dtgreene: If you're talking about the remastered trilogy, you have to beat the game to get the option to transfer to the next, and you can't just go straight from BT1 to BT3; you unfortunately have to go through (and beat) BT2.
In the originals, the option to in a different place depending on the version; I would suggest looking at the Command Summary card that came with the game. (For those not aware, the original games shipped with a manual, which was the same between all versions of the game, and a command summary card, which had different versions for each platform the game was on.)
udog26: Ah, this isnt the remastered one, this is the original individual games. I'm just not seeing an option when it comes to disks (using F4) to switch to a disk that isn't listed (ie, my BT1 disk, or anything other than the BT3 character disk). It doesn't even appear to offer to import from BT2, though I know you can. However you're supposed to it's definitely not intuitive!
One other thing: Without some hacking, you can't transfer characters between versions on different platforms. If you are playing the versions included with the 2004 release, you have an Apple 2GS version of Bard's Tale 1 and 2 and an Apple 2 version (not 2GS) of Bard's Tale 3, and therefore the transfer can't be done without some trickery.
If you are *really* interested in doing the transfer, and you are good with hex editing and willing to possibly use another emulator, I believe you could do something like this:
* Load the Apple 2 version of BT2 in an emulator, then make a save state with a party.
* Find where the data is stored in each version of BT2, and copy the data over to the other version. (I know the Commodore 64 version encrypts the data on disk, so the Apple 2 version might, but I know the Apple 2GS version does not. The use of save states is to get around the on-disk encryption, as the game doesn't encrypt memory. A more difficult approach would be to crack the encryption. The data format seems to be the same between the 8-bit versions and the Apple 2GS version (but not the DOS version, however), except that some versions might have the high bit set on each character of the name.)
* Now, you can transfer between that version of BT2 and BT3.
Incidentally, while the DOS versions of BT1 and BT2 use a different save format from other versions, the DOS version of BT3 does not (except for the high bit of the name), so you can use this trick to transfer DOS BT3 characters to a better version.
Of course, this is all quite technical; maybe someone should write a program to automate all this?
In any case, what versions are you playing, anyway?
