That when I play, I need to have my homemade maps open so I know where I'm going, the word file I copy/pasted all the spells onto, and the cluebook to know what weapons/armour are better. (I don't use the cluebook maps because I find my homemade ones easier to follow)

So in other words, three files to constantly switch back and forth to. It can get rather rattling.

Graph paper were a common requirement back then for those type of games. Many games included it in the box.

Yeah, I made graph-maps all on word files and had a lot of fun making them :3 (Another reason why I prefer them over the premade maps in the cluebook, but even then I only use the cluebook for the weapon/armour stats as everything else is an outright spoiler)

Yes, I used the cluebook for the items too. I don't remember if there was an ingame method of identifying them (blacksmith?) in MM1, or if it was introduced in MM2 only.

I think that was introduced in MM2. In MM1, you could go by the selling price as a rough indicator of which item was better, but that's really cumbersome and annoying, so I just looked up items in the cluebook like most players. I actually did this in MM2 also since manually identifying items was also a pain.

Also drew the map with hand for MM1. The nice point about it was, that you do not have to grind that hard, because, well by exploring every single tile of the map multiple times and drawing it, you received much xp by killing all those enemies standing in your way.
From todays perspective, drawing the map is the most fun part about MM1 :D

I agree. Mapping out the game made the locations themselves feel like adversaries, especially ones with traps designed to disorient or disrupt my cartography. Also, if I died, it wasn't a total loss since I still had the map I was making.