BRE's RESOURCE.DAT: the per-install settings file

RESOURCE.DAT is Barren Realms Elite's own per-installation configuration file, in the directory holding BRE.EXE. It is plain text, one Keyword value per line, ; for comments, and booleans may be written TRUE/FALSE, ON/OFF, YES/NO, T/F or 1/0. It is the original's equivalent of IB's bbs.cfg: a sysop's own file that no other board and no league officer writes.

docs/bre.doc documents 38 keywords. The binary reads 56, of which 21 are undocumented — and three of the documented ones are read by nothing at all. The undocumented remainder is where several whole mechanics hide: the lottery, the monarch's name, and six switches that remove features from the game outright.

How the list was recovered

Every setting is read through one of three resident helpers, called with the keyword as a Pascal ShortString loaded immediately before the call:

Helper	Type
0d61:0025	number
0d61:002a	boolean
0d61:002f	string

So the complete set is the set of call sites. The catalog (docs/dev/bre-v0988-disassembly.json) lists every caller of the three, which is what makes the sweep exhaustive rather than a grep: load_display_name_settings (39 sites), exe_025d_proc_0080 (8), parse_doorfile (4), configure_local_game (4), load_pirate_settings (2), initialize_fossil_port (2), exe_09bd_proc_0808 (2), initialize_game_runtime (1), ovr_00ad05_proc_0004 (1), exe_0a42_proc_002d (1) and select_bios_console_io (1, reaching the boolean reader directly rather than through the resident stub). Each routine's keywords then come from find-string --function <name> "". No segment base is guessed anywhere in this.

Two call sites resist it: the number and the boolean read in exe_09bd_proc_0808 reference no identifier-shaped string in their own unit, so those two keywords are unknown. Everything below is the 56 that resolved.

Most of them sit in one table of consecutive ShortStrings at BRE.OVR 0x5680f, read by load_display_name_settings (0x056a03) — the routine's name in the catalog understates it; it loads the feature switches too.

The undocumented settings

Feature switches — each removes a feature from the game

Six booleans, default on. Every one is tested twice: once where the main menu is built (show_game_settings, BRE.OVR 0x013753), which skips registering the item and its hotkey, and again at the feature's own entry point, which returns before doing anything. A switched-off feature is therefore gone rather than hidden.

Keyword	Global	Menu test	Feature test
DIPLOMACY	0x6d4e	0x13ce2	run_diplomacy_menu returns at entry (0x1c80f)
MESSAGES	0x6d4f	0x13dae	send_local_message returns at entry (0x1d853)
TRADING	0x6d50	0x13e4d	inside run_trading_market_menu (0x26e78)
TRADINGMARKET	0x6d51	0x13e54	run_trading_market_menu (0x26e7f, 0x26eb6) and draw_trading_market (0x3d0d6)
COVERTOPS	0x6d52	0x13cb5	enter_covert_operations_menu returns at entry (0x179e9)
MACROS	0x6d53	0x13ea7	none
LOTTERY	0x76c0	—	run_lottery returns at entry (0x01861f)

MACROS is the exception worth knowing: the byte is written by the loader and read in exactly one place, the menu builder. Switching it off hides Write Macros from the menu and nothing else — the Ctrl-key expansion of macros already recorded goes on working.

LOTTERY has no menu item to hide; its own routine is the only reader. The mechanic it gates is specified in docs/mechanics-reference.md.

LEADER — the crown's name

A string, up to 30 characters, held at 0x6d92 and defaulting to the literal Queen Royale (BRE.OVR 0x564de). It is read by the tax refund (queen_refund 0x18364), the crown-tax payment prompt (allocate_turn_budget 0x2f9cc), the random-event resolver (0xe6d6) and the news writers (0x4ec31, 0x4f0a0) — so the sysop renames the monarch everywhere the game speaks of them.

PIRATENAMEn / PIRATECOLORn — the nine pirate factions

The keyword is built at run time by appending the faction digit to the base string, and the value indexes an array: names are 31 bytes apart from DS:0x1293, colours one byte apart from DS:0x13c9 (BRE.OVR 0x5726c, 0x572c7). So each of the nine factions can be renamed and recoloured per board. IB reached the same place from the other direction: its factions carry IB-original names because the original's cannot be copied.

The rest

Keyword	Type	What it is
FOODMARKETNAME	string	renames the Food Market on screen
BANKNAME	string	renames the Bank
IPPIRATENEWS	boolean	pirate news while the board plays in a league (write_local_attack_news 0x4e53c)
LOCALPIRATENEWS	boolean	the same news while it plays alone (0x4e54a)
MINOUTBOUNDTIME	number	read by run_interbbs_maintenance (0xa2ce)
STRICTPROCESSING	boolean	gates process_incoming_interbbs_data (0x3be2b)
EXTERNALSCORESANSI	string	path
EXTERNALSCORESASCII	string	path
EXTERNALSCORESNAME	string	name
LOCKBAUDRATE	number	a second keyword beside the documented LockedBaud; parse_doorfile reads both
TopScoresAmt	number	how many rows the scores file carries, 0x795b; the documented BBSAmt/PlayerAmt do not exist

The purpose column is traced from the code for the news and InterBBS entries. For the names and score paths it is read off the keyword and its helper type, not from following the value — treat those as likely rather than proven.

Documented but absent

Three keywords in bre.doc have no matching string anywhere in BRE.EXE or BRE.OVR at v0.988, so nothing can be reading them:

• NoTimeCheck — documented as switching off the time-limit check
• BBSAmt, PlayerAmt — documented beside the scores-file placeholders, of which only TopScoresAmt exists

Either they were dropped and the manual never caught up, or they were renamed. whatsnew.doc is a changelog and may describe a build that is not this one, so do not treat the manual as evidence that a setting works.

What this means for IB

LOTTERY is implemented, as Lottery in bbs.cfg (docs/mechanics-reference.md). The pirate pair is implemented as ONE switch, PirateNews in bbs.cfg. The two keywords are not two kinds of news: write_local_attack_news emits the pirate tags (7 and 8) through whichever of them the InterBBS flag at DS:0x6a9a selects — IPPIRATENEWS when the board is in a league, LOCALPIRATENEWS when it is not — and neither reads anything remote. Nothing anywhere posts another planet's pirate raids. So a sysop who wants raids out of the news wants them out in both modes, and IB asks once. Deliberate divergence.

The other six feature switches have no IB counterpart. World.VisitCovert, VisitTrading and VisitMessage look like three of them and are not: they are per-player preferences on the Preferences menu, deciding whether a stage is offered during that player's turn, and a player can turn them back on. A sysop switch that removes Diplomacy, Messages, Trading, the Trading Market, Covert Operations or Write Macros from the board would be a new setting, and belongs in bbs.cfg beside Lottery for the same reason: the original leaves it to each installation, so a league's boards may differ.

Renaming the monarch (LEADER) has no IB counterpart either. IB says "Queen Royale" throughout, in code and in translated catalogs.

PURGENETMAIL is documented rather than hidden, so it is absent from the lists above, but it is worth reading for what it says about the original's design. It is a boolean, default off, that has the game sweep its own leftover netmail out of the netmail directory during BRE INBOUND and BRE PLANETARY — the envelopes other boards' copies of the game left behind, which the manual frames as saving the sysop from deleting that mail by hand.

The original therefore wrote file-attach netmail like barons-ftn does, and shipped the receiving board a way to clean up after it. IB has no counterpart, which is #223. Line 7 of the original's own bbs.cfg carries the other half of the same thought: a mailer setting of NONE writes no .MSG at all, for the boards the manual says were running the game with no mail system.

Both are from docs/bre.doc. Neither has been confirmed against the binary.

Every keyword the binary reads

Undocumented ones are marked. Read via the string, number or boolean lookup as shown.

load_display_name_settings (BRE.OVR 0x056a03), table at 0x5680f: FOODMARKETNAME, BANKNAME, DIPLOMACY, MESSAGES, TRADING, TRADINGMARKET, COVERTOPS, MACROS, ANSISCORES, ASCIISCORES, TODAYNEWSANSI, YESTERDAYNEWSANSI, TODAYNEWSASCII, YESTERDAYNEWSASCII, IPPIRATENEWS, LOCALPIRATENEWS, DELETIONDAYS, MINOUTBOUNDTIME, PURGENETMAIL, STRICTPROCESSING, LEADER, LOTTERY, EXTERNALSCORESANSI, EXTERNALSCORESASCII, EXTERNALSCORESNAME, RECONUPDATE, OLDESTRECON, TIMINGCHECK, then the scores-file placeholders BBSScore, BBSWorth, BBSLand, BBSWorthLand, PlayerScore, PlayerWorth, PlayerLand, PlayerWorthLand, ANSIExtension, ASCIIExtension, TopScoresAmt.

Elsewhere: GAMENAME, VGA, STATUS.BACKGROUND, STATUS.TITLE, STATUS.TOPINFO, STATUS.BOTTOMINFO, STATUS.LINE, STATUS.EXTRA (exe_025d_proc_0080); MULTITASKER (exe_0a42_proc_002d); FOSSIL, Com (initialize_fossil_port); LOCAL, LOCKEDBAUD (configure_local_game); LOCKBAUDRATE (parse_doorfile); PIRATENAME, PIRATECOLOR* (load_pirate_settings); BIOS (select_bios_console_io).

Twenty-one marked, 56 in all, plus the two unresolved sites named above.