BANNER.DAT

Text-mode startup resource. Loaded by DARKLAND.EXE before the VGA mode switch. Contains the welcome banner rows, the startup selection menu, and the memory/disk diagnostic strings.

Extension: BANNER.DAT
Location: DARKLAND\
Byte order: Little-endian (16-bit)
Size: 1,519 B fixed — 20-entry offset table (40 B) + string payload
Compression: None
Magic: None — 20 LE uint16 offsets at 0x00, first entry always points to 0x0028
Status: Documented
Source: RE — direct byte inspection + DARKLAND.EXE runtime tracing (2026-04-16)

Reverse-engineered from DARKLAND.EXE startup analysis and direct file inspection (2026-04-16).

File Layout

Offset 0x0000 – 0x0027:  word[20]  offset_table  — 20 absolute byte offsets into this file
Offset 0x0028 – EOF:     entries 0..19             — display rows and diagnostic strings

The header is 20 little-endian uint16 values. Each value is a file-absolute byte offset to one entry.

Entry Table

Entry	File offset	Content
0	`0x0028`	Blank top row (79 spaces + CR LF $)
1	`0x007B`	Banner row 1
2	`0x00CC`	Banner row 2
3	`0x011D`	Banner row 3
4	`0x016E`	Banner row 4
5	`0x01BF`	Banner row 5
6	`0x0210`	Banner row 6
7	`0x0261`	Banner row 7
8	`0x02B2`	Banner row 8
9	`0x0303`	Banner row 9
10	`0x0354`	Banner row 10
11	`0x03A5`	Banner row 11 (highlighted)
12	`0x03F6`	Banner row 12 (highlighted)
13	`0x0447`	Banner row 13 (highlighted)
14	`0x0498`	Diagnostic: disk space error
15	`0x04C6`	Diagnostic: conventional memory required
16	`0x0502`	Diagnostic: conventional memory available
17	`0x0541`	Diagnostic: additional memory needed
18	`0x057E`	Diagnostic: memory override warning
19	`0x05B9`	Diagnostic: EMS requirement

Entries 0–13 are display rows; entries 14–19 are startup diagnostic strings.

Display Rows

Entries 1–10 are 80-column CP437 null-terminated rows that build the text-mode banner:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                       Darklands(TM) - Version 483.07                       |
|        In Medieval Germany, reality is more horrifying than fantasy        |
|        Program & Audio-Visual Copyright (C) 1992 by MicroProse,Inc.,       |
|                            All Rights Reserved.                            |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

                              1) Tactical Battle code
                              2) Role-Playing code
                              Select:

Entries 11–13 (the menu rows) each begin with raw bytes FF 0F. The startup renderer interprets 0xFF as an inline control/escape byte: the following byte is applied as the current text attribute. 0x0F is bright white on black — the attribute used for the menu prompt rows.

Diagnostic Strings

These are plain null-terminated C-style strings used by the memory-check stage at 1699:1150:

Entry	String
14	`Insufficient free disk space - 512K required.`
15	`Darklands requires %ld bytes (%dK) of conventional memory.`
16	`Your machine has only %ld bytes (%dK) of conventional memory.`
17	`Therefore, you need to free an additional %ld bytes (%dK) .`
18	`You have chosen to override the memory check - BEWARE!!`
19	`Darklands requires at least 176K of EMS memory free.`

Entry 14 (disk-space check) is consumed by an earlier startup path; entries 15–19 are used by the conventional/EMS memory check.

Inline Attribute Encoding

Rows that need custom text colours embed a two-byte escape sequence inline:

0xFF  <attribute>  rest of row text ...

The renderer at 0C6D:00A9 recognises 0xFF and applies the following byte as the current DOS text mode attribute byte before continuing. This allows the banner to display distinct foreground/background colour combinations without switching video modes.

Consumer

DARKLAND.EXE function 1699:0114 loads BANNER.DAT as a loose file and uses the 20-entry offset table to index the in-memory blob. The startup memory-check helper at 1699:1150 later reuses entries 14–19 for formatted diagnostic output through INT 21h / AH=09.

Confidence

High. File layout and all 20 entry offsets confirmed by direct byte inspection. Renderer behaviour confirmed by runtime tracing.