Petz II Runaways, more help to get them back. ============================================= You can get runaways back every time, forcing Petz II petz back into the game, if you follow this procedure. Remember to remove all your other pets from the Adopted pets directory while you concentrate on the Runaway. Open your runaway .pet file in your Hex editor. Look at the first two bytes in the Hex numbers section of the editor; in the ASCII section they will look like two dots or weird characters just before the name of the pet. It's the Hex numbers that you want to note, though. They will be numbers such as BD 0B (or it may be grouped as BD0B in some hex editors -- it's still two bytes). Make a note of these numbers. They are a kind of "ID" number, to identify your pet to the game. Now run Regedit.exe. -- go to Start, choose Run, and type in Regedit. You'll get something that looks a little like Windows Explorer. Navigate, clicking on the crosses on the left hand side as you would with W.E., to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz II\1.00.01 Click on that "directory" of 1.00.01. Now look at the Right-hand side. Scroll down to "Pets in Playpen" and double-click on it. _Replace_ the first two digits which are probably 00, if all your pets have run away!) with the first two-digit number you noted down -- in my example, BD, and replace the next two-digit byte with 0B. So the Value data will look like this: BD 0B 00 00. There will be 4 two-digit numbers only -- no more than that; it allows for two pets to be in the game at once, you see. Click "ok" and close Regedit.exe. Make sure that your pet's .pet file is in the "Adopted Petz" subdirectory of your Petz game directory, and all required .dog or .cat files are in the relevant directories. Run the Petz game, and your chosen pet should come out of the door right away. Give it a fair bit of cossetting to make it happy again. It'll still be classed as "Runaway", as you will see if you click on the "pick a pet" button and scroll down so that it highlights the pet in question. You can close the program and open it again and the pet will still come out for you as long as its first two bytes are in the registry and the pet file is in the "Adopted petz" directory. This is the old method, which let you play with the pet but which kept it classed as Runaway. Now, you want your pet to be permanently non-runaway so that you can put it away and bring it back out again as you always used to. So here's what you need to do now. First, change the byte at address hex 348 to 00 from 01. I have a more detailed page with illustrations about this, but the basic info is here. You have to have some knowledge of editing .pet files before you try this, also as always you will make sure you have a safe copy of the pet somewhere first, won't you? This is pretty obscure, but if you concentrate you should be able to do the job. Open the pet in a hex editor and scroll down to address 840 (decimal) or, if you prefer hex notation, 348 (hexadecimal). In a Runaway pet, this byte is hex 01. Change that to hex 00. You will then have to compensate for the checksum; just increase a nearby number by 01. Now you're almost there. You can either do my old method, now, of putting the pet's ID number in the registry, and use the brain-sliders to reduce it's "neglect" when it's in your game, or you need to change a second byte within the pet. It didn't occur to me to mention this in my earlier howto, so my thanks to Richard Hartman for the "heads-up". The second byte is in the petfile's energy, fullness etc section. In Petz II it is in a different place from the other games' petfiles. You can do it manually or, after the pet is in the game using the above method, use the "brain-slider" to reduce slider 16 to zero. If you want to do it manually, here's what you need to know. What you have with a Petz II pet is that the "neglect" indicator is lower down the pet file and it's among more indicators (Petz II pets have 17 of them). So you have numbers which look like this, starting at offset 7FB0, in the hexadecimal pane of the editor: 60000000 <-- energy (High for lots of energy) 2D000000 <-- hunger (low number makes pet hungry) 3A000000 <-- fatness 00000000 <-- sickness 00000000 <-- catnipped (acts weirdly if high) 00000000 <-- fleas 08000000 5B000000 60000000 01000000 5A000000 4C000000 04000000 00000000 00000000 64000000 <-- neglect. If this is high you're in trouble. 64000000 <-- age. 0 is just born, 64 is full adult. (The numbers will of course be different in different petz.) The numbers in between those that I have given names to I've not delved into in depth, but they relate to various things such as walking, talkativeness, seriousness and so on. So what you need to do is to change that neglect from 64 to 00. Change the one before it -- the 00000000 -- to 64000000 to compensate; it does no harm and, if you use the brainsliders after the pet is in the game, you can reduce that safely back to 0 (it's slider 15). It's a neat idea to use the brainsliders, it keeps your pet's state of mind clear and you won't suffer from nasty shock runaways if you keep slider 16 down to 0. Now, you maybe wonder what I'm talking about as regards the brain sliders. They are a small entry into the Registry. I mention it elsewhere, but her it is also for completeness. You can do it manually if you want, Entering it manually, you would open Regedit.exe, navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz II\1.00.01 Choose New, Binary value, from the Edit menu, rename the new value Show Slider Brain and double-click on it. Type in the number 01, then okay, then close Regedit. Or if you prefer, you can make a little text file containing everything between the ********** marks below, save it with a .reg extension, and double-click to have it enter the data. ********** REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz II\1.00.01] "Show Slider Brain"=hex:01 ********** To turn it off of course, you change that hex:01 to hex:00. You will be able to monitor the pet's happiness; the sliders 1 to 17 correspond to the list I show above. Enjoy Carolyn Horn