For those who don't know, the original Ultima was never ported to PC. What we have on GOG is a remake that was made six years after the original, after Ultima's 1 through 4 had already been released.

The true original is on Apple II, which was published by California Pacific Computer in 1981. I'm trying to play through it on AppleWin, but it's a rough experience.

Finding "pristine" images that work is tough. The rampant piracy scene really did a number on preservation; just about everything floating around on the Internet is either cracked (often with obnoxious loaders), buggy, corrupt, has saves, or a combination of the above.

The images I'm using seem good enough. I can start a new character, save the character to disk 2, then start a new game. But there is a big problem - if I save with the 'Q' key and try to load the save later, AppleWin just freezes. So I have to use emulator quicksaves.

Another weird issue, and maybe this is just a bug from the original game - if I take the disk images in their pristine state and try to continue a previous game without generating a new character, it plops me in the middle of the ocean, dead on arrival. Then I resurrect onto an island with a signpost. I appear to have no name, no inventory, and be a Level 1 Lizard Peasant.

Actually playing the game is a bit agonizing. Every move redraws the screen, and at the default speed it is SLOW. This is especially painful in dungeons, where standing still and attacking enemies makes the screen redraw with each attack. And at higher speeds, it's liable to auto-pass my turn, since input is timed.

There was one other thing I've experienced that never happened in the remake. I was wandering to the Mines of Mt. Drash, cut through the forest, and hidden archers, previously invisible, started shooting at me from the woods. And the icon for them actually looked like little men hiding in the trees, rather than light dots. But I couldn't seem to counter-attack; even though I was adjacent, it kept saying "OUT OF RANGE" or something like that, and I could not move any closer. So I died. This was also where I learned that manual saving does not work, because when I rebooted and tried to continue, the game just froze.

On the second attempt I did not encounter archers. But after clearing out a good portion of Level 1 in the dungeon, I fell into a trap and landed in Level 2 where I got killed by rangers and orcs.

Maybe I'll keep trying and see if I get anywhere. The DOS remake is clearly a lot more polished and more convenient to play. But if anyone else has played this version and knows what they are doing, I'd like to know if my experiences are normal or abnormal. Especially on the lack of saving.

Had another session, in case anyone is reading this. I've learned that dungeons are deadly! I went to Dungeon Montor just north of Britain, and almost instantly triggered a trap. Fortunately my rope & spikes saved me. Unfortunately that was my only set, and it disappeared in the process. When I turned around I walked back over the trap a second time, it dropped me down to Level 2. Fumbling around on Level 2, I triggered ANOTHER trap, and fell down to Level 3, where a gelatinous cube ate my plate mail and a viper and an orc killed me.

So I did something I've never done before in the DOS version. I paid gold tribute to LB in exchange for more hitpoints. In the DOS version I would just venture into dungeons repeatedly until I came out with all the HP I wanted, but it looks like this won't be a working strategy this time, at least not at first.

I did discover that encountering hidden archers isn't necessarily a death sentence. I still can't hit them, but when I walk towards them repeatedly, eventually it stops saying "BLOCKED!" and I move into their tile, and they just disappear.

Next strategy, try to save up for a few L.Up spells. Rope & Spikes seem like a waste of money. If I'm going to invest in disposable stuff, I think I prefer disposable stuff that lets me quickly escape so I can buy more and not re-fall into the same trap again.

I may have hit a wall. I got enough money for a shuttle, and went to space, but this final frontier is rather unfamiliar.

Front View works very differently from in the remake. When you press left/right, it actually simulates steering left/right in first person by changing the parallax of the stars. The crosshair remains in the center of the screen at all times. Same with climbing/diving. This makes it a bit difficult to know whether you are advancing on a fighter or of the fighter is moving away from you. Fortunately, Space Bar resets all steering to neutral.

Unfortunately, I cannot hit any enemies, no matter what I do.

First of all, Space Fighter 1 only has 100 shields, not 1000 like in the remake. So it's useless - it blows up in one hit. Even your starting shuttle has 1000 shields.

In combat, no matter how dead-on the crosshairs look, firing never seems to register a hit. Just now I managed to get a fighter dead center in the crosshairs, and hit space, and then instead of the fighter drifting away, it just sat their right in the middle of my crosshairs, unmoving, but returning lots of fire. Hitting "Fire" myself continued to not register any hits.

So I'm stuck. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I don't know if I'm doing anything wrong - maybe the disk image is corrupt (so many of them are), and because of it a bug manifested just now. It wouldn't be the first thing that looks like a bug - saving doesn't work at all either. Or maybe this was a bug in the original game itself and nobody has been able to finish the game until the remake. Unlikely, but not impossible. There's basically zero information about the non-remake version of this game on the Internet, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write about my experiences with it and put it out there.

Wall overcome! I just had to set the emulator to ][+ mode. Now hitting fighters is easy.

Were you able to finish the game? =)

Flynn

No. Ran into another snag. My character simply would not level up past 6 IIRC. Experience points did not cap at 9999, they were well over 10000 after landing back on earth as a Space Ace, so there was apparently no way to finish the game. So at that point I thought "I basically know how the rest of the game goes, no need to redo the whole game just to see how the big fight against Mondain is different."

If I ever take another go at it, I'll know to use ][+ mode, and also to keep an eye on the XP and levels regularly. But don't hold your breath.

Still, that's pretty cool. I've messed around a bit with AppleWin and a few favorites (Lady Tut, Drol, Bolo) but hadn't tried hunting down the original Ultima. The original Wizardry was worth the hunt though. I've been thinking about a Let's Play of some sort, but my DSL connection just isn't fast enough for uploading video. Though I have thought of a blog format with pictures, but that doesn't seem as popular as video, heh.

Flynn

What makes Wizardry AppleWin worth it? I did track down a copy, but the unfriendly interface, sluggish performance, and the knowledge of how ruthlessly hard Wiz is, did not make me feel compelled to play through it and see how it differs from the more familiar Ultimate Wizardry Archives version. I have played through that one on DOSBox, and it uses the much improved Wiz3 interface and engine. The only downside I know of is its infamous predilection for lowering your stats on level up.

Replaying Ultima as it originally existed didn't seem nearly as daunting, mostly because Ultima (the familiar DOS remake anyway) is a rather easy and uncomplicated game, at least once you understand how HP works.

My main takeaway from this experience is that the remake does lose some things in translation, some subtle, some less so. On the less subtle end of the scale, dungeons are super deadly if you aren't ready for them. Every floor has pitfall traps that will dump you into levels full of monsters out of your league. Ultima '86 didn't have these at all. Rope & Spikes bypass these traps, but you lose one every single time you step on a trap square, even if you stepped on it before.

Also if I'm not mistaken, monsters are harder here, and stats seem to matter more. I guess this is a more subtle difference, because I'm not completely sure if this is true or not.

But there's a very big downside to this original version - it is slow. Frustratingly slow. Doing a sign run feels like it takes ages, which wouldn't be SO bad if you're playing this for the first time and don't know what you're doing, but to boost your stats and weapons through repeated sign runs is patience trying.

Not sure if it's worth it or not. More curiosity than anything. A friend of mine had it on an Apple ][ clone back in the day and we played the crap out of it together. Nostalgia, I guess? *shrug*

Of course, doing a Let's Play doesn't necessarily have to be Wizardry. I think that's the other hurdle is having so many games that it's tough to pick out something that A) hasn't been Let's Played to death already (anything relatively recent), or B) something that's so obscure that no one knows what it is, heh.

Flynn