Research and More Research…
| This was first brought to my attention at The Cutting Room Floor, a Wiki for content cut from games. On the page for this game, it's mentioned that "It's possible to bring this functionality back to the game, however only human players can use it, getting a great advantage against AI." This fascinated me, so I looked around to see what I could find. My second discovery led me to the Forums of Enroth. There, member Orzie set up a forum poll asking if people would be interested in playing Heroes II with a Wait command. Moreover, he linked to another thread of his that housed a truckload of links – now all very dead, apparently – to various tools and unofficial patches for Heroes II. One such pack included a "Wait restoration patch" by AlexSpl. I was not able to further trace this back, nor was I able to find said patch pack anywhere. Lastly, I found this forum post by Bersaglio which explains the method in which AxelSpl managed to re-enable the "Wait" command. It specifies that this only works in the Windows v2.1 version of the game – basically, the last commercial release of the Price of Loyalty expansion. He also warns that this might not work with the Good Old Games version, and he was right. I tried modifying my copy if Heroes II Gold from GoG and, though the hex addresses were correct, all it ended up doing was disable the Colored Cursor – which is to say, the Colored Cursor didn't update its position on the screen, anymore, but the Black and White one worked fine…? Weird. Either way, pressing "W" to initiate the Wait command didn't work. I also compared the addresses between the Windows version of the game and GoG's DOS version. They did not match. I couldn't find the bytes that needed changing, either, so I have to assume that it works differently in that version. |
Whether you read all of that or not, here's the bottom line: I just want to know if there's a relatively easy way to (re?-)enable the lost Wait command in any version of Heroes of Might and Magic II. I'd really like it if someone could figure out how to do this in every version, but at this point, I'm perfectly willing to settle for absolutely any version. Mostly, I'm curious about how much of an impact this actually makes to the game, but I'd also like to add this information to The Cutting Room Floor so it doesn't become completely lost to time. The more information, the better.
Thank you for reading.
