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Discoveries
Things the reverse engineering turned up — the archaeology of a game shipped half-connected.
A complete item shop exists in the engine: selling, buy-back via a click on the goods, even a loyalty counter feeding a "You are an important customer" line. It is placed in one building on the entire island, unmarked, outside the starting zone — and the shopkeeper has no dialogue by design (the speech field on shop buildings is authored empty). Interiors are routed by map row: every building sharing a latitude stripe shares a personality; the engine has no concept of an individual building.
Taverns sell rumors on an escalating price ladder — 0, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 2000, 4000 jade — indexed by a purchase counter stored in your save. Buy a few cheap rumors early and the keeper's "Come back later. A little richer, if possible!" becomes permanent, because the next tier costs more than a party can practically carry.
Found rings and sceptres say only "ring" or "sceptre" because they are empty: the item builder fully supports enchantments (a spell-variant parameter written into every item record), but the drop catalogs contain no rings or sceptres at all, and every other grant site passes variant 0. The single enchanted droppable item in the entire game data is one rod. The effects system, the naming, the variant field — all built; the data was simply never authored.
Temple revival cost level³×20 jade, refused without payment, and a dead character carries no purse. A party wiped early could never revive anyone — the classic first-death game-over that made the PC version notorious.
DRAKM.CC1 holds two MS-DOS programs: the game engine and a separate character creator, each
BPE-compressed. The mods live in proven-dead space — orphaned filename tables, the carcass of
the copy-protection routine, and 37 unreachable records of the creator's private item catalog —
because the image cannot grow a single byte without starving the graphics loader.
More depth: docs/NOTES.md (file formats, engine addresses, tables), and docs/ROADMAP.md for what was built, dropped, and why.