Here are two programs that decode all string information from pretty much all
Legend Entertainment adventure games. One of these programs - LEGEND_VOCAB -
decompresses and decodes vocab.dat files from all text games except the two
earliest ones (Timequest and S101 used uncompressed vocab.dat which can be
decoded by Volker Blasius's LEGEND1 utility). The other - LEGEND_STR - does the
same to string files in all Legend games, stretching from Timequest all the way
to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Check comments at the beginning of source code
for each utility for details how to use it.
Those utilities are not particularly clean or stable. If wrong file or wrong
version number specified they can produce garbled output or just crash.
Stability was not a goal for this release. The goal was to document file formats.
Now, some bad news. Not all game strings are stored in those files. Some strings
(and quite a few of them) can be found only inside game executable. Unfortunately,
Legend adventure games did not have any kind of virtual machine similar to
Infocom & Co. All games were just written in C from scratch. I seriously doubt
if any kind of portable interpreted can be written for those games. Bummer, I
would not mind playing Eric the Unready on PocketPC -- the game interface could
easily be adapted by interpreter. A couple months ago I ran into Glen Dahlgren
(former designer/producer/programmer at Legend) and he confirmed that there was
no interpreter behind those games. Oh well, at least all those games are
perfectly playable with DOSBox (http://dosbox.sf.net).
The question that still puzzles me... Eric the Unready Official Hint Book
mentions that it is possible to get 1001 out of 1000 points in the game. I could
not find it. Does anybody know where is that hidden point?

Vasyl Tsvirkunov
vasyl at pacbell dot net