What a player saw
Nothing out of the ordinary. Out in the wilds, in places where the game should now and then send a pack of Wolves, Small Dragons came instead, and nothing on the screen suggested that anything was missing.
What we noticed
Every monster in the game is a short list of 38 numbers kept in one file, holding its hit points, its magic, which picture to draw, and so on. In the Wolf's list one number is missing in the middle, and every number after it has moved up one place. Set beside the Cobra, another plain animal, it looks like this:
| Monster | Third spell | Magic points | Hit points | Alignment | Picture | Second group | Companions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cobra | 0 | 5 | 12 | 0 | 41 | 65% | Cobra, Cobra |
| Wolf, as shipped | 7 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 31% | Wolf, Skeleton |
| Wolf, moved back one place | 0 | 7 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 65% | Wolf, Wolf |
Read as shipped, the Wolf has 0 hit points, a picture number that has no picture, a spell it has no chance to cast, and no courage at all. Each of those values is the only one of its kind among all 80 monsters. Moved back one place, every value is ordinary, with 7 magic points, 14 hit points, the picture of the Wild Dog, and a good chance of a second pack.
I had long suspected that the Wolf's 7 magic points were really meant to be its hit points. I was close. The 7 is in the wrong place, and once the numbers are put back the Wolf has 7 magic points and 14 hit points.
How we tracked it down
The part of the program that chooses a monster for a fight in the wilds ends with two checks that have nothing to do with the dice. If the choice is the Wolf, it becomes a Small Dragon, and the same goes for the Mud Elemental. We ran that code and watched it make the swap.
The other ways in are closed too. A High Devil can bring Wolves along, but the broken Wolf's picture number counts as an oversized picture, and the game leaves companions like that behind, so the High Devil fights alone. Fights in the dungeons choose their monsters another way, and none of the eleven dungeons ever reaches the Wolf.
The fan and the Commodore 64
What we could not tell was which number had been lost. The answer came from a fan on the English Amiga Board, who had noticed High Devils with Wolves behind them in the Commodore 64 game, never on the Amiga, and had rebuilt the Amiga Wolf from the C64 data (the thread).
The C64 disk keeps the same 38-number lists, and its Wolf is whole. Side by side, the Amiga Wolf is the C64 Wolf with one number taken out, the size of its damage roll, 16, the same as the Cobra's. The Wolf was meant to come in groups of up to five, with 14 hit points, 7 magic points and a good chance of a second pack. The Atari ST version ships the same broken Wolf as the Amiga.
The Mud Elemental
The same check turns the enemy Mud Elemental into a Small Dragon too. Its record looks complete, but its picture number has no picture either, and the game has no battle picture for it or for the Wolf. The Mud Elemental a party summons is a different thing, a member of the party, and the check never touches it. Whether the missing pictures are why both were blocked is our guess.
My fix for the Wolf, below, leaves the Mud Elemental's check as it is.
In my recreation
My recreation plays the game exactly as it shipped in 1987 unless you ask for a fix. This one is listed as The Wolf never appears.
In 1987
In 1987 the Wolf's monster record lost a byte, so the game swaps every Wolf for a Small Dragon and no one ever meets one.
With the fix
The lost byte is put back from the Commodore 64 version, where the Wolf is whole, and Wolves appear: packs in the wild and in a High Devil's second rank, with the Wild Dog's picture.
It is one of my fixes, so a game disk made With Justin's fixes has it.
When you make a game disk, the game asks which rules it plays: The 1987 original, With Justin's fixes, or Choose my own. To change a disk later, pick Set fixes on disk on the list of disks.