New Project: Anchoromé Conversion

[waldronate]

I dug into the archives and the disk label actually says "WotC / TSR - FR Overland Scans - CONFIDENTIAL - NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED". There are a bunch of FR overland maps and 4 1600ishx1000ish images that have a tectonic map, a physical map (caostlines with previously and newly mapped), mountains & reefs, and "Areas of Special Interest" that has a set of alphabetic labels without a key (there's undoubtedly a key, just not on the disk). The date on the files is 3/31/1999, but I expect that's when they were written to the CD.

I have no idea what those straight lines were supposed to be. They were in the "areas of special interest" map.

There were a great many folks that did a lot of good work redrawing those maps for the viewer. I did the little Globe program that came with the product, including piecing together the image maps and drawing the national maps (I screwed up in a few places, too). The pretty map in the intro animation was done by an artist at WotC/TSR. The ugly globe map that is solid colors with what looks like the 1st Ed FR wall map and Maztica maps pasted onto them (because that's what happened) was my fault. If the version with the red lines and greenish hatched areas off the coast made it to production (I don't recall any more), then the notations were from the mountains and reefs map with the asterisks indicating tectonic hotspots.

[Werthead]

I don't recall a map with red lines and green hatched areas. I think as far as the globes went there was just the 'satellite view' map and the solid colour one with the 1E maps on it. Unless that one was added in the patches? I can get the FRIA itself working on Windows 7 (just about), but not the globes at all.

On the solid colour map (this one, for the uninitiated), there are dark lines on the unexplored landmasses which appear to represent mountains. Are those from the TSR source maps, i.e. 'canon', at least as of 1999? Thanks.

[waldronate]

The dark textured lines on that second one are indeed where the mountains (red lines) were marked. I never had time to get other textures splotched around on the blank areas, though. You can still see the round edges of the brushes where I scribbled over the original lines. Note that there are some lines in the upper ice caps where there should be mountains as well.

I have an updated globe version that works under Windows 7, but I don't know if ProFantasy ever released it officially. These days it would be possible to do a much better job directly in a browser, especially one with WebGL support. But that was back in 1999 when such technologies didn't exactly exist.

[Kashabat]

Look's like an interesting project