Ultima for 400/800

[Robert Cook]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

I think Garriot just coded on an Apple II (until Ultima VI) and owned a Mockingboard so he supported it.

Sure seems like that, and truth be told, I suppose it's appropriate that the original, definitive platform for this game series (pre-VI) would have the soundtracks.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

When it comes to ports,  Atari always got hurt by the fact that developers wanted to support users with 48K models and 810 disk drives for maximum potential audience.   Too few games had optional 64K support.

Yep, and even with the 130K format introduced with the 1050, it would have taken more work and rearranging of files to have fit Ultima V on the same number of disks, as at least one or two of the disk sides are almost completely filled with more data than that.  Apple II disks are 140K, and can barely contain some of the sides.

 

6 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I agree. That was always a disadvantage for the Atari 8-bits when it came to ports. Having to cater to a mix of 16K - (eventually) 128K machines (although the latter was rarely supported) and a low capacity disk drive. That often meant max 48K games and additional disks over other versions that were at least 64K and fewer disks. Certainly one of the many reasons for the C-64's multi-territory success and overall sales numbers was the simple fact that it always had a base 64K and one disk standard. The Apple II platform was only able to mitigate its different DOS versions, varying RAM, and other considerations because of the more affluent user base that was highly likely to upgrade (and certainly its legacy status and being what many developers had didn't hurt).

The C64 might have suffered from a painfully slow disk rate transfer rate (400 B/s versus 1200 B/s for the Atari, which is also slow, but not nearly as slow), but disk capacity was pretty decent for the time at about 170K, at least.  It still boggles my mind what happened with the drive speed thing, by the way, and how it happened.  Commodore could have fixed it at any point, even before release, but decided not to.  That was a management thing, not what the engineers designed or intended, and the company was always moving on to the next computer instead of building on what they had.  The 1541 itself isn't a slow drive at all, and the IEC serial bus is physically capable of supporting speeds many times faster than what the C64+1541 does out of the box.  It could have been fixed later, too, simply by defining a standard to replace the default protocol in a compatible way, but that was never done, either.  Crazy!  Probably the best solution that existed, then or now (still available for purchase new), is JiffyDOS, which makes the C64+1541 approximately as fast as they were originally intended to be.  It's just a couple of replacement ROMs.

 

The Apple II was a hobby computer to start with, and deservedly, at the time, attracted a lot of support from hobbyists and the industry.  I was always envious of how it had well-supported 80-column support that was added as an enhancement instead of as a separate, incompatible mode like on the C128.  The latter is a nice computer in its own right, and quite popular, but Apple did it the right way with the Apple IIe, at least after their Apple III debacle.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

A couple of years back, I tried to figure out the best platform to play the Ultima games with 1) little to no disk flipping, 2) faithful graphics and color 3) good music implementation

 

But all the ports kind of come up short.  PC seemed like the best bet since they can be hard drive installed, but the games only run well on a 4.77mhz 8088, they are too fast on anything else.   The "patches" that are supposed to fix the speed don't always work.    The 8-bits have a lot of disk-swapping,  C64 disk performance is poor.   ST/Amiga color scheme is terrible in U3 and U4.   U5 on ST is almost perfect but lacks MIDI music

Well, for Ultima IV there is the Remastered edition on the C64, which is available in 1571 and 1581 formats on a single disk each, so there is no flipping.  All disk access, except for the initial load, which is still much shorter than that of the original game, is accelerated by several times, at least (not as fast as ProDOS, but faster than the Atari).  So if you're using real vintage hardware and own a 1571 or 1581, this might be the best version to play.  It is also available in 1541 format, of course, and only has two sides, so flipping is extremely minimal: generally, the second side is in the drive virtually the whole time after loading, and that's it.

 

The only real caveat is that the graphics have been "upgraded", so they are not faithful, although they are nice.  Many of the new tiles are based on the ones in Ultima V on the C64, which are of course not normal for Ultima IV.  The Remastered edition takes things a bit farther with the tiles, and also has replacement C64-style multicolor graphics for the process of creating a new game.  If you'd rather have faithful graphics, as I strongly suspect you would, then take a look at the Gold edition instead.  It's similar except for the fact that, as far as I've noticed, the graphics are all the same as on the original port of this game made by Origin.  This might well be the best way to enjoy Ultima IV on an 8-bit computer with extremely minimal or no disk flipping.

Edited July 17 by Robert Cook

[Robert Cook]

3 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I don't know if there is a best single platform to play the Ultima games on, though one might say the Apple II is the most "authentic." There's a good argument to be made to switch platforms every game, including with wildcards like the SMS version of Ultima IV. Origin themselves even (loosely) remastered the original trilogy, not to mention all of the fan updates to the PC versions. It's probably the type of thing where there's no wrong answer. Each version and system offers its own feel and advantages/disadvantages.

I'd say in all honesty that the Apple II versions are definitive.  These games' original design and aesthetics were based on the capabilities and limitations of the Apple II.  That doesn't mean I don't welcome the differences that came with the various ports, and I find this whole subject interesting, but there is one definitive version of each game, and it's on the Apple II.

 

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean these are the "best" versions in every way.  For one thing, it's hard to beat the C64's wider variety of colors (in this case, obviously, not in general) and avoidance of NTSC artifacts (by using an 8.18 MHz dot clock instead of the standard 7.16 MHz).  Hi-res is the C64's forte, and even if the additional colors hadn't been used, these games would still have automatically benefited from looking cleaner and better resolved (especially when using separated Y/C video, but even when using RF on a TV).  Just ignore the existence of the C64 port of Ultima II, which is weird.  It works, and I completed it fine, but it's just wrong. 😄

[zzip]

On 7/16/2024 at 9:01 PM, Robert Cook said:

The C64 might have suffered from a painfully slow disk rate transfer rate (400 B/s versus 1200 B/s for the Atari, which is also slow, but not nearly as slow), but disk capacity was pretty decent for the time at about 170K, at least.  It still boggles my mind what happened with the drive speed thing, by the way, and how it happene

Just like I don't quite understand how Atari's "Double Density" 1050 ended up having 127K capacity instead of 180K or so.    These decisions probably all come down to cost cutting or not wanting to spend $$$ fixing an issue, or not wanting to miss a deadline.

 

On 7/16/2024 at 9:01 PM, Robert Cook said:

The only real caveat is that the graphics have been "upgraded", so they are not faithful, although they are nice.  Many of the new tiles are based on the ones in Ultima V on the C64, which are of course not normal for Ultima IV.  The Remastered edition takes things a bit farther with the tiles, and also has replacement C64-style multicolor graphics for the process of creating a new game.  If you'd rather have faithful graphics, as I strongly suspect you would, then take a look at the Gold edition instead.  It's similar except for the fact that, as far as I've noticed, the graphics are all the same as on the original port of this game made by Origin.  This might well be the best way to enjoy Ultima IV on an 8-bit computer with extremely minimal or no disk flipping.

I'll put it this way,  I like Ultima aesthetic that Richard Garriott created.   I didn't like when ports took too many liberties with it,  like the "GEM App" Ultima II on Atari ST or the NES version or the weird colors on Ultima III/IV on Amiga/ST.

 

So if an Ultima IV remaster "borrowed" tiles from Ultima V, it should still be true to the Ultima aesthetic and not bother me much.  

[pcrow]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Just like I don't quite understand how Atari's "Double Density" 1050 ended up having 127K capacity instead of 180K or so.    These decisions probably all come down to cost cutting or not wanting to spend $$$ fixing an issue, or not wanting to miss a deadline.

This is a tangent, but my understanding is that it was about using a smaller internal buffer to save a few cents.

 

DOS 2.5 only uses 1024 sectors for compatibility. The ED format has 1040 sectors.  So 130K raw, 128K seen by DOS 2.5, and 126K after subtracting the directory, boot, metadata, and reserved sector 720 (8, 3, 2, and 1 sectors respectively).

[+DarkLord]

I guess it's all all a matter of the user's perspective but I like the color scheme for Ultima III, IV, and V

on the Atari ST (and I did play Ultima III on my 800XL first).  <shrugs>

 

As far as a good platform for it, all the Ultima's have been adapted by various sources (Dbug, Klaz, or P.Pera)

to run on newer versions of TOS, more RAM, with accelerators, and on mass storage devices. P.Pera also has

scanned the artwork from the box covers and inserted them into the code so you see a really cool picture

when you boot up these games.

 

 

[+MrFish]

46 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

I like the color scheme for Ultima III, IV, and V on the Atari ST

I like the colors for those versions too. The only thing I don't like is the yellow & brown font they use on III, which they wisely got rid of on the versions that followed.

 

 

[zzip]

13 hours ago, DarkLord said:

I guess it's all all a matter of the user's perspective but I like the color scheme for Ultima III, IV, and V

on the Atari ST (and I did play Ultima III on my 800XL first).  <shrugs>

I never had an issue with Ultima V on ST.    But looking at the screenshots it's mostly the ST Ultima III color scheme I had an issue with.   I thought Ultima IV was just as bad but I guess not?

 

 

[Robert Cook]

22 hours ago, zzip said:

Just like I don't quite understand how Atari's "Double Density" 1050 ended up having 127K capacity instead of 180K or so.    These decisions probably all come down to cost cutting or not wanting to spend $$$ fixing an issue, or not wanting to miss a deadline.

The 1050, like the 810, is really basic in some ways.  It runs on a 6507 and 6532 RIOT, so it's like an Atari VCS/2600 (minus the TIA) attached to a drive mechanism.  They must have had A LOT of those chips on hand, which made them cheap.  The RIOT provides 128 bytes of SRAM and there is an additional 128-byte SRAM chip to provide buffer space for a single sector.  In order to support a true double-density disk, given the limitations of Atari DOS (when trying to maximize compatibility, that is), the drive would need additional SRAM, but clearly someone didn't want to accept the added cost.

 

By the way, this reminds me of how Commodore added a 512-byte (as 1024 nybbles) SRAM to the C64 to implement its main color memory.  I've been told that they had piles of these from their calculator business, which they had recently abandoned in favor of computers, and the PET and VIC-20, so they were cheap at the time (already paid for means free).  Interestingly, their 1541 had no shortage of RAM, with 2K of SRAM on board, undoubtedly for the same reason, which was what made fastloaders possible.  The fastest one back in the day, using software only with no hardware mods, reached about 9-10 kB/s (I'm thinking Vorpal by Epyx, which was used on many of their games).  For some perspective, the 1541's original data transfer rate was supposed to have been about 3.6 kB/s, compared to 1.1 kB/s on the PET, 1.2 kB/s on the Atari (unmodded), 2.2 kB/s or so on the Apple II running DOS 3.3 (about the same as the Epyx Fast Load cartridge), 6+ kb/S on the Apple II running ProDOS, and 25-30 kB/S on the BBC Micro (yep, all of the memory on most units could be filled in a single second).  And the fastest modern fastloaders on the unmodded C64+1541 approach 20 kB/s.  But by default, 400 B/s was what it did.  Disgraceful! 😬  And so was "Enhanced Density" or "Dual Density" on the 1050.  Why not just do it right?!

 

22 hours ago, zzip said:

I'll put it this way,  I like Ultima aesthetic that Richard Garriott created.   I didn't like when ports took too many liberties with it,  like the "GEM App" Ultima II on Atari ST or the NES version or the weird colors on Ultima III/IV on Amiga/ST.

 

So if an Ultima IV remaster "borrowed" tiles from Ultima V, it should still be true to the Ultima aesthetic and not bother me much.  

You could always give the Remastered edition a spin to see whether you like it, or switch to the Gold if you want the original C64 graphics.  The main thing with these editions is that even with a single 1541 drive, there is virtually no disk flipping and disk transfer speed is fast.  Additionally, the highly accelerated disk transfer protocol does not interrupt the soundtrack like the regular incredibly slow protocol does.  Not only that, but the game itself is more responsive and snappier.  The C64 version of Ultima IV used to be the most sluggish for things like scrolling the view--acceptable, but slower than the Apple II and especially the Atari versions.  But the Remastered and Gold editions on the C64 now have the fastest scrolling.  That's some nice code optimization there.  It's like how Atari BASIC runs faster, when executing graphics commands, on my Atari 800 "emulator" on the C64 than it does on a real Atari!  The C64's CPU is most definitely a bit slower, but I wrote faster replacement graphics manipulation routines for it (these had to be written anyway to support the C64's graphics, and they happened to be faster).

 

An oh yeah, while this is no big deal, the Remastered edition (but not the Gold edition) allows you to use lowercase letters in your name, like you can on the Apple IIe (but not earlier Apple II models).  Why the heck did the C64 and Atari versions not allow lowercase letters?  Most curious.

 

20 hours ago, pcrow said:

This is a tangent, but my understanding is that it was about using a smaller internal buffer to save a few cents.

 

DOS 2.5 only uses 1024 sectors for compatibility. The ED format has 1040 sectors.  So 130K raw, 128K seen by DOS 2.5, and 126K after subtracting the directory, boot, metadata, and reserved sector 720 (8, 3, 2, and 1 sectors respectively).

Right, as I see it, the only completely compatible way to support double density would be to use 256-byte sectors, but there is only enough buffer space for a 128-byte sector.  Well...maybe they could have used 180-byte sectors to do it, but I guess they figured that would have been too weird.  For all of the brilliance there was in that early time period, there were a lot of clunky decisions and mistakes being made, too, and I suppose that is to be expected, and now it's part of the "charm".

[+CharlieChaplin]

The Turbo 1050 enhancement did not offer nor require any additional RAM and still gave true double density (256 Bytes per sector for a full 180k) on 1050 drives. It also works with Pokey divisor 6 (68k Baud) using the turbo format, a special sector interleave. So there were ways to use DD on a 1050 drive without additional RAM...

 

[Robert Cook]

18 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

The Turbo 1050 enhancement did not offer nor require any additional RAM and still gave true double density (256 Bytes per sector for a full 180k) on 1050 drives. It also works with Pokey divisor 6 (68k Baud) using the turbo format, a special sector interleave. So there were ways to use DD on a 1050 drive without additional RAM...

True, although I was thinking more in terms of something more "standard" and less "outside of the box" that the engineers at Atari might have been willing to implement, and really should have, from the get-go, when they introduced the 1050.  That's what I meant about them probably not going for something they'd consider "weird" (and I just didn't think about the Turbo enhancement).  From their point of view, the 130K "enhanced density" format was a cost-saving compromise, even though we'd find out later that 180K would have been possible without additional manufacturing cost (in terms of hardware).  Other enhancements simply did the obvious and added 128 bytes of SRAM.

 

It's really odd, from my non-business-oriented perspective, how cost is factored into the making and selling of products.  To take a prime example from another industry, some of us might be old enough to remember when Ford Pintos used to burst into flames easily when hit at the rear in the 1970s.  This was a big scandal at the time, and I recall (although I was young and didn't have all of the details) that an additional part that cost like $7 for each car would have significantly mitigated this problem.  It was omitted to save some money, and Ford explained that saving $7 might not sound like much, but if, say, they were to manufacture 10 million (a number I just made up now because I don't remember their exact example) of these cars, the savings would be $70 million.  OK, that makes sense, but people were like "Why didn't you increase the price by $7 to compensate, then?  That wouldn't have made much of a difference to you or buyers."  Then Ford explained that it doesn't work like that.  Different people decide on the wholesale and recommended retail prices based on the market, and that's it.  Every dollar that other people in the company save on manufacturing after that point, therefore, is an extra dollar in their pocket, period.  So there is at least some decoupling between the cost of manufacture and the price of products, which can sometimes result in major compromises being made for what seems like relatively tiny cost savings.  We can see this when Jack Tramiel dumped the XL series on the market at a loss.  The wholesale prices and MSRPs were set for the 800XL to compete directly with the C64 on the market, even though it was lower than the cost of manufacture (uh oh), presumably to maintain market share and industry support until the further-cost-reduced XE series could be developed to restore per-unit profitability.  Selling each unit at a loss definitely reflects this decoupling, as does saving a buck or two when the market price is set according to other factors.  It doesn't make as much sense from the end-users' perspective, though, significantly compromising performance in one area to save like $0.50 per unit.  Wouldn't we have gladly paid $0.50 more to get 180K capacity instead of 130K?  Yes, but it doesn't work that way from the manufacturer's perspective: you charge what you think others would be willing to pay, and then you keep manufacturing cost as low as possible.

[Robert Cook]

On 7/16/2024 at 1:55 PM, zzip said:

A couple of years back, I tried to figure out the best platform to play the Ultima games with 1) little to no disk flipping, 2) faithful graphics and color 3) good music implementation

In addition to the other editions of Ultima IV on the C64, apparently there is also an Ultima V "Remastered" edition that you might want to check out.  The graphics don't look like they were changed (not a negative), but the whole game is on a single 1581 disk, which means zero flipping.  Running it on the C128 would be best, and is the only way to get this particular soundtrack on a Commodore computer.  If you want a faithful 8-bit version of Ultima V that has a good soundtrack and runs well with no disk flipping, then this is it.

 

Also, earlier I had wondered out loud whether there were any views on Ultima IV with 6 colors at once on the Apple II, and I found one without looking too hard:

 

Here is what it looks like on the Atari version:

 

They ran out of colors for the magical fields, so they had to change the look of the sleep field tile.  So at least they put in some effort, but the poison field is blue instead of green in this case (varies by the Atari model) and the fire field is green instead of orange.  This can all be fixed, at least on the Atari 800 and 800XL (and probably every model).

 

For comparison, here is the same view in Origin's C64 conversion.  There are 7 colors used in the view (and an 8th in the frame).  The field tiles are so hi-res.

 

Here is what it looks like in the C64 Remastered edition.  Looks like there are like 9 or 10 colors used in the view, total.

 

For further comparison, here is a previous view I showed on the Apple II and Atari versions, but on the C64 (left, 7 colors in the view) and C64 Remastered (right, 10 colors) versions here.

 

The one thing regarding color selection that I never liked about the C64 version is using cyan for shallow water.  While I can see the logic of that, since such color effects are often seen in real life, I just don't think it works that well in this game.  The Remastered edition fixed this issue, but obviously deviates more from the original Apple II and C64 versions of this game.  I kind of hate to admit that I like the Remastered edition a lot, because normally I'm all for maximum faithfulness in everything.  On the other hand, it is also cool to see some of the particular capabilities of the target platform being used instead of immediately falling back to the least common denominator.

 

There's one more thing (can't help it, as I'm wearing a black turtleneck shirt and jeans at the moment 😜).  Here is one of the changed graphics from the process of initiating a new game in the C64 Remastered edition:

 

This is definitely NOT a faithful recreation of the original Apple II graphics!  It's just a multicolor bitmap image (split-screen with hi-res text/bitmap at the bottom) with a sprite for the shimmering moongate effect (obviously not shimmering in this still image).  Now imagine what could be done with the palette and one of the many "special" software-driven modes of the Atari 8-bit.  But to be honest, I personally would not trade the "charm" of the original graphics (which are very faithfully reproduced in the official C64 version of this game) for this.  And no, I'm not actually wearing a black turtleneck shirt.  That was just a bad joke. 😁

Edited July 21 by Robert Cook

[Laner]

On 7/16/2024 at 3:55 PM, zzip said:

A couple of years back, I tried to figure out the best platform to play the Ultima games with 1) little to no disk flipping, 2) faithful graphics and color 3) good music implementation

 

But all the ports kind of come up short.  PC seemed like the best bet since they can be hard drive installed, but the games only run well on a 4.77mhz 8088, they are too fast on anything else.   The "patches" that are supposed to fix the speed don't always work.    The 8-bits have a lot of disk-swapping,  C64 disk performance is poor.   ST/Amiga color scheme is terrible in U3 and U4.   U5 on ST is almost perfect but lacks MIDI music

The PC version of U5 with all the various fan patches applied is probably your best bet (https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/category/ultima-patcher/) , though you'll need DOSBox to crank it down to a reasonable speed.

 

Otherwise the C64 U5 Remastered mentioned elsewhere in this thread is great: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=227816 

 

Edited July 22 by Laner