After adventuring I dropped a bunch of items in my room, saved then later restored and most of the items had disappeared.

Items included were a mix of weapons, armor and food.

Is this normal?

thanks in advance,

hobofoo

It's semi-normal: there's a limit to how many loose items can be left lying around on any given level before the game starts to delete them due to memory limitations. The castle main floor isn't a great place to store stuff thus, since it's loaded with various clutter in peoples' rooms.

You can sometimes see the consequence of this elsewhere: after a few arena battles in the Pits of Carnage, various 'decorative' objects (like the skull piles) will begin to thin out or vanish.

thank you very much that makes a lot of sense, sometimes i forget about the hardware constraints these older games had to work within.