I've heard that there are programs that can allow you to cheat in the games. For example, alter your characters' stats once you've started the game. Does anyone know about this, including where I might be able to download something like this (relatively) safely?

I think for most of the games you can modify your character after creation, maxing out their level and stats. For a number of the games in the series, this is enough to really plow through the enemies you would encounter.

Aside from that, I am fairly certain you could edit the hex values in your save file to increase you stats and HP, money, etc. I knew kids back when I first played these on a 386 that did that and it worked. They used something called 'PoolEdit' I think. There was another program called UGE (http://bitomoander.runboard.com/t651) that could do the same thing A quick search yielded the following address values, in case you end up going the old-school route:

00: Length of name

01-0F: Name

10: STR

11: DEX

12: CON

13: INT

14: WIS

15: CHA

16: Exceptional Strength

17-2C: Memorized spells

2E: Race

2F: Class

30: Age (Low byte)

31: Age (High byte)

32: Max HP

33-3A: Knows 1st level cleric spells

3B-47: Knows 1st level MU spells

48-4E: Knows 2nd level cleric spells

4F-55: Knows 2nd level MU spells

56-5C: Knows 3rd level cleric spells

5D-66: Knows 3rd level MU spells

72: Movement rate

88-89: Copper

8A-8B: Silver

8C-8D: electrum

8E-8F: Gold

90-91: Platinum

92-93: Gems

94-95: Jewelry

96: Cleric Level

97: Druid Level

98: Fighter Level

99: Paladin Level

9A: Ranger Level

9B: Magic-user level

9C: Thief level

9D: Monk level

9E: Gender

A0: Alignment

A1: Number of attacks

A3: Dice of unarmed damage

A5: Size of dice for unarmed damage

A7: Bonus to damage

A9: AC Modifier

AC-AE: Experience

B2 1st Level Cleric spells

B3 2nd Level Cleric spells

B4 3rd level Cleric spells

B5 1st Level MU Spells

B6 2nd Level MU Spells

B7 3rd Level MU Spells

BB: Head portrait

BC: Body Portrait

BD: Head Icon

BE: Weapon Icon

C0: Icon Size

C1: Body Color (1st)

C2: Arm Color (1st)

C3: Leg Color (1st)

C4: Head Color (1st)

C5: Shield Color (1st)

C6: Weapon Color (1st)

102: Encumbrance

10C: Status

11B: Current HP

Does this actually do anything? Or is this a leftover for something they planned to implement, but didn't make it to the final release?

(In particular, does it affect unarmed damage?)

Probably just what you're thinking. If I remember correctly, those classes all showed up later on.

I browsed a few forums after finding that link, and it seems that if you set your character to any of those not originally in the game, you could get errors or in-game messages any time you tried to train or level, since some of the other class features hadn't yet been implemented. Nothing game-breaking really, but you would have to run the cheat to "level up" every time, so keeping track of them on paper would be a requirement I'd think. And I'm not sure of talents and skills. Would probably have to cheat those into the character as well and would still be limited by what was already included in the game.

Found something else called 'Gold Box Companion.' Appears to be a newer editor that lets you do all kinds of things with any of the AD&D Gold Box games. I don't know much about it, but looks robust. See Arcmyst's post from 8/27/2015 on this forum (titled "I've found the Gold Box Companion pretty vital"). Someone posted a link to GBC in it.

I tried to use Gold Box Companion to change all my characters' charisma scores in PoR (GOG version). (I'm experimenting with some things in the game.) I opened a save game under gbc.exe as instructed and used to editor to change each character's score, making sure to click on Apply Changes afterward. However, every time I restarted the game, the characters' scores were exactly as they were originally. One thing I noticed is that when I clicked on Search in the gbc.exe window, I got an error message, but the window closed too fast for me to read the ERROR message.

Can anyone think of what's going on?

GBC makes changes directly to memory so no restarting / save game reloading is needed. The save slot selecting is just to get your character names. So if you want the changes to be saved to a save slot you have to make a normal save via the game.

You should see the error message again if you click "Search wizard" button in the HUD.

That seems to have worked. Thanks.

Editing this could be useful if you run into the bug mentioned in ArthurWalden's other topic.