the arrow keys to move over to the end of START.BAT. On the text editor VI, you push the letter i to start editing. Do that now. Use backspace to erase START.BAT then type CHARTRAN.EXE in its place. Hit the ESC key to stop editing. Press SHIFT :
In the lower left corner you will see the colon. Type wq (this stands for “write” and “quit”) then press ENTER. You are now back on the command line. We can leave this for a moment without closing it. Mouse over to your icon for Wake of the Ravager (probably on your Launchpad unless you made a shortcut on your desktop or Dock). Double click to start and then click on the Launch button it offers you. You will now boot into the character transfer program. Notice it auto populates DSUN as the source directory and RAVAGER as the destination directory. If everything has worked so far this should be a breeze. Push ENTER. Select which save game you wish to import. It will run the program in less than a second and dump you back out. (I had to do this part over and over and over and over again so that I could read the error messages it was giving me). You will want to officially quit the program because Mac is silly and doesn’t close programs properly.
Now we are going to go and correct the Game Info path so that it will run the game again instead of CHARTRAN.EXE. Going back to our trusty Terminal that we did not close (right?)
vi “Game Info.plist”
Using the same method as before, arrow over, push the i key, delete CHARTRAN.EXE and type START.BAT push the ESC key, SHIFT : wq ENTER.
Now here is a tricky part. The transfer ran successfully, you likely saw your character names flash briefly before it dumped you out, but if you run Ravager right now they still won’t be there. We need to copy the edited files to the Boxer save state folder so that it will recognize them.
cd “C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk/RAVAGER”
cp .* “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun-wake-of-the-ravager/Current.boxerstate/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
That should copy the two files OBJEX.GFF and CHARSAVE.GFF over the top of those same files in that directory. You can double check the time stamps to make sure
ls –l “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun-wake-of-the-ravager/Current.boxerstate/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
And that is it! Hopefully you have had no problems throughout this endeavor, and you should be ready to get back in business. Click your Wake of the Ravager icon and double check that your people are there when you click ‘Create Party’. Now I’m going to be honest with you: not a single item transferred over properly. Most of the magical armor I had now only existed as a bag of money. That’s ok. Don’t fiddle with any items yet. Just import your characters then start the game. You are immediately launched into a fight. Open your inventory and take a look. Clicking the bags will net you the prior item’s value in ceramic pieces. Some of the armor items might be there but in the wrong slots. The rings and swords will all say the wrong thing. El’s Drinker, for instance, said it had a Charm Monster effect. Don’t worry, it lies to you! Unequipping and re-equipping the items during the fight should correct the errors (you will see the magical protections and/or stat increases stack back on). El’s Drinker will correct itself when you hit someone with it. The Serpent Boots and Belt of Might did not transfer over, and neither did the Terror Blade. I hope you had the Genie duplicate El’s Drinker for you. I started Ravager with 3 of them, and it helps me immensely.
I hope this was helpful. Feel free to post any comments or questions. The internet is full of people far more computer savvy than I, and they are bound to correct any mistakes I may have made.
Ok, so this was a very tricky thing to do and took me a couple of days to figure out. I figure that I will post a (hopefully) helpful article here documenting my journey. I’m not the most computer savvy person so this took quite a bit of trial and error on my part.
First things first, install Wake of the Ravager on your Mac and run the game. It will prompt you to go and grant the program privileges in the Security settings of OS/X. Do this. Once the game starts, you can push shift a bunch to skip the intro video. Click on ‘Create Party’. Notice that only the default characters are there. Go ahead and exit the game. If you don’t do this step before altering files then OS/X will fail the app when it runs its checksum and prompt you to reinstall it.
Now we will be working in the Terminal. It’s not that scary, and you are going to have to do so if you want to use your pre-existing characters. The Terminal is located under the Launch Pad and ‘Other’. If you have not already done so, install Home Brew on your OS/X. You can do an internet search to learn more about this. I use the VI text editor. Once you have Home Brew setup (It’s one command you copy and paste from their website), you can type into the terminal
brew install vi
If you have a different text editor you prefer like nano or emacs, then by all means use that instead.
The first thing you need to do is copy your Shattered Lands info into a folder. This is located under your home directory. Type the following
cd “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun/Current.boxerstate/C app.harddisk”
Please note that spaces and capitals matter in UNIX based operating systems. Notice the quotations. Sometimes dealing with spaces in file names is a pain on UNIX based operating sytems. Now type
mkdir DSUN
This makes the folder that will carry your save info. We will copy all the information in this current directory into the newly created folder.
cp .* ./DSUN
The dot is telling the computer “right here” and the star is saying “everything”.
You can double check everything is there by typing
ls
and then typing
ls DSUN
Now we have to move this folder to where the Ravager character transfer program can see it. Please note that the directories and sub directories get convoluted and repeat themselves here on out.
mv –T DSUN “/Applications/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/game/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.boxer/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
Now we will move over to that directory and double check everything is there
cd “/Applications/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/game/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.app/Contents/Resources/Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.boxer/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
Now that we are here, take a look inside and see what’s what
ls
This directory, for all intents and purposes, is the emulated C drive. You should now notice that your DSUN folder you made is here. You need to make another folder so that the transfer program will work properly.
mkdir RAVAGER
I had to figure out by trial and error which files were needed and where. We will now move the files that CHARTRAN.EXE looks for. It is always a good practice to make backup copies of files before messing with them in case something goes wrong somewhere.
cp –p OBJEX.GFF OBJEX.GFF.bkup && cp –p CHARSAVE.GFF CHARSAVE.GFF.bkup
Now that we have the original files preserved as backups, we move them into the newly created RAVAGER folder
cp OBJEX.GFF ./RAVAGER && cp CHARSAVE.GFF ./RAVAGER
You should now see those 2 files in there if you type
ls RAVAGER
Moving right along, we will now get ready to tell the program to use CHARTRAN.EXE. But first, back it up!
cd ..
cp –p “Game Info.plist” “Game Info.plist.bkup”
Now we are going to get into the text editor
vi “Game Info.plist”
There isn’t very much here. You will notice a path name that leads to START.BAT. Use the arrow keys to move over to the end of START.BAT. On the text editor VI, you push the letter i to start editing. Do that now. Use backspace to erase START.BAT then type CHARTRAN.EXE in its place. Hit the ESC key to stop editing. Press SHIFT :
In the lower left corner you will see the colon. Type wq (this stands for “write” and “quit”) then press ENTER. You are now back on the command line. We can leave this for a moment without closing it. Mouse over to your icon for Wake of the Ravager (probably on your Launchpad unless you made a shortcut on your desktop or Dock). Double click to start and then click on the Launch button it offers you. You will now boot into the character transfer program. Notice it auto populates DSUN as the source directory and RAVAGER as the destination directory. If everything has worked so far this should be a breeze. Push ENTER. Select which save game you wish to import. It will run the program in less than a second and dump you back out. (I had to do this part over and over and over and over again so that I could read the error messages it was giving me). You will want to officially quit the program because Mac is silly and doesn’t close programs properly.
Now we are going to go and correct the Game Info path so that it will run the game again instead of CHARTRAN.EXE. Going back to our trusty Terminal that we did not close (right?)
vi “Game Info.plist”
Using the same method as before, arrow over, push the i key, delete CHARTRAN.EXE and type START.BAT push the ESC key, SHIFT : wq ENTER.
Now here is a tricky part. The transfer ran successfully, you likely saw your character names flash briefly before it dumped you out, but if you run Ravager right now they still won’t be there. We need to copy the edited files to the Boxer save state folder so that it will recognize them.
cd “C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk/RAVAGER”
cp .* “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun-wake-of-the-ravager/Current.boxerstate/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
That should copy the two files OBJEX.GFF and CHARSAVE.GFF over the top of those same files in that directory. You can double check the time stamps to make sure
ls –l “~/Library/Application Support/Boxer/Gamebox States/com.gog.dark-sun-wake-of-the-ravager/Current.boxerstate/C Dark Sun Wake of the Ravager.harddisk”
And that is it! Hopefully you have had no problems throughout this endeavor, and you should be ready to get back in business. Click your Wake of the Ravager icon and double check that your people are there when you click ‘Create Party’. Now I’m going to be honest with you: not a single item transferred over properly. Most of the magical armor I had now only existed as a bag of money. That’s ok. Don’t fiddle with any items yet. Just import your characters then start the game. You are immediately launched into a fight. Open your inventory and take a look. Clicking the bags will net you the prior item’s value in ceramic pieces. Some of the armor items might be there but in the wrong slots. The rings and swords will all say the wrong thing. El’s Drinker, for instance, said it had a Charm Monster effect. Don’t worry, it lies to you! Unequipping and re-equipping the items during the fight should correct the errors (you will see the magical protections and/or stat increases stack back on). El’s Drinker will correct itself when you hit someone with it. The Serpent Boots and Belt of Might did not transfer over, and neither did the Terror Blade. I hope you had the Genie duplicate El’s Drinker for you. I started Ravager with 3 of them, and it helps me immensely.
I hope this was helpful. Feel free to post any comments or questions. The internet is full of people far more computer savvy than I, and they are bound to correct any mistakes I may have made.
