Pool of Radiance Translation/Code Wheel Updated + also a new PoR wheel with Rotation!

Back in 1988, copy protection for video games was limited. In the case of the Strategic Simulations Inc. computer role playing game, Pool of Radiance, it consisted of a translation wheel which took an Espruar (Elvish) rune, and a Dethek (Dwarvish) rune, and converted it to the English language.

An image of the Pool of Radiance Dethek and Espruar codewheel can be viewed at the image below.

An online codewheel translation JavaScript page was created by Andrew Schultz and hosted at Yahoo's Geocities web-hosting service. The Geocities link was originally hosted at the following URL... http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/projects/poolwheel.htm

Unfortunately Yahoo decided to eliminate it's Geocities service in 2009, thus destroying many numerous interesting sites which included Schultz's PoR codewheel.

You can still find an archived version of Schultz's site at https://archive.org/

Access archive.org and enter the link (or any link that you want to look into the archive of) into the Wayback Machine search bar and click on the browse history button to search the site.

Yahoo eliminated Geocities Web-Hosting in October of 2009, so if you search Schultz's Pool of Radiance codewheel page, you would need to search the archives prior to October of 2009 in order to see the site.

Any online site should be search-able provided that the site that you intend to search did not use it's robots.txt file to block webcrawler bots like the one's archive.org uses to search the web. If a site used robots.txt to block bots from searching and archiving the site, then you may find that no archives exist for that particular site.

Immediately prior to the closure of Yahoo's Geocities, Andrew Schultz's Pool of Radiance Codewheel was mirrored. Attempts were made to contact Andrew Schultz in regards to mirroring the site but the emails of Schultz either were no longer functioning and/or no reply was ever received. Yahoo then turned to the dark side and eliminated Geocities service in October 2009. A great disturbance was felt in the Force, millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

The mirror corrected the "Choose Espruar / Choose Dethek" text, switching the text so that the images beneath showed the correct Espruar and Dethek images. The original Schlutz version showed Dethek text displaying Espruar images, and Espruar text displaying Dethek Images. Additionally Schlultz's .gif image files were also still incorrectly named. Espruar .gif image files began with the letters det while Dethek .gif image files began with the letters esp. This can still be found in Schultz's archived site if you click on an image and select "view image", and is also found in the mirror. Although the image files were named incorrectly, Schultz’s translation wheel and the mirror still gave the correct answers.

Fast forward to the year 2014. Another Pool of Radiance fan by the alias of Pajamaman decided that it was high time to fix and update the code of Andrew Schultz's pool of radiance codewheel, and that he did.

Pajamaman's translation wheel updates not only changed and corrected the .gif file names of the images of the original translation wheel, but also updated the code. Now a more defined red outline selects each selected image, which makes it easier to see which rune was selected.

Pajamaman's updated pool of radiance translation wheel can be viewed at the following link.

http://pajamaman.github.io/poolwheel-wwm/

Now for the really fun part....

Pajamaman has also created a (ROTATING) pool of radiance translation wheel which can be viewed at this link!

http://pajamaman.github.io/poolwheel/

Grab the rotating wheel with your mouse and move it to the appropriate rune to translate from Espruar + Dethek.

Posted by weekendwastemonster @orcchief