Hello! A few days ago I finished a patch for Dark Legions that increases animation speeds on the strategic board, and it was suggested I post it here - hopefully this is okay 😀

While combat is quite smooth, the "chessboard" movement in Dark Legions has always seemed unusually slow. One can work around this by skipping animations or playing on the overhead map, but it's hard to observe enemy turns this way - plus you miss out on all those nice visuals. After a little reverse engineering, I discovered that every animation function takes in a variable to limit frame rate, and on the strategic board, this is almost always set to a very slow value. Patching it to a faster value doesn't seem to have any negative effects (I've tested multiple hours now on both on my P166 and in DOSBox) and the results are very satisfying.

Edit: I've been informed posting modified game binaries may be against the forum rules, so I have quickly put together a binary patch with bsdiff (https://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/) This will only work on the 1.1 floppy version. There are two variants of the patch: dlpatch makes unit movement faster and smooths animations, while dlpatchf adds even more extra speed to unit movements for efficiency-minded players.

I consider this experimental and unfinished (burning animations are still at their original speed, as they use a more complex set of functions). I'd be happy to share my disassembly notes if anyone wants to work on this further.