I had some frustrations with Wizardry 6 in terms of low scores for my characters and just losing patience in some of the bullshit built into the game. As a result, I poured through various forums trying to find a decent trainer/editor to give me a little boost so I wouldn’t go crazy (and for those saying that’s cheating, well fuck you I already beat this stupid game 35 years ago, I don’t have that kind of time nor patience that I did as a teenager). Anyway, I fell down a series of rabbit hole in terms of trying to get DosBox and some other CheatTable thing to work to no avail. Instead, the solution that did work for me was the result of using the Wine emulator.
Part of the problem with BaneEdit.exe is that it’s an old Windows program which means you need some sort of Windows emulation layer to run it on a Mac. Parallel and Boot Camp are simply too large to run just for a tiny program. DosBox won’t run BaneEdit.exe either because again you need Windows to run it. So your best hope for getting it to work is Wine.
First of all, if you want to install Wine, you’ll need Homebrew (or some other package management tool for the Mac). I prefer Homebrew just because I use a lot of developmental tools. I won’t go into installing Homebrew but you can find it here. For most of the stuff I’m going to talk about, you’ll require the Terminal window as I use Unix to invoke various commands to run Wine, brew, etc.
Once you get that setup, you can install Wine via the command:
brew install –cask –no-quarantine wine-stable
This command will get you the a stable release. Unfortunately, wine by itself won’t be enough to get BaneEdit.exe working on your Mac. When you try to run BaneEdit.exe under wine, you will see the system complain that you are missing a specific dll (dynamic link library). That error message might look like this for you:
0024:err:environ:init_peb starting L”Z:\\Applications\\Wizardry 6.app\\Contents\\Resources\\baneedit\\BaneEdit.exe” in experimental wow64 mode
0024:err:module:import_dll Library MFC42.DLL (which is needed by L”Z:\\Applications\\Wizardry 6.app\\Contents\\Resources\\baneedit\\BaneEdit.exe”) not found
0024:err:module:loader_init Importing dlls for L”Z:\\Applications\\Wizardry 6.app\\Contents\\Resources\\baneedit\\BaneEdit.exe” failed, status c0000135
Note: the BaneEdit.exe file is wherever you’ve extracted the zip file. In my case, I put it inside the Wizardry 6 application directory under a custom fold called baneedit.
To correct the missing dll issue, you will require to first install another helper tool called winetricks. You can download it anywhere, but make sure the path is either globally accessible or you run it via the global path. Out of sheer laziness, I kept it in the same directory as the BaneEdit.exe file. But to obtain winetricks, you can run the command:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
You might have to install wget as well to do this. Again, this is where homebrew comes in handy:
brew install wget
Now that you have winetricks downloaded (along with wget presumably), you might need to change permissions to the file so that it can be executable:
chmod +x winetricks (wherever you installed it)
From there, you can run the following command to fix the dll issue:
winetricks mfc42
Finally, you should be able to run BaneEdit.exe with wine:
wine BaneEdit.exe
If you performed all these steps, wine will take a few moments to get its environment setup then load BaneEdit.exe. BaneEdit.exe will require that you have both your SAVEGAME.DBS and SCENARIO.DBS made available if you have not installed it in the same directory as the game itself. These files on a Mac should be located under:
/Applications/Wizardry 6.app/Contents/Resources/game
In my case, I have Wizardry 6 purchased via GoG and it installs these files here. The “game” directory is the main Wizardry 6 directory with various data etc. For safety reasons though, I highly suggest making a backup of your SAVEGAME.DBS file before modifying it. Also, after reloading your game, you’ll notice that your characters will have not have their gear equipped. So double check everything before you proceed.
So what can you do with this editor?
Without going into detail, it mostly is used to edit your characters. I believe most of your stats are editable so you can use this editor to level the playing field a little if you felt ripped off by low rolls early on. Also, you can assign skill points to your character or boost any skill up even if the class does not have them immediately available. For instance, I gave everyone Ninjitsu and Kirijitsu. Now, there might be an odd bug that occurs as a result of the game attempting to assign certain skill points automatically. For instance, my Samurai ended up receiving 9 additional skill points above 100 to Kirijitsu when he leveled. I’m dead sure he already had 100 before leveling in this situation. Afterwards, I didn’t see his skill points go up in Kirijitsu and I don’t know how/if this may affect the game. He’s still doing critical hits so I’m assuming that anything above 100 doesn’t really matter.
You can assign more spells too. This is a good and bad thing because you might miss out on some spell points if you end up giving yourself everything. I did give myself a spell here and there because of how slow paced the spell acquisition has been. In one instance, I gave myself a certain spell because after leveling I accidentally grabbed the wrong spell and saved (I was really tired) So you can correct your mistakes or boost yourself slightly in this manner.
I don’t know if this editor helps patch anything though. I know there are some outstanding bugs such as 7th level spells not doing damage or even working. Having recently acquired a few, I can attest that I have not seen this bug pop up thus far but it could be that the GoG version already had been patched. Also, I can’t say if this editor patches the low random number generator. At least during leveling, nothing seems to have really changed.
It does provide the ability to edit your inventory. I haven’t tried this just yet and might consider it because I have a few excessive quest items I’d like to get rid of (namely that rubber thing). At this stage, it’s very low priority for me so I probably might just end up not using it compared to dealing with the hassle of fixing my characters after an edit.