I've recently started re-playing the Forgotten Realms Pools series and it's the first time I'm using GBC. Since I've already finished most games the original way twice, I have to admit that I couldn't resist a little 'adjusting' this time and so I created a party including 4 multi-classed characters that I edited to humans right after creation in order to avoid the other races' level caps.

After finishing PoR I transferred the characters to CotAB. The issue that i'm having now is that while memorizing spells in camp is working fine, none of my magic-user characters are actually able to cast any spells in combat (when I press "C" the screen goes gray for a moment and then back to the combat window, where the active character is still awaiting my instructions). Note that all of my MU characters are human-turned multi-class characters:
1 fighter/magic-user
1 fighter/magic-user/thief
1 cleric/fighter/magic-user (cleric spells work just fine for him)

BTW, For transferring I didn't use copycurs.exe because it didn't work on my x64 DOS prompt so I simply copied the necessary files from PoR into my CotAB directory (at least that's what I thought I did). Maybe I also made a mistake there.

Has this occured to anyone else?

Any hints would be much appreciated since I don't wanna have to drop my beloved party :(

Thanks!

Wow, thanks a lot for your quick answer! So just to make sure, the way that race hack is intended to be used is to switch your characters to human right before training to avoid level caps and then immediately restore them back to their original race?

I guess what I did was: I created multi-class characters and then just switched them to human using the GBC editor, end of story. It worked fine all the way through Pool of Radiance. I also used the level up feature occasionally btw.

Yes.

Changing my multi class mages to elves fixed the issue, thanks again!

Btw, awesome job on GBC - incredible work, very much appreciated! It's like a huge playground for the child within

A couple things here:

1. I suspect that the game treats any human character with multiple classes as dual class rather than multi class; this can cause issues if the character's second class level is not higher than their first class level, and it also affects XP distribution. Also, since you can't normally dual class more than once, I have no idea how the game handles humans with three classes; the result might not be what you'd expect. (I know that, for example, having 26-100 Strength doesn't give you any bonus at all, for example, and that having a 2 in the gender field (in at least one of the games) allows you to edit Strength to 100 when using Modify Character.)

2. Humans can't cast arcane spells while wearing armor unless they're Rangers (though human Ranger/Mage dual classes can use all their spells while wearing armor, not just spells gained through Ranger levels); other races can.

By the way, I remember reading that, if you are somehow above the racial level cap, that you can continue leveling even further above the cap. If you want to play around even more (for example, if you want to do things that GBC doesn't let you do, or if you want to play around with different games, or if you want to eventually write your own tool of this sort), I recommend learning how to use a hex editor.

(Does GBC allow you to change a character's sex to something other than male or female?)

No, and I see no reason for it as you can edit Strength regardless of gender limitations.

AD&D likes to use tables in the rulebooks and most stuff can't be calculated from a base value. Many of these character related values use lookup tables in the code and if you set the value to something which is not in the table limits, odd things may happen. Like picking an open doors value depending on the character's Strength. If the table goes just up to 21 or 23 and you set Strength to 26, you'll get some value outside the table which the code can't always handle and may even crash the game. I know that hit/damage values for high Strength go up to 25 but this may not be the case in other Strength-related stuff or other abilities and may be different between the games.

String tables are also heavily used so if you change the gender to something other than male/female and check the character sheet, you'll probably see the next string from a string table or some trash if there wasn't a table following the gender table.

If this however was a point that the two options for gender are not enough then I have nothing to say at the matter.

Sometimes I just like to play around with the game a bit, seeing what happens if I set a parameter outside the range the game expects.

By the way, at least in the particular game I tested, a value of 2 in the gender field gives the character the Copper gender.

I checked Pool of Radiance's START.EXE with a hex editor. The male/female strings are followed by coin name strings ("copper", "silver", "electrum"...) so it uses the gender value to pick up a string from a table.

In Curse of the Azure Bonds, if you increase the class-value past normal class/mutliclass-values, you'll get the string "OK BUDDY, WHO ARE YOU" displayed in the character sheet.