First of all, apologies if this has already been posted here elsewhere. There are way too many topics for me to check!

I have been researching Wizardry 1 to 5 for many years and collected all versions both original boxed disk versions and images for all formats.

I recently stumbled upon a solution to play Wizardry 1 to 5 from the Ultimate Wizardry Archives and easily be able to transfer characters between games and also (if you are so inclined) cheat in the same way as we used to do with the PC floppy versions :)

When creating the versions for UWA, Interplay (or whoever) actually ripped off the work of Takeo Katoh, who created a program to make disk images of the Wizardry floppies and another program to play them in Dos.

I don't know why the makers of UWA made it complicated to transfer character and why they had to add the SAVE disks instead of just sticking with Takeo Katoh's simple system...

He originally created the programs to be able to play the games on an HP100LX palmtop Dos machine!

Some of his work is/has been available on abandonware sites but whoever uploaded them removed the documentation (in Japanese).
I had these files for many years but could not figure out how to transfer characters from Wiz 1 to 2 & 3 (and 5).

Recently, digging around in my RPG archive hard drive, I found a set of zip files from a long-gone French site which actually included the docs and with a bit of Google Translating from Japanese I was able to work out how to do it.

Since the disk images had the same name as the UWA files I thought I'd take a chance and see if they worked with Takeo Katoh's Dos loader...

...they do!!!

The program is called WIZDOS.COM

All you need is the following files from the Ultimate Wizardry Archives:

WIZ1.DSK; WIZ2.DSK; WIZ3.DSK; WIZ4.DSK and WIZ5.DSK

They can be run in real Dos or DosBox


With the instructions below, I am assuming you are already familiar with how the Wizardry 1 to 5 games work.

To launch Wizardry 1 (for example) type WIZDOS WIZ1.DSK (just press enter when asked for Scenario Disk)

To transfer characters launch (for example) WIZDOS WIZ1.DSK WIZ2.DSK

Go to Utilities / Move Characters and use <ctrl><right shift> to 'insert' the WIZ2 destination disk.
Use <ctrl><left shift> to re-insert the WIZ1 disk.

Remember to ALWAYS use Edge of Town / Leave the Game when quitting!

Characters can be transferred between Wizardry 1, 2, 3 and 5 (not 4).
They can even be transferred from 5 to 1 or any other combination.

I don't know if I can post a link to the WIZDOS.COM utility here.

Takeo Katoh meant it to be distributed freely

Please advise

Interesting, but of course I have questions. When the games are played this way:
* Does the Identify Glitch work? (Can you identify item 9 to get 100 million XP?)
* One issue with the UWA versions is that stats are significantly more likely to drop at level up (I've heard of young characters dying of old age this way). Is this an issue with WIZDOS?
* In Wizardry 4, does Trebor's ghost move in real-time, or does it only move when you do? Interesting, because the UWA versions do not allow this. (The Apple 2 versions do, and that allows some tricks like easily getting a level 200+ Bishop into Wizardry 3.)

CHARACTER TRANSFER
WIZDOS lets you load two disk images at a time and swap between them, so you can copy your (say) WIZ1.DSK to WIZ1A.DSK, load them both and copy characters to duplicate items, multiply gold etc like in the old days.
The UWA loader only deals with one image at a time. Not sure why they did that. Maybe to simplify things for newbies?


YOUR OTHER ISSUES MENTIONED

I have not tested the UWA images as far as playing a game. Only booting, creating characters and transferring them on to W2, W3 and W5 (and back).

Will try and get a chance to test them in future.

But I don't think that either WIZDOS or the UWA loader affect the games' behaviour in any way. They just enable the original Pascal code to run.

It's probably more to do with the version of Wizardry itself.

There are two versions of Wizardry disks: version 1 and version 2.
I have a 5.1/4 floppy version of the Wizardry Trilogy and in that set Wizardry 1 and 2 are version 1 while Wizardry 3 is version 2.

My original 5.1/4 floppy of Wiz4 is Version 1

It is possible to transfer characters between versions as long as they come from the same floppy size.
This, unfortunately, is valid also for disk images.
It is not possible to transfer characters from an image made from 5.1/4 disks to one made from 3.5 disks or the other way around.

All 3.5 disk originals are version 2 (wiz 5 says 2.1)

The UWA images are ALL version 2 so that's maybe why they may behave differently. I don't think the people who put UWA together actually touched any of the code. BTW, although the files are only 320KB in size, they are actually from 3.5 versions of Wizardry. You can check with a hex editor and you'll see that the fourth pair of hex character is 80 instead of 00 (the hex number of the 5.1/4 floppies)

The original WIZDOS package includes a utility to create image files from original floppies and when imaging a 720K disk of Wiz 1 2 or 3 will write a 320K file.

One last note: instead of WIZ1.DSK, WIZ2.DSK etc. you can actually play with SAVE1.DSK, SAVE2.DSK etc from UWA but I have yet to work out what the differences are.

Does anyone know where to get WIZDOS.COM? I just found my old 3.5" floppies so I'm interested in the "original WIZDOS package" too. Thanks!