I wasn't able to find any text immediately, so I just looked around for places with a lot of zeros. Eventually I found text was off by an offset of 0x80. A simple utility and voila!

It turns out that the underground is equally easy to read. 2400 AD reads it in blocks of 32. Therefore, if you have a hexadecimal editor that allows you to view rows of 32 bytes, you can see how the underground maps out. Now you will have a jigsaw puzzle of 8-by-32 maps. 1