How to undat a file

I downloaded the program Troika made to undat the files but I can't get it to work.
Did a search on this forum and can't seem to find a any thread that explains how this program works.
Anybody ware to enlighten me?

 

The Troika program is a DOS program, so you have to run it in a DOS window on the command line. If you do that, when you just type in the program name by itself it will print out the list of options.

A much easier way to undat files is to use either Dj_Unique's Undat Utility program or the Arcanun undat program. Both of those programs are Windows-based programs and much easier to use. I prefer to use the original Troika program to put things back in DAT files because I have never personally been able to get anything else to produce a usable DAT file, but I'm not sure that isn't a peculiarity caused by my system configuration. Arcanun will only undat files, but DJ_Unique's program will go both ways, if it will work on your system. (I'm NOT putting down DJ_Unique here because he has done a lot of good work and produced some great utilities that I am very grateful to him for and I hope he will continue to improve all of them. ) If you do any work with script editing you will definitely want to get DJ_Unique's Script Editor and his Mes Editor sure makes working on those Mes files easier than doing it from a text editor, except in a few special cases where the Mes file is not formatted normally. All of these utilities are available in the Modding Tools Section here at TA.

 

thank you very much
I managed to undat the file, now I only have to find out what everything means

another question:
I downloaded your boat/level127-hack and I like it a lot
except for:
-the bugged backgrounds
-the huge amounts of magical treasure you can get early in the game


is there anyway to fix this?

 

I'm working on an update to fix the backgrounds. Sorry about the bugs. I thought I had them all out before I put it out.

The amount of treasure can be adjusted by editing the InvenSource.Mes file. Most of what you will probably want to change will be small changes to the percentages on the entries for the magical chests. Do be careful about what you change in this file because careless changes can make the game not run or it can cause the chests to be empty. So try small changes and test them. You can put a copy of this file in your Sierra\Arcanum\data\Rules directory and it will act directly to modify the game behavior without having to re-dat the complete file.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to get that update out soon.