Looking at the spell lists, I noticed one significant omission: There are no spells to help the player navigate areas. Why isn't there a spell to allow me to view the map where it is normally forbidden, or at least give me my coordinates in the area? (Even something like DUMAPIC from Wizardry would be nice.)

Also, why is there no Phase Door (make the wall in front of you disappear) or Teleport (move to arbitrary coordinates in the dungeon, assuming the area isn't no teleport) in the games? Those spells definitely exist in Dungeons and Dragons, and there are cRPGs that implement these spells (Bard's Tale series for one), so why don't they exist in these games?

I didn't miss those spells, navigating is pretty easy in the Gold Box games.

The Pool of Radiance profile me and Mrkgnao are working on for Grid Cartographer will give you the co-ordinates of the party via it's game link function. It's not ready just yet but we're not too far from completion.

I am not interested in an external program, especially not one that is closed source and costs money.

(The only exception I make is for the games themselves.)

I just wish there were spells for more than just combat. (Well, there's Find Traps, but that's about it, and to my understanding, the uses for that spell need to be explicitly scripted by the developers, which becomes an issue in Unlimited Adventures.)

The closest spell to what you want is the 6th level Cleric spell FInd the Path. Given that it only guides you to a location and only does so in the shortest way possible, using it to make a map does not fit. Clairvoyance (3rd level Mage spell) could potentially fit as well, but the way it works would have been unwieldy to implement.

In general, the D&D divination spells will not work well in a cRPG unless severely limited. Teleport is out because it could allow for massive sequence breaking, and the D&D version would be at least as troublesome to implement as Clairvoyance. Passwall or Phase Door could be used to accidentially leave a map, and they'd also allow for a lot of sequence breaking.

Teleport could be handled like in Wizardry and Bard's Tale: choose the coordinates you want to warp to, and you end up there.

Sequence breaking could be prevented by having the spells fail to work in those areas where it would be an issue. As I mentioned, there are other cRPGs that actually *did* implement these sorts of spells.

To prevent leaving a map in a strange direction, just make the spell fail. (Or, for Teleport, you could be cruel and adopt the Wizardry approach; teleporting outside the map causes you to teleport into solid rock, causing your entire party to be GONE.)

Additionally, the Gold Box games -

* simply are fairly lacking in areas that are actually large enough to really justify the use of distance travel spells, except perhaps on the overland maps. And let's face it, overland travel can get tedious (especially with random encounters being ANNOYING to fight there), but would you spend a 5th or 7th level spell slot on skipping it (especially a 7th level spell slot which could be another super awesome Delayed Blast Fireball)?

* moreover, most of the areas that are large enough use engine tricks in order to implement the illusion of size and are actually 16x16 areas; it would probably take an enormous amount of additional scripting to make these not break when arbitrarily jumped into somewhere other than one of the designated entry points (heck, in Secret the coordinates already tend to become inaccurate even during normal gameplay in the Eastern Crevasses!).

* events in Gold Box are more or less tied to specific coordinates (in other words to specific 1x1 cells on the map), unless they are "Zone" events, and there are only a certain number of Zones (8 in UA's case, not sure about the GB games themselves) that a dungeon can contain. Even Zone events are not always a viable option (e.g., combat events where the player is to be surrounded on multiple sides, where each approach to the room will need a separate event chain to account for the different geography). IOW there is a large premium on controlling what direction the player can approach a room from - ideally from an economy of resources standpoint (very important up through Gateway especially, because until then SSI was still supporting 8-bit computers where there was less than 64K of RAM to work in), you only want the player to be able to enter a major encounter from one direction. Passwall and Teleport of course are both ruinous to this idea.

Grid Cartographer v3.1.1 has been released. It includes improved support for running Pool of Radiance side-by-side and having Grid Cartographer show your party position on the map screen.

here's a demonstration:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/share/gc311_por.gif

and you can download it here:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/?aim=dl

There's also a free edition without the advanced 'Game Link' feature. A lot of people use that one and it'll still help you map the game without costing you a thing. I hope you give it a try sometime because making maps is lots of fun :-)

For non-game software, not costing a thing is not good enough for me; it needs to have the source code available under an open source license for me to seriously consider it.

Also, even when there is a free version available, having a feature-added paid version rubs me the wrong way.