Talk:C64-port of Ultima VI

http://groups.google.com/group/swcollect/browse_thread/thread/821a14527d80384d/ac75eb69de41c1f3

The first paragraph of this page may not be true. John Romero claims on the SWCollect Usenet group that Richard Garriott, in fact, had no intention of starting Ultima VI on Apple II, being enamored with the 16-color EGA graphics available on DOS while the Warriors of Destiny ports were being written and made the decision to drop the Apple II as a main dev platform then. There is no source cited for this first paragraph, and so I didn't want to change it until the source for this could be compared and verified.

That post from John Romero is more than sufficient to use as a source for a rewrite; you can't get much more credible than an Origin employee from that period. There's also the simple logic that with Ultima V released in 1988 and Ultima VI released in 1990, there is absolutely no way Origin could have wasted a year developing U6 for the Apple II and then turned around and cranked out a game of that complexity in only one more year. The author of the article should have checked their facts. --Terilem 14:09, 16 August 2011 (PDT)

This, however, is interesting:

http://vorlon.case.edu/~zwb2/Ultima/1988-04-14.txt

That conference took place on April 13, 1988 -- a few weeks after the Apple II version of U5 was released. Further down, Richard Garriott talks about how U6 would be initially released on the Apple II, which appears to contradict what John Romero is saying about the decision to go IBM-PC having already been made in 1987. I still find it highly improbable that any Apple II development would have continued for any significant length of time, though; certainly not a year. --Terilem 15:05, 16 August 2011 (PDT)

Weird Bug

Has anyone noticed the weird bug that you can't speak to Xiao about the spells and reagents? Instead of the normal converation it will come with the one that originally spoken by Isabella from Minoc. Weird is not?

Technical

The description of the "play from disk" method makes it sound like this is exclusive to the C64 version. This method of playing the game is available as an option in the PC version, for computers without hard drives. The wording should make it clear this is possible on the PC version, but is the only option available on the C64 version.

Thank you for the suggestion! The new wording should hopefully address this. --Terilem (talk) 10:16, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Floppy drive talk

I removed "EDIT: The 1571 drives worked fine and were faster than the 1541s - and you could use two of them with Ultima VI; I did so when I first played the game in this format, though I was using a C128 in C64 mode - do not know if that made any real difference. The amount of disk swapping was still insane." because it sounded like someone thinking out-loud. If some appropriate material can be sifted out, feel free to include it. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 18:28, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

"Htw-fixed" disk

...New disk images with the label "Htw-fixed" from a new, clean source circumvent the problem....

Web Link? please.

• Can be found here: https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spieledetail.php?filnummer=1242
• And direct link to the file: https://www.c64games.de/hugo.php?art=d&fil=1242&Dateiname=/u/ultima_6.zip

They do add in the text files coming with it, that it mainly was Populace A that was broken and they got a clean version of.--Tribun (talk) 13:09, 4 July 2022 (MDT)

Apple II vs C64 in terms of capability

The article has this claim: the C64 was theoretically a more powerful system than the Apple II. However, the C64 had less usable RAM for game logic than the Apple IIe with 64K (I think the C64 normally has a just 38K RAM available for game logic) and especially any apple II with more than 64K. The main limitation of the Apple II when compared with the C64 is that it didn't have any support chips to offload graphics and sound processing to. Additionally, it had very primitive graphics capability. In terms of gameplay depth, though, the Apple II (with 64K or more) would be more powerful than the C64, unless the gameplay requires the more sophisticated graphics of the C64. The C64 version could have been a much better game if it had been designed to need 128K RAM, which would have been possible if owners would have the Commodore REU 1700 or a 3rd-party RAM expander. That would have also made the Commodore 128 more relevant to the game. The game also should have used five floppy disks, not three.

The part about the graphics and sound makes it more powerful in terms of Ultima VI, at least partially. No matter how efficiently the Apple II managed memory over the C64, what difference would that have made to performance? My recollection of C64 games vs Apple II is that the C64 frequently just need to access the disk during start up, while games on the Apple would often pause for disk access. On the other hand, my experience w/C64 games didn't have multi-disk Apple II counterparts. Can anyone tell me what Autoduel and the later Ultimas were like?--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 08:32, 31 January 2024 (MST)