Thanks to FujiNet I was able to correct a 30+ year old game error. #ThanksFujiNet

[SlagOMatic]

Forgive the long narrative. I'm just tickled pink by this.  🙂

 

Anyone remember Ultima III?

 

Way back in the day I adored that game. Played the every loving crap out of it and enjoyed every minute of it. After a long time playing (I wanna say, two months?) I finally beat it, but the game was so good that I kept wandering around Sosaria and its dungeons looking for more spoils.

 

And then one day, I realized something about how the game was engineered. When you moved from one part of the map to another it would access the disk to load that map data, but I noticed that when it did this the drive wasn't looking for a file. When a program tells the drive to open a file it first accesses the directory data, then moves the head to the appropriate spot on the disk. Ultima III didn't do that. It just read data from the disk. I realized that it was being told to read data from specific sectors of the disk, and I wondered if there was any checksum involved. So I experimented. After entering Sosaria I removed the Ultima III disk and inserted some random disk from my collection, then moved west. When the game loaded the "map" from the disk, there was just a confused jumble of objects -- random landscape, monsters (which didn't move), structures, and...treasure chests. And I found I could loot those chests. Through trial and error I discovered that I could loot those chests, swap the Ultima III map disk back in, walk away from the jumble, then walk back towards the jumble and then the game would reload the map proper, with no trace of what I'd done other than the added loot in my inventory.

 

I also knew that the game automatically saved whenever you entered or left a structure (castle, town, dungeon) or quit the game, so I was careful to never leave a jumble on the map before doing so.  #FORESHADOWING

 

A few days after making this revelation I got careless. I walked west into a jumble, looted it, and then walked east -- without swapping the disks back. Suddenly I was surrounded on both sides with jumble. Worse, I was in a location on the map where there was only water north and south. The only other option available to me was a town that just happened to be a few squares away from me. My beloved party that I spawned from my imagination and nursed through the levels of the game, was effectively trapped. Bandor and Kalimar, my fighters. Circie, my cleric. Delmann, my wizard. Forever trapped.

 

"No problem," I thought. "I'll just quit the game and relaunch."

 

About .00001 milliseconds after hitting the Q key, I realized what I'd done: I just overwrote the Ultima III map disk with the jumbled map. My days of playing Ultima III were effectively over. I couldn't move my party anywhere on the map, and by this point in time Atari 8-bit BBS's were effectively dead and those few that still existed didn't have Ultima III for download. Most of my local friends were C64 users, and those few Atari users I knew didn't have Ultima III. I was screwed. Still, I held on to my disk in the hopes that some day I'd find a way to free my beloved party.

 

Then the internet arose and I was able to find a copy of Ultima III online. But, how to translate that to my Atari? Couldn't be done. So I left it alone.

 

Then SIO2PC came out...but I was a Mac user. It didn't apply to me. When a Mac version finally did come out my Atari was 70 miles away at my mother's house, so I didn't pursue it.

 

But a few months ago I bought a FujiNet, and over the past couple of weeks I've been copying all of my Atari disks to ATR images with great success. Including my copy of Ultima III. With great delight I launched Operation Freedom.

 

Turn my Ultima III map disk into an ATR image, copy it to my local server via FujiNet. Launch Atari emulator on my Mac, insert Ultima III disk and boot. Swap in my map disk, load my trapped party. Enter the town. Swap out my map disk for a clean/new map disk. Leave town. If I was right, the game would save my party onto the new map disk, then load the clean map data from that same disk. I held my breath and....

 

Freedom at last.

 

For the first time in about 30 years my party has been roaming Sosaria and cleaning out the vermin therein. I had to re-learn all the commands and spells and such, but for the past hour and a half or so I've been having a blast.  🙂

 

 

Edited April 11, 2023 by SlagOMatic

[Tinman]

 

Brilliant!

[V-Cool]

That's awesome!  And creative...

[erichenneke]

Great story, thanks for sharing. Happy your party is free again and the campaign can commence! 

[xrbrevin]

mustve felt like a life sentence for the poor souls!

..only to be released by 'mysterious forces' hehe

nice wrangling!

Edited April 11, 2023 by xrbrevin

[TZJB]

15 hours ago, SlagOMatic said:

Forgive the long narrative. I'm just tickled pink by this.  🙂

 

Anyone remember Ultima III?

 

Way back in the day I adored that game. Played the every loving crap out of it and enjoyed every minute of it. After a long time playing (I wanna say, two months?) I finally beat it, but the game was so good that I kept wandering around Sosaria and its dungeons looking for more spoils.

 

And then one day, I realized something about how the game was engineered. When you moved from one part of the map to another it would access the disk to load that map data, but I noticed that when it did this the drive wasn't looking for a file. When a program tells the drive to open a file it first accesses the directory data, then moves the head to the appropriate spot on the disk. Ultima III didn't do that. It just read data from the disk. I realized that it was being told to read data from specific sectors of the disk, and I wondered if there was any checksum involved. So I experimented. After entering Sosaria I removed the Ultima III disk and inserted some random disk from my collection, then moved west. When the game loaded the "map" from the disk, there was just a confused jumble of objects -- random landscape, monsters (which didn't move), structures, and...treasure chests. And I found I could loot those chests. Through trial and error I discovered that I could loot those chests, swap the Ultima III map disk back in, walk away from the jumble, then walk back towards the jumble and then the game would reload the map proper, with no trace of what I'd done other than the added loot in my inventory.

 

I also knew that the game automatically saved whenever you entered or left a structure (castle, town, dungeon) or quit the game, so I was careful to never leave a jumble on the map before doing so.  #FORESHADOWING

 

A few days after making this revelation I got careless. I walked west into a jumble, looted it, and then walked east -- without swapping the disks back. Suddenly I was surrounded on both sides with jumble. Worse, I was in a location on the map where there was only water north and south. The only other option available to me was a town that just happened to be a few squares away from me. My beloved party that I spawned from my imagination and nursed through the levels of the game, was effectively trapped. Bandor and Kalimar, my fighters. Circie, my cleric. Delmann, my wizard. Forever trapped.

 

"No problem," I thought. "I'll just quit the game and relaunch."

 

About .00001 milliseconds after hitting the Q key, I realized what I'd done: I just overwrote the Ultima III map disk with the jumbled map. My days of playing Ultima III were effectively over. I couldn't move my party anywhere on the map, and by this point in time Atari 8-bit BBS's were effectively dead and those few that still existed didn't have Ultima III for download. Most of my local friends were C64 users, and those few Atari users I knew didn't have Ultima III. I was screwed. Still, I held on to my disk in the hopes that some day I'd find a way to free my beloved party.

 

Then the internet arose and I was able to find a copy of Ultima III online. But, how to translate that to my Atari? Couldn't be done. So I left it alone.

 

Then SIO2PC came out...but I was a Mac user. It didn't apply to me. When a Mac version finally did come out my Atari was 70 miles away at my mother's house, so I didn't pursue it.

 

But a few months ago I bought a FujiNet, and over the past couple of weeks I've been copying all of my Atari disks to ATR images with great success. Including my copy of Ultima III. With great delight I launched Operation Freedom.

 

Turn my Ultima III map disk into an ATR image, copy it to my local server via FujiNet. Launch Atari emulator on my Mac, insert Ultima III disk and boot. Swap in my map disk, load my trapped party. Enter the town. Swap out my map disk for a clean/new map disk. Leave town. If I was right, the game would save my party onto the new map disk, then load the clean map data from that same disk. I held my breath and....

 

Freedom at last.

 

For the first time in about 30 years my party has been roaming Sosaria and cleaning out the vermin therein. I had to re-learn all the commands and spells and such, but for the past hour and a half or so I've been having a blast.  🙂

 

 

 

Wow, that was quite a feat to go through, but you where right that you could correct your mistake, it just took a while. In reality they were in virtual suspended animation.

 

I never played that game but I always run a game from a copy, even if it's someone else's! 😉

 

I am glad that your Fujinet and your resurgence of the game has brought you joy. And you can back it up a lot easier now!

 

[SlagOMatic]

6 hours ago, TZJB said:

I am glad that your Fujinet and your resurgence of the game has brought you joy. And you can back it up a lot easier now!

Indeed.  🙂  The second-best part was copying my "healed" player/map disk back to the floppy disk so that I could play it on native hardware, with actual floppies. Sure, I'll still play it via FujiNet and my server but...floppies.  🙂

[+Stephen]

OK - this reminds me of a Star Trek, TNG episode "Elementary, Dear Data", where a Holo-deck character becomes self aware.  They gave him a cube with stupid  memory.  I hope your players are happy to finally be out of "digital jail"!

 

Meant to say "a stupidly large amount of memory".

[+mytek]

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

OK - this reminds me of a Star Trek, TNG episode "Elementary, Dear Data", where a Holo-deck character becomes self aware.  They gave him a cube with stupid  memory.  I hope your players are happy to finally be out of "digital jail"!

I was thinking of that exact same episode with Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes nemesis, when the OP was describing preserving the Ultima characters he created.

 

 

[+gnusto]

1 hour ago, mytek said:

I was thinking of that exact same episode with Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes nemesis, when the OP was describing preserving the Ultima characters he created.

We can only help that Delmann has not become self aware and very pissed off at 30 years of sitting in garbage data. He is, after all, a wizard.

[R.Cade]

I hope you learned a valuable life-lesson about cheating?

[SlagOMatic]

28 minutes ago, R.Cade said:

I hope you learned a valuable life-lesson about cheating?

No, but I did learn a valuable life-lesson about having a backup. 

[R.Cade]

19 minutes ago, SlagOMatic said:

No, but I did learn a valuable life-lesson about having a backup. 

Even better lesson. I guess.

[invisible kid]

Lol on the ST:TNG references. Scotty put himself in the transporter buffer for like 75 years in episode Relics. rofl

Edited April 12, 2023 by invisible kid

[Simon Carter]

I buggered my copy of Ultima III by saving something like a savegame over my Play disk, ruining it forever. 15 year old me swore a lot. 

 

The jumbled, gold laden landscape works in U4 as well...