It is possible to hide programs through the use of ASM, but IMHO it's not necessary. Most  people won't care about such a thing. Also, I'm not sure but in order to acess a hidden program I *think* you would have to un-hide it and then re-hide it when you are finished using it.

For large BASIC programs 5 is NOTHING anyway. Just ask DJOmnimaga or Tifreak. Metroid and some of the other large BASIC programs have had like over 9000 subprograms. O_o

As a shameless plug...

While trying to *run* a hidden program won't go over very well, you can use Celtic III to access hidden programs. For an earlier post, you can also paste in list data as a string using another one of Celtic III's functions. The destination can be an appvar, so it won't be as easy to hack it. You can also explore Celtic III's ability to convert matrices into strings that you can use to write back into a program that could recreate it.

Interfere? Heck no. That's not the purpose. Celtic III is a stand-in replacement for xLIB with a load of extra functionality. Doesn't fully work quite yet, but if your needs aren't too demanding ( DJ's games don't qualify), it'll work out just great without any modification to the syntax.

Another plus is that Celtic III comes with an autoinstalling program in case you don't want to leave the installation of the lib up to the user. More information and documentation can be found here : http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showforum=62 . You'll be looking at "Progress..." for the most recent binaries. Also be sure to read through the topic, as it indicates known problems. If you experience problems, feel free to contribute.

Edit:

As far as list to string goes, the same can be accomplished with a matrix. If you store the resulting matrix to a program file, it'll likely take up less memory than having the matrix as a matrix in memory. Sure, it's not immediately usable, but it'll help save space.

But... if you choose to use Celtic III as the main lib, you'll also be able to use string tilemaps, where you can absolutely do away with the entire matrix idea. But... you'd want to ask a very experienced BASIC programmer if you want a halfway-decent explanation on how that works.

If it's true that 75% of the game is basically randomized, I'm pretty sure that it would be suffice to say that random maps would also be sufficient, but if you really want it "Diablo-esque", you're going to want to save the maps that are generated, which could take up more space. A potential solution to that problem is to generate a map that is based upon a single seed. I say a single seed because "random" isn't really random if you seed the random number generator with a known value. In fact, all the numbers after the seed are the same if you happen to reseed rand with the same number. You can possibly get this seed by various means, including your stats and how many cycles it took for the player to push a key. Store this number (seed) into a list so that upon regenerating the map, you can look up that list for the seed that was used to generate it.

A good approach is to define a list used specifically for maps, and a variable to determine which map you are in. If you go to the next map and the variable's value exceeds that of the list dimensions, expand the list by one and add in a randomly selected number to be used as the seed. After that, go into some generic routine that picks that list element back up and loads it into rand for your random generator.

...

If you know all of this already, then... darn. I must sound like some sort of elitist or something. (sorry!)

Still. I can't ignore a possibility that an entire map can be stored in a single list element (9 bytes). Just make sure there's enough variation depending on the map level to ensure that none of the maps really do look alike, even with the same seed. You could be using your map level variable to make the determinations.

No problem.

But now that I think about the whole scheme, I'm now interested in how fast you can regenerate a map from a single seed, since I'm pretty sure that constructing a sensible map from a random number must take quite a bit of work. For generating an actual dungeon from a random number, I've got very little idea as to how about doing it, and the only way that I can possibly think about doing it would take some serious processing time.

I hope to see what you can come up with. Exceed all expectations and create a truly great game! (Hmm... Diablo for the graphing calculator...)

You still may need a separate list linked to each "randomly"-generated dungeon to define the events that have happened in it. For example, which treasure chests have been taken and which ones are still there for grabs. Which quests have been completed in that level and which ones still remain to be done. You know, stuff like that.

EDIT: btw, the idea for the random number seed came from a much earlier project when Weregoose asked me to retrieve a listing of a couple hundred thousand results in an attempt to create some sort of weird compression routine that used the randomness found in the random number generator. I though it might be useful to somebody someday, even if in a different incarnation.

Well, currently... I can't think of a way to implement a seed "number" per se...
My current idea is to have a list for each dungeon.
In the random generation part, it's choose a number that defines the layout of the dungeon (first element of the list) then generates the rooms to be placed in the layout (next approx. 9 elements).
That list will be that character's first floor of the dungeon.

The rooms that will be generated will be set based on a collection of interiors and the walls that contain the doors/pathways will be placed based on the layout.
From a little more on the thought of the layout, here's my examples.

Let's take a (3 room)x(3 room) dungeon.
_ _ _
|_|_|_|
|_|_|_|
|_|_|_|Now, the layout will decide which rooms to use which will leave out about... 2-3 rooms.
Not positive yet.
A possible layout could look like so:
_ _
| | |_
|_ _  |
  |_ _|Of course, the possibilities are endless. (due to the rooms that can be taken out and the placement of doors/walkways)
I'll probably only have 10-20 layouts to be randomly picked.

What's in each room will be randomly generated and I'll work on random encounters too. (generation of room contents was explained above)

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Assuming anyone understood the above... do you think it's a good idea?
Also, excuse my lame art above, I did it in a rush.