[RPG] Ultima I - V on ProDOS HD

[Arsene Lupin]

With the great success by qkumba to make U5 runnable from a ProDOS HD, now I become greedy... very greedy :-D

U1/U2: Origin did the dirty work already converting them to ProDOS when the Ultima Trilogy was released. However, they still require a player diskette to store the player. This could be a very quick conversion job, I think.

U3: Long time ago deckard, another awesome hacker, did the work and you can find it here ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/games/rpg/ultima/ultima_III_prodos I have only played it once or twice but everything seemed ok from my HD.

U4: AFAIK, this is DOS 3.3 based with 4 diskettes. I am not sure if Origin started their crazy protection scheme like the one in U5 from this release but I won't be surprised. So far I have not seen any efforts converting it.

U5: Completed by the Almighty qkumba

Hope this request is not too easy for you, qkumba :-)

-AL

[Matthew Power]

I personally have long hoped that The Apple II Ultima series (I-V) could be launched from A2Desktop. To me, Apple = Ultima. I got back into Apple II after decades away solely because I missed Ultima.

[Antoine Vignau]

U4 and U5 do not have a crazy protection scheme. U4 is more DOS 3.3 than ProDOS but I am pretty sure it can be ported to ProDOS as the interactions with the OS are through BLOAD and BSAVE commands. If there is enough room to have ProDOS and a basic BASIC interpreter, it can be done.

Antoine

[Steve Nickolas]

Sounds like it dovetails into my comments from earlier that I wanted to
"port DOS 3.3 to ProDOS", i.e., make a BASIC.SYSTEM substitute that
functioned internally like DOS 3.3 for programs that needed to function in
this manner.

If Ultima 4 can be ported this way I bet a lot of other programs can too.

-uso.

[I am Rob]

On Wednesday, December 6, 2017 at 1:57:50 AM UTC-6, Antoine Vignau wrote:
> U4 and U5 do not have a crazy protection scheme. U4 is more DOS 3.3 than ProDOS but I am pretty sure it can be ported to ProDOS as the interactions with the OS are through BLOAD and BSAVE commands. If there is enough room to have ProDOS and a basic BASIC interpreter, it can be done.
>
> Antoine

If it just uses the actual commands "BLOAD" and "BSAVE", then one just has to copy the commands and filenames to the input buffer at $200, then do a call to $BE03 and remove Dos 3.3 calls to $3EA. No MLI calls.

That sounds so easy, I think I may even take up hacking and cracking.

[Antoine Vignau]

The only thing about U4 I don't have in mind is how they handled the different disks. Is it by volume number or by some volume name (huh for DOS 3.3) or by a file name or its contents? I cannot tell right now.

Antoine

[qkumba]

The "DISK" file on each disk holds the ID of the disk that it represents (Boot is 01, Brittania is 02, Town is 03, Dungeon is 04).
Other than that, it's actual DOS 3.3 and BLOAD/BRUN/BSAVE.
It's not clear to me that BASIC.SYSTEM would fit in memory, though. I suspect that it will require direct ProDOS Open/Read or Write/Close commands instead.

[Arsene Lupin]

Glad to see many people are also interested in this series. IMHO it's the best RPG series on Apple II.

I did a quick experiment: boot DOS 3.3 from S6D1 in AppleWin and BRUN INIT from the 1st diskette (labeled BOOT) on S6D2. The whole time all data was read from S6D2 and the DOS 3.3 image in memory seems quite intact.

Oh, BTW, at least on my copy of BOOT, there is a hidden Ctrl-A between 1st and 2nd characters in all filenames, e.g. I(Ctrl-A)NIT.

-AL

[Antoine Vignau]

Cool, thanks for looking.
av

[Anthony Ortiz]

Hold on a second, does this mean the venerable qkumba of all qkumbas has decided to tackle Ultima IV as well? Do we even deserve a second coming... are we even allowed such an extravagant and almost hedonistic indulgence of pleasure within a single lifetime? Please don’t tease us qkumba, make your designs plain for all to see as my wife is still cleaning up bits and pieces of brain matter from my keyboard and we can’t afford to ruin it again.

[qkumba]

> Oh, BTW, at least on my copy of BOOT, there is a hidden Ctrl-A between 1st and 2nd characters in all filenames, e.g. I(Ctrl-A)NIT.

Yes, and as a result, the game will loop infinitely looking for the "DISK" file if you don't swap disks when it asks.
Someone went too crazy with the filename protection.

[qkumba]

Note also that the Hotrod crack on Asimov is damaged and the game can't be completed as a result.

[Antoine Vignau]

You have clean crack disks at http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/crack/ ;-)

LoGo

[qkumba]

> Hold on a second, does this mean the venerable qkumba of all qkumbas has decided to tackle Ultima IV as well?

Yes.

> Do we even deserve a second coming... are we even allowed such an extravagant and almost hedonistic indulgence of pleasure within a single lifetime? Please don’t tease us qkumba, make your designs plain for all to see as my wife is still cleaning up bits and pieces of brain matter from my keyboard and we can’t afford to ruin it again.

:-)
I have it booting right now, using ProRWTS because the game uses all 64kb.
No room for ProDOS once the game starts running.
The first snag is that the original prompts for disks even if the floppy disk is in the drive already (it prompts and only then checks the disk). I have some work to do to disable them all.
Then to enable saving, and finally playi... er, play-testing.

[qkumba]

Aaand it does direct sector-reading, too.
15 tracks worth, all three sides other than boot.
What a nuisance.

[Anthony Ortiz]

> Aaand it does direct sector-reading, too.
15 tracks worth, all three sides other than boot.
What a nuisance.

The copy-protection dragon delivers an otherwise fatal blow to qkumba, knocking him back a hundred meters and to the ground. Groaning in agony, he pulls himself back up on his remaining leg, the other having been torn and rendered completely useless.

‘tis nothing but a flesh wound!’ he snarls at the beast as he hops on one leg, readying himself for what is certain to be the decisive life or death finale.

Will it be qkumba or dragon salad? Stay tuned for the next episode of Qkumba’s Misadventures!

[qkumba]

ROFL!
Yes, barely a scratch at most. A temporary setback only.
I now have my character walking around, combat works, moon doors work...
Only the file saving remains to be done. So close!

[Anthony Ortiz]

Bewildered by the sight of his deadly but wounded foe floundering about on its remaining leg in one last desperate and futile act of resistance, the copy-protection dragon pauses for a moment of what may only be described as profound pity, a feeling completely foreign and thought not to exist in a dragon whose very nature makes it impossible, much less one of the five elder dragons where any sign of weakness is an immediate death sentence; never in its eternal existence has a foe lowered himself to such a pitifully ignoble sight, preferring instead to die with some semblance of dignity, but then again never has a dragon come across the likes of qkumba before. The moment is gone almost before it began, imperceptible even to the elder dragon himself as he barrels towards the hopping qkumba to collect his well earned meal, but even the infinitesimally smallest of moments will affect the cycles of time and the destiny of all those within it much as the fluttering of a butterfly wing can cause an empire-ravaging hurricane in far-away lands. No creature living within the stream of time is able to perceive these destiny altering cycles, not even the eldest of copy-protection dragons, but qkumba is no ordinary creature; he is the master of timing and cycle counting. Grasping the significance of this moment as a drowning sailor would a life-line, qkumba stops his wild and grossly unflattering gesticulations, planting his remaining foot deep into the earth and closing his eyes in deep meditation as his favorite hero Daniel LaRusso once did in a work of fiction now forever lost to time. Though exactly what would happen next will be hotly debated among the most respected scholars until the end of time itself, it is universally agreed that had the copy-protection dragon known that qkumba’s last dragon-pity-inducing moments would include an attempt to re-enact the feeble defense of a fictional character, he would have been stricken dead of sheer embarrassment for his foe. Though this exact scenario will play out in a multitude of alternate time-lines, we are fortunate to witness a slightly less comical but infinitely more unlikely chain of events.

[qkumba]

It seems to work. I will start play-testing perhaps tomorrow.
I will put a preview version on my site when that happens (and then post the link here), so that others might help with testing.

[ilu...@gmail.com]

It is really great that Ultima V ProDOS ver got the old game saved just copying files in Britannia floppy to the folder.
It is nice if Ultima IV ProDOS ver will be able to inherit old game saved in a floppy.

[qkumba]

http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/tmp/ultima4.zip
is the preview version. It still has prompts for the disk, just press ESC.
I will remove those in the final version.
Please post bug reports here so that others will know what to expect.

As far as I remember, I made no modifications to the original files, so you can copy the tlist, party, rost, etc files and I believe that they will work to inherit saved games.

[Matthew Power]

Tried it on my //e with a CFFA3000 and ultima4.po as the boot image. Intro works, Initiate New Game works with taking a name and running through the gypsy questions. Pressing ESC (per your post) when prompted for the Britannia disk works and I land next to whatever town I chose via the gypsy questions. Move around a bit fine, but system freezes whenever I E to enter a town. I tried a few different towns (via the gypsy questions) and same result.

Also, after a reboot from the hang, Journey Onward reports "no active game" and won't respond to any key-presses to go back.

I haven't tried adding and activating a sound card yet.

[qkumba]

Yes, while restoring the image to an empty party, I re-established a debugging hook which is causing the hang.
Please try
http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/tmp/ultima4_20171210_1406.zip

[Matthew Power]

Entering towns now works, Journey Onward still freezes.

[Arsene Lupin]

On Sunday, December 10, 2017 at 3:48:54 PM UTC-8, Matthew Power wrote:
> Entering towns now works, Journey Onward still freezes.

I am now back from a pretty busy trip, and look what I have missed :-D

First, thanks a million again, qkumba!

I tried the new test build (ultima4_20171210_1406.zip) on AppleWin (v1.26.3.4, with "-r 64") with the ultima4.po mounted as S7D2 and ran LOADER.SYSTEM from the ProDOS quit menu. Everything looks good, and I can "Q" to save the game and restart the emulator to "Journey Onward." Luckier than Matthew, I guess. Will try some more tomorrow after I catch enough zzzz....

-AL

[Arsene Lupin]

A few more combinations:
1. Copied the whole diskette content to my 32MB boot HD under /APPLEWIN/U4 and ran LOADER.SYSTEM from there without any issue (so far).
2. Same as above but this time the U4 directory is on the 2nd 32MB HD in S7D2. Again, everything works.

-AL

[qkumba]

> system freezes whenever I E to enter a town. I tried a few different towns (via the gypsy questions) and same result.

Okay, I will try to reproduce that here. I have a matching configuration.

> Also, after a reboot from the hang, Journey Onward reports "no active game" and won't respond to any key-presses to go back.

The original game locks up intentionally when there's no party.
I didn't change that behaviour.

[qkumba]

I can't reproduce the effect.
Entering a town prompts for the Towne disk. Pressing ESC allows me to enter the town. I can leave the town, quit and save, shut down and restart the machine, and then Journey Onwards continues from wherever I was.
Matthew, does the original game run on your system?

[I am Rob]

Yah! Most playable game so far in Sweet16.

Can read text. Moved around extensively. Figured out all the commands.
Can talk to people. Can fight and lose health.

BUT! Pressing Q says Quit & save, but does not exit. Just asks "What?"
Have to re-boot to exit. Journey Onward says "no active game" and ESC does not not go back to main screen.

ESC does not work after dying as well.

[I am Rob]

Ah! One has to leave the town to quit and save then.? I was trying to quit while in town.

[I am Rob]

Nope! Leaving town does not quit and save for me.

Is the Quit and save supposed to take you back to the main screen or just save at that spot and continue on?

[qkumba]

You can only quit and save while walking around outside (i.e. in Brittania).
Note that it doesn't actually quit, it just saves and then lets you continue as you were.
However, if you reboot at that point, and Journey Onward, it should continue from where you were.

[qkumba]

Matthew, by any chance is your .po file write-protected?

[qkumba]

> Have to re-boot to exit. Journey Onward says "no active game" and ESC does not not go back to main screen.
>
> ESC does not work after dying as well.

As I noted previously, the original behaves like that, too.
When the game hangs like that, it hangs on purpose.

[Matthew Power]

On Sunday, December 10, 2017 at 11:45:53 PM UTC-5, qkumba wrote:
> I can't reproduce the effect.
> Entering a town prompts for the Towne disk. Pressing ESC allows me to enter the town. I can leave the town, quit and save, shut down and restart the machine, and then Journey Onwards continues from wherever I was.

Just to be clear, after you posted the second version of the image, entering towns DOES work for me.

> Matthew, does the original game run on your system?

Yes the game in original form has always worked on this //e, whether with physical floppies or using floppy images on the CFFA3000.

By the way, thank you for this!!! I'll keep playing around with it, it's pretty fun checking all the little steps along the way!

[qkumba]

Okay, the game does not automatically save anything. I suspect that this is the source of the problem that you're seeing.
To enable Journey Onward, you have to explicitly "Q"uit and save while in Britannia (not in a town, not in a castle, not in a dungeon, not in a box, not with a fox).

[Matthew Power]

> To enable Journey Onward, you have to explicitly "Q"uit and save while in Britannia (not in a town, not in a castle, not in a dungeon, not in a box, not with a fox).

Makes sense because with the first version of the image, I was getting locked up BEFORE I could Q to save progress in Britania. I didn't realize that the party isn't saved until you did that. I thought the party was saved upon creation.

I installed a Mockingboard clone (SD Music from Ian Kim) and activating the card works perfectly, in case anyone's interested to know.

> not in a box, not with a fox

lol, good one!

I'm going to now try it on my IIgs and see how it goes!

Thanks again, qkumba! Having fun with this...

[Matthew Power]

Ok, tried a couple things just having fun. If the //e is accelerated, then walking around in Britannia doesn't work. What happens is that when CFFA disk access is needed to load the next section of Britannia, my character will suddenly appear in random locations. Sometimes in the middle of the ocean, lol. But of course this game is not meant to be accelerated so that's really just a silly quirk. Just to be sure, I removed acceleration (pulled the card) and each new section of the Britannia map loads just fine on the //e.

Next thing I tried was putting the image as boot on the IIgs. Same random locations happened when Britannia loads the next map section. Middle of the ocean, etc.... I figured, ok, let's boot and quickly hit OA-CNTL-ESC to access the menu and slow the IIgs to 1 mhz. I thought slowing the IIgs to //e speed would work but it didn't. Same middle of the ocean stuff happening when Britannia tries to load the next section of the map on the IIgs.

So further on the IIgs I thought to get myself killed so I would return to Lord British's castle. The death messages come up, but when the prompt comes up for "Please place the towne disk into drive 1 and press [ESC]", the system freezes after pressing escape.

It seems like the IIgs is out at this point.

Please let me stress that I'm not complaining one bit! Playing around with this image and trying to break it is just as fun as playing the game itself!

Thank you again, qkumba. Amazing stuff that you do...

[qkumba]

> Next thing I tried was putting the image as boot on the IIgs. Same random locations happened when Britannia loads the next map section. Middle of the ocean, etc.... I figured, ok, let's boot and quickly hit OA-CNTL-ESC to access the menu and slow the IIgs to 1 mhz. I thought slowing the IIgs to //e speed would work but it didn't. Same middle of the ocean stuff happening when Britannia tries to load the next section of the map on the IIgs.

I can't explain that. I will investigate that one.

> So further on the IIgs I thought to get myself killed so I would return to Lord British's castle. The death messages come up, but when the prompt comes up for "Please place the towne disk into drive 1 and press [ESC]", the system freezes after pressing escape.

Ah, I can explain that. There's a file on the towne disk called "MAP@", but the '@' character is illegal in ProDOS. I've worked around it here:
http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/tmp/ultima4_20171211_1852.zip
I'll start removing the prompts soon.

> It seems like the IIgs is out at this point.

For now.

> Please let me stress that I'm not complaining one bit! Playing around with this image and trying to break it is just as fun as playing the game itself!

:-)

> Thank you again, qkumba. Amazing stuff that you do...

Thanks.

[Matthew Power]

> Ah, I can explain that. There's a file on the towne disk called "MAP@", but the '@' character is illegal in ProDOS. I've worked around it here:
> http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/tmp/ultima4_20171211_1852.zip

I tried the newest image on the IIgs and after getting myself killed on purpose returning to LB's castle works perfectly. I didn't try on the //e yet, though I imagine it works just the same.

[Matthew Power]

This is the sort of thing that happens when trying to move around Britannia on a IIgs. I've played around with this at different accelerations (including none on the IIgs). I'm really reaching here, and I admit I don't have any understanding. Is it possible that disk-access speed messes up?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/joa1vyehg0uj9oc/IMG_6999.jpg?dl=0

[Arsene Lupin]

On Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 12:09:48 PM UTC-8, Arsene Lupin wrote:
> With the great success by qkumba to make U5 runnable from a ProDOS HD, now I become greedy... very greedy :-D
>
> U1/U2: Origin did the dirty work already converting them to ProDOS when the Ultima Trilogy was released. However, they still require a player diskette to store the player. This could be a very quick conversion job, I think.
>
> U3: Long time ago deckard, another awesome hacker, did the work and you can find it here ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/games/rpg/ultima/ultima_III_prodos I have only played it once or twice but everything seemed ok from my HD.
>
> U4: AFAIK, this is DOS 3.3 based with 4 diskettes. I am not sure if Origin started their crazy protection scheme like the one in U5 from this release but I won't be surprised. So far I have not seen any efforts converting it.
>
> U5: Completed by the Almighty qkumba
>
> Hope this request is not too easy for you, qkumba :-)
>
> -AL

Right now even though there are still a few kinks left in qkumba's U4 release to iron out, I think it's safe to say his marvelous work has reached a critical milestone and we can mark it as completed, sort of.

So....

qkumba, this is a very gentle nudge to get your attention on U1/U2, in case you have nothing better to do during the holidays :-D

As usual, many many thanks for the great gifts you have brought us old geeks :-)

-AL

[Alex Lee]

Have you tried playing the ProDOS compatible version of Ultima I on my
collection of 8-bit games a single 32meg ProDOS volume?

http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/time-out-for-some-8-bit-fun-iigs-style/

And go into the 'ProDOSHackGames > U > Ultima.I' folder.

That could save qkumba some work ;-)

- Alex

[Antoine Vignau]

What about Akalabeth? :-)

[Arsene Lupin]

Yes, I did. Was very excited about it but found it has the same "issue" as the one from Ultima Triology: you have to format a player diskette to store it. Was hoping a quick hack from qkumba could remove it altogether.

-AL

[qkumba]

> This is the sort of thing that happens when trying to move around Britannia on a IIgs. I've played around with this at different accelerations (including none on the IIgs). I'm really reaching here, and I admit I don't have any understanding. Is it possible that disk-access speed messes up?

I don't believe so. I asked a friend with a GS to try to reproduce, without success. It might be specific to your configuration.
If you can tell me what's in all of the slots, then perhaps we can investigate further.

[qkumba]

Can you also try
http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/tmp/ultima4_20171214_1157.zip
I've spotted a potential issue in the image format (not a code issue).
Let's see if I've guessed correctly.

[Matthew Power]

qkumba, thanks for your replies.

I put the newest build #1157 on a USB and made it the boot image on the CFFA3000. To simplify things, I removed all cards but the CFFA and a RAM card. CPU is stock. Same result at stock IIgs "fast" speed, so I also use OA-CTRL-ESC to set the speed to "normal". Game boots, I create a character quickly, and use the questions to land in different parts of Britannia. Result is always the same. Entering towns and interacting is fine, but moving more than 20 tiles (an estimate) in Britannia dumps me into random locations. To be specific, sometimes the same locations keep repeating over and over... or if there's not enough land to do that it dumps me into the middle of the nearby ocean.

The RAM card is ByteBoosters DarkRAM-8MB, but just to be sure I replaced that with a GGLabs RAMGS/4. Same result.

My particular IIGS is a ROM01 (early I think since it has the keyboard connector attached). The CFFA3000 itself was recently re-flashed by Rich and works perfectly as far as I can tell.

Here is a photo of me trying to move around Moonglow including the system itself if it is of interest.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/st1877qqlxtoe3b/IMG_7011.jpg?dl=0

[Matthew Power]

> Have you tried playing the ProDOS compatible version of Ultima I on my
> collection of 8-bit games a single 32meg ProDOS volume?

Burger's Ultima I works great on my IIgs. She's also really cool with answering any questions about games she wrote, who she worked with, histories of games like Tracer Sanction, etc...

[qkumba]

> To simplify things, I removed all cards but the CFFA and a RAM card.

Can you simplify further and remove the RAM card?
You only need 64kb to boot the game.

[Matthew Power]

Ran it with no mem card. Same result.Britannia jumps to a pattern of locations on the map.

[qkumba]

Too bad. I will have to think more about this.
Meanwhile, I looked at Deckard's Ultima 3 port. It requires 128kb to run.
This is not ideal. I might port this one first. It looks straightforward.

[qkumba]

Okay, the Ultima 4 IIGS issue is fixed!

[Antoine Vignau]

Cool!