gandalf.nho: A SSI game? I hope to see in the future the SSI AD&D games.
Ahh, Curse of the Azure Bonds was one of my favorites. Never played the original Pool of Radiance. They'll need some copies of the Adventurer's Journal, it was a form of copy protection, but better than reading a bunch of text on screen at the 80x25 font they used, I suppose. Hey GOG, I still have mine if scans are needed. Code wheel pieces, too. I had the Adventurer's Journal memorized. Interestingly enough, there were actually some red herrings in there, if should you read the whole thing.
If anyone is interested, Curse of the Azure Bonds and Secret of the Silver Blades used Pascal-like strings, so it was either programmed in Pascal (or Assembly Language, 'cause the assembler can go both ways, string-wise), and everything was pretty much wide open in the save. It was name, stats (don't forget strength has two bytes, one for natural strength, and one for the 0-100 range, or 0-50 if you're a woman), class-levels (one byte for each class), then items which I never really bothered to delve into. It was easy enough to duplicate items, so everyone had multiple Dust of Disappearances to toss around. Worked best if you used it right before combat. Even against Beholders and Black Dragons. Beholders were also backstabable (oops). If your constitution went from 19 to 20 in game, a bit would be set in the game and you would regenerate like a troll.
One of my favorite things to do was dual classing. I would play through the game and get to be a Level 11 Cleric, and then switch over to another (probably fighter) class. Same for magic-users, except they would switch to Ranger - cause then they could cast arcane spells while wearing armor. In my party, I usually had one Dwarf, a fighter-thief, and one Elf or Half-Elf that was a thief. And thief Halfling. Perhaps even named Bilbo. There was a Monk class available, but the monk stuff was only active if you didn't have a weapon out (makes since I guess). Yes, I had to modify the save game to get the character that way.
The code wheel was very annoying. Especially after it broke. When I got tired of not being able to save, or encountering the save game bridge troll (seriously!), I unpacked the exe (pkpack I think) and edited all the answers to be S (for save game). Then I repacked it with lzexe. Worked like a charm. Of course, all that was back before I was 18 and reverse engineering was (somewhat) legal. At least we were allowed to back up our games then.
[Back OT]
I hadn't heard of this game, but I did have discs for all the others. In fact, there was a Strategy General pack, (5 Star General) that had PG, FG, SG and two other games I cannot recall. Maybe it was maybe PG2.