Doctor Who on DVD for North America

I can say without a doubt that the classic Doctor Who is the most expensive series to buy today.  Twenty-six seasons (or portions thereof) are sold not in season/series box set like every other TV program released in the past decade, but by story.  Nor are complete seasons available for download.  Of the 157 stories produced before the year 2000 (including Shada and the TV Movie but not The Curse of the Fatal Death which had been released on VHS), 18 do not have a sufficient number of existing episodes to release separately, two stories with half their episodes can be released (The Underwater Menace & The Crusades), but only Underwater Menace will be released.  That leaves 137 stories that have been released on DVD since 1999.

As of October, 2015 all Classic Doctor Who stories will have been released with the exceptions noted above. Now is the best time to begin purchasing DVDs if you haven't already.  Unlike the VHS releases, which were released over a span of 21 years, the DVD releases were never released as movie editions which eliminated the cliffhangers (The Seeds of Death, Spearhead from Space, Day of the Daleks, The Time Warrior, Death to the Daleks, The Ark in Space, Revenge of the Cybermen, Terror of the Zygons, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang).  Other stories were noticeably edited (The Web Planet, Carnival of Monsters, Pyramids of Mars (also movie), The Brain of Morbius (also movie)).  Thus with DVDs you can have an almost totally consistent release of the series, (with the obnoxious release of The Chase in the US and Australia)  More importantly, for the First and Second Doctors, almost all of their episodes have been subject to the VidFIRE treatment to restore the video look to the film telecines that exist today (exceptions include The Time Meddler and Episode 1 of the Crusade. The Moonbase DVD in the U.S. should have had the process applied byt did not)  The Third Doctor's stories that are only available as B&W film telecine and poor quality NTSC tapes have also been colorized with the best technology available.  The Restoration Team that has supervised the releases of Doctor Who has done an extraordinary job with the existing library to produce the best quality releases.

The U.K., (Region 2/Region B) the U.S. (Region 1/Region A) and Australia (Region 4/Region B) are the three major markets for releases of Doctor Who (including the current series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures).  Everything is available (except for Seasons 4 & 5 of Sarah Jane Blu-ray) in some form or another in each region.  Nonetheless, if you wish to purchase a uniform collection, you should really purchase the Region 2 U.K. releases.

First, new Doctor Who releases in the U.K. begin expensive, but within a few months the prices almost always fall sharply.  New Doctor Who releases in the U.S. begin expensive and seemingly remain expensive to purchase new, seemingly no matter how old.  Older titles (by DVD release date) in the U.K. are often extremely inexpensive (£5-6).

Second, every story is still in print and can be purchased new, today, in the U.K.  In the U.S., there are several stories that have gone out of print, and the prices for them can rise dramatically.  The stories that are out of print in the U.S., with no planned Special Edition to replace them, are :

The Sensorites
The Rescue / The Romans
The Web Planet
The Time Meddler
The Gunfighters
The Invasion
The Krotons
The War Games
Terror of the Autons
Colony in Space
The Time Monster
Planet of the Spiders
City of Death
Black Orchid
Earthshock (included in a barebones edition for The Doctors Revisited Volume Two)
Time-Flight
The Awakening
Frontios
Planet of Fire
Attack of the Cybermen
The Mark of the Rani
The Two Doctors
Happiness Patrol
Dragonfire

Battlefield

Ghost Light
The Curse of Fenric

2003 is the first year where prior DVD releases have not been superceded.  Here are the stories were originally released and have been later replaced with Special Editions :

The Aztecs
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Seeds of Death
Spearhead from Space
Inferno
The Claws of Axos
The Three Doctors
Carnival of Monsters
The Green Death
The Ark in Space
The Robots of Death
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
The Ribos Operation	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Pirate Planet	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Stones of Blood	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Androids of Tara	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Power of Kroll	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Armageddon Factor	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Visitation
The Five Doctors
Resurrection of the Daleks
The Caves of Androzani
Vengeance on Varos
Remembrance of the Daleks
Doctor Who – The Movie	UK Only

Special Editions are more expensive than the earlier releases, but contain more extras (usually an extra disc) and improved picture and sound quality.  Most Special Editions today have dropped in price so much as to make them not any more expensive than buying now-OOP original DVD releases.

Third, copyright clearances are easiest in the U.K., which makes export versions for the U.S. and Australia comparatively more expensive.  Moreover, sometimes music cannot be cleared and must be replaced.  In one instance in the first episode of The Chase, two minutes had to be excised from the U.S. and Australian DVD releases because the Doctor and his companions were watching a concert of The Beatles.  The footage is available on the VHS version of these stories for each country.  Similarly, The Beatles can be heard on the soundtrack of Remembrance of the Daleks on all VHS copies, but that had to be replaced for the U.S. DVD releases.

Fourth, since 2006 the BBC has been releasing story collections of the classic serials in Region 2.  These collections can follow a particular monster like Beneath the Surface, which collects the Silurian and Sea Devil stories, a series of related stories, New Beginnings, which presents the stories surrounding the Fourth Doctor's regeneration, or a looser collection of weaker selling titles like Earthstory, which includes the First Doctor story The Gunfighters and the Fifth Doctor story The Awakening.  In the U.K., virtually none of these box sets had the stories released separately.  Most of the box sets that made it to the U.S. also allowed the stories to be purchased separately.  There are at least nine box sets that never saw a U.S. release, and while the prices may have been high in the beginning, the prices on them have so decreased as to make them very good bargains.  In the U.S. you would have to purchase these stories separately at increased cost.

	US Release	UK Release	Stories Available Separately in US?	Stories Available Separately in UK?
Earthstory	No	Yes	Yes	No
Bred for War	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mara Tales	No	Yes	Yes	No
Revisitations 1-3	No	Yes	Yes	No
Peladon Tales	No	Yes	Yes	No
Mannequin Mania	No	Yes	Yes	No
Time-Flight & Arc of Infinity	No	Yes	Yes	No
Beneath the Surface	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
New Beginnings	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
The Beginning	Yes	Yes	No	No
E-Space Trilogy	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Key to Time	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Lost in Time	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
The Invisible Enemy with K-9 and Company	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Black Guardian Trilogy	Yes	Yes	No	No
Dalek War	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Space Museum & The Chase	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Key to Time (Original Edition)	Yes	No	Yes	N/A
The Doctors Revisited 1-4	Yes	No	Yes	N/A
The Doctors Revisited 5-8	Yes	No	Yes	N/A

Finally, the packaging of the U.K. releases is superior to the U.S. releases.  Each U.K. release came with a booklet discussing the story and giving a listing and description of all the special features on the disc.  These booklets are not available as a paper copy on the U.S. releases.  Also, some U.S. box sets like The Beginning, The Invisible Enemy with K-9 and Company and The Space Museum & The Chase did not have separate cases for each story.

There are, however, a pair of hurdles if you wish to buy Region 2 DVDs outside of the U.K.  First, you must find a seller willing to ship to your country and be prepared to pay for shipping.  Amazon.co.uk. will ship Region 2 U.K. DVDs or Region B U.K. Blu-rays to the U.S., and their shipping charges are very reasonable.  There is a delivery charge of £0.99 per CD, DVD or Blu-ray and a £2.09 combined delivery charge.  This delivery charge does not increase on the number of items in the order.  The delivery time is 5-7 business days.  No VAT or U.S. state sales tax is collected unless perhaps you live in a state where Amazon.com collects the tax.

Second, you will need a region 2 or region free DVD player to play these discs.  I think that the vast majority of people who play Region 2 DVDs in a Region 1 country these days use VLC Player.  VLC will work fine with Doctor Who Region 2 DVDs, so long as the drive does not have a region code (RPC-1) is hard-coded to Region 2.  I now recommend using MakeMKV to backup your Doctor Who episodes.  MakeMKV is a modern program that is trialware, but you can always get a new trial period when it upgrades to a new version.  MakeMKV will easily rip all video and audio tracks losslessly from a disc.

Ripping four episodes of Doctor Who takes about 15 minutes on my PC.  To figure out what to rip, I use VLC or PowerDVD to select each individual episode and mark down the Title number when that episode plays.  Having a list of the episode times helps, which are provided at the excellent and venerable Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Travel site : http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/

Even though the PS3 will not play PAL content from a DVD, even if the DVD is a region free copy, it has no problems playing the extracted, uncompressed content via a media server.  My flat screen LCD and my CRTs have no trouble displaying the resulting streamed video.  With the latter, presumably the PS3 is outputing an NTSC-compatible video signal (NTSC color encoding, 525 lines/59.94i), and it does it very well.  While the PS3 does not natively play MKV files, with PS3 Media Server, that is not a problem.

Last month, I began ordering all available DVDs from Amazon.co.uk, buying the regularly released boxsets (not limited editions) to save money. On Amazon.co.uk, you can only order 50 items at a time, so for a complete classic Doctor Who set you will need at least two orders.  I was able to get my first batch of purchases into two orders, but the site can get error prone when trying to order so many things at one time.  Prices fluctuate frequently on Doctor Who DVDs, so you may get a better or worse price depending on when you put an item in your shopping basket versus when you actually complete an order.

Fortunately, the value between the British Pound Sterling and the U.S. Dollar has been fairly favorable for the past three years, generally hovering around $1 USD equaling between £1.50-1.70.  However, your credit card will charge a fee to perform the conversion.  My card charged me approximately 3% of the total cost of the order, including shipping.

If you place a large order, Amazon will ship out DVDs several at a time.  You will not get one big box, but maybe eight smaller shipments.  Each time a shipment is sent from the factory, your card will get charged.  I have not encountered a damaged disc, but three cases have had some minor issues with damage.  Also, for one story, the DVD insert booklet was not present, but I understand that the issue does occasionally rear itself.

Having purchased all the Region 2 Doctor Who DVDs, I can definitely say that now is the time to buy.  The BBC apparently is not keen about producing new Special Editions of previously released stories.  The last was back in August, 2013.  Additionally, there are no classic episodes left to be released, save for The Underwater Menace Episode 2.  That story may receive a release with animation or telesnap reconstruction, probably the latter.  Buy before stories go out of print.

Apple II Gaming and Hardware

Gaming on the Apple II and useful hardware is mostly straightforward.  In this post I intend to identify hardware upgrades and their usefulness to Apple II games.  We start with the original Apple II of 1977 :

Paddles and Joystick - Apple II and II+ machines included a pair of paddle controllers.  They are black in color and each has a pushbutton and a knob.  The cable is plugged into the 16-pin Game I/O socket on the motherboard.  Apple did not release a joystick until the Apple IIe and //c machines.  Apple II Joysticks operated like a pair of paddles, but usually supported two buttons.  Rival machines from Commodore and Atari only supported one button on their controllers.  Apple IIe and //c did not come with paddle controllers when bought from Apple, one had to purchase the Apple II Hand Controllers.

RAM - The Apple II and Apple II+ can support up to 48KB on the motherboard.  The Apple II has three rows of RAM sockets and can support 4KB or 16KB in each row.  Except on the last Apple II+ machines, there were configuration blocks which the user would use to inform the system whether he had 4KB or 16KB in each bank.  While some commercial games could work with 16KB or 32KB, most required 48KB.

Revision 1 and later Motherboards - Adds the blue and orange colors to the High Resolution Graphics (HGR) mode. Absolutely essential for games, thousands of which use the HGR mode.  Without this functionality, only purple and green colors are displayed in HGR mode.  Also useful in eliminating color fringing in text modes on color monitors, making it easier to load and save onto cassettes and turning the system on. Usually not an issue, since Apple IIs with revision 0 motherboards command the highest prices and most people probably would want to keep those in pristine condition.  With some user modifications, the revision 0 boards can have the features of a revision 1 board.

Disk II - Another essential upgrade, cassette tapes were seen as too slow and unreliable for most commercial software after it was released.  Most Apple II games come on 5.25" floppy disks.  The Disk II Interface Card is needed to connect the drives to the system, and each card can support up to two drives.  I know of no game that supports more than two disk drives.  The card is installed into one of the expansion slots in the Apple II, and eventually slot #6 was settled upon as the de facto standard installation slot.

When the Disk II was first released in 1978, it had two 4-bit PROMs on the card that supported 13 sectors per track (256 bytes per sector) on each of the 35 tracks of a single sided drive.  The earliest public releases of the Disk Operating System, DOS, only supported 13 sector disks.  This encompasses DOS 3.1, 3.2 and 3.21. Apple later found that using 16 sectors was within the tolerance of the drives, and updated the PROMs in the Disk II Controller Card and released DOS 3.3 to support 16 sector disks.  DOS 3.3 had three releases, the first in 1980 and two bugfix releases in 1983, and the vast majority of games were released on 16-sector disks.  Some early games were intended for 13-sector disks, but most have been converted to 16-sector.

Games will often require DOS 3.3 to format blank disks for save games.  ProDOS will not work for these games.  Some really early versions of Sierra's Mystery House and other early text adventures may require DOS 3.2 13-sector formatted disks for saves.  Later versions of these games include a utility to format the disk for the appropriate geometry needed for the game.

The Apple II+ is an Apple II with Applesoft BASIC ROMs instead of Integer BASIC ROMs.  Many games and programs require Applesoft in ROM.  I cannot think of any that cannot get by by having Integer BASIC loaded into the RAM of the Language Card.

Language Card - The Language Card was released with the Apple PASCAL system and added 16KB of bankswitched memory to the Apple II or II+.  It was installed in slot 0, which was specially made for RAM or ROM upgrades.  Many, many games require 64KB, especially after the Apple IIe was released.

When DOS is booted, it loads a copy of the BASIC version not found in the ROM.  So when DOS is booted on an Apple II, Applesoft BASIC is loaded into RAM.  Conversely, when DOS is booted on an Apple II+ or IIe, Integer BASIC is loaded into RAM.  The version of BASIC currently in use can be selected with a simple command.  This way, older programs written for Integer BASIC can still be run on newer Apple II+ and IIe machines.

Apple released a Firmware Card that was inserted into slot 0 and contained the ROMs not found on the system board.  The ROM used could be changed with the flip of a switch.  However, this did not allow for the Language Card to be used, since both used slot 0.  The Language Card is more flexible and adds that extra crucial 16KB.

Mockingboard - In the early 1980s, Sweet Micro Systems released a sound card for the Apple II/II+ in four varieties: the Sound I, Speech I, Sound/Speech and Sound II.  The Sound I came with one AY-3-8910 three voice programmable sound synthesizer, the Speech I came with one Vortrax SC-01 speech synthesizer chip, the Sound/Speech come with one AY-3-8910 and one SC-01 chip, and the Sound II came with two AY-3-8910 chips.  Many games assume that the board would be located in slot 4 of an Apple II, II+, IIe or IIgs.

Eventually, Sweet Micro Systems refreshed their line and released the Mockingboard A, B, C and D.  The Mockingboard A has two pin reduced AY-3-8913 chips and two sockets for SSI-263 speech chips.  The Mockingboard B was a SSI-263 speech chip.  The Mockingboard C included two AY-3-8913s and one SSI-263.  There was a Mockingboard M that had identical capabilities to the C that was bundled with the Bank Street Music Writer.  The Mockingboard D was an external unit that connected to the Apple //c's serial port.  The Mockingboard D is utterly incompatible with games.

Games typically only supported one AY chip.  Ultima IV supported two AY chips and Ultima V three AY chips, requiring two Mockingboard Sound II, A, C or M.  A few games like Crypt of Medea and Crime Wave supported the speech chip.

Applied Engineering released the Phasor sound card, which could emulate a two AY chip Mockingboard.  It had four AY-3-8913 chips, one SSI-263 speech chip and a socket for a second speech chip.  Ultima V could take full advantage of it.

Super Serial Card - One of the most popular expansion cards for the Apple II, II+ and IIe is the Super Serial Card.  This was typically used to connect to printers like the Apple ImageWriter II and Modems like the Hayes Smartmodem line.  They typically go into slots 1 & 2.  A few games supported printer output, like Wasteland, which could use a serial or parallel printer.

Apple IIe - This is an Apple II+ with a Language Card built in, far fewer chips integrated on the motherboard and added DE-9 port for game controllers.  The official Apple II Joystick and Hand Controllers plug into this port, which is much easier than plugging older joysticks into the Game I/O socket.  The Apple II Joystick could operate in self-centering or free-form mode by a switch for each axis on the base of the joystick.

The Apple IIe has a newer keyboard with a much more IBM-like layout.  Gone is the REPT key, its function is contained in the ROM.  Added keys include Up and Down cursor keys, Open and Closed Apple keys (corresponding to joystick buttons 0 and 1) and a Caps Lock key.  The Apple IIe has true lowercase support and fully functional shift keys.  Initially, BASIC commands could not be entered in lowercase.  The IIe machines also have a socket to connect the Apple IIe Numeric Keypad, except for the Platinum, which has most of the previously-separate keypad built-in.  The Numeric Keypad, whether attached or detached, functions as duplicate keys, they do not report their own scancodes.

The Apple IIe has an AUX slot for memory expansion.  This could house the 1K 80-Column Memory Expansion Card, which allowed 80-column text.  Later releases of Infocom text adventures supported 80-column text.  Wizardry does not intentionally support 80-column text, but will display its text in an 80-column mode with each character separated by a space if there is an 80-column card in the system.  The other option was the 64KB Extended 80-Column Memory Card, which added 64KB of Bankswitched Memory and the 80-Column Text Mode.

Revision B Motherboard - Changes in this motherboard allowed Apple IIe machines to use Double High Resolution Graphics Mode with an Extended 80-Column Memory Card.  While an Apple IIe Revision A Motherboard could use the extra 64KB, it could not display DHGR graphics.  A user modification exists to fix the Revision A boards.

Third party boards like the Applied Engineering RAM Works exist to expand the Apple IIe to well beyond the extra 64KB of the Extended 80-Column Memory Card, but it relies on an extension of the bankswitching memory scheme and it is unknown whether any game ever used more than 128KB of RAM.  There is also an Apple-branded Apple II Memory Expansion that fit in one of the seven slots of an Apple II=//e can could provided more memory, but the memory addressing is utterly incompatible with the addressing of the 80-Column Memory Card, which is what games used.

Apple //c - The Apple //c was a portable version of the IIe with 128KB and contains the equivalent of two Super Serial Cards, a Disk II Interface.  Its DE-9 port also supports a one-button mouse.  One floppy drive is built-in, a second external drive can be added.  First versions of this system did not allow RAM to be expanded beyond 128KB, later versions did.  It supports DHGR graphics.

Apple Mouse - The mouse was supported in approximately fifteen or so games, so it is not a major peripheral.  Balance of Power was one such game.  The Apple IIe required a Mouse Interface Card to be installed, while the Apple //c's mouse connected to its joystick port.  The IIe can use standard Macintosh mice from the time period, but the //c requires its own mice.  However, its de facto slot is slot 4, which is where many games expect to find the Mocking Board.

ProDOS - This is Apple's successor operating system to DOS 3.3, and it came with the Apple //c.  Several later games have obvious ProDOS derived boot loaders, and they often load far more quickly than older games based of DOS 3.3.  Unless a game informs you it needs ProDOS, stick with DOS 3.3 as needed.  Several games will require the user to format save game disks, but they will insist on the DOS 3.3 format.

Apple //e Enhanced & Platinum - This exchanged the original 6502 for the slightly more advanced 65C02 and new character and firmware ROMs.  I have never seen any box state that the game requires an enhanced Apple //e, only that it requires an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM.  This would suggest that no game uses the extra features of the Enhanced model.  Except for some minor backward compatibility issues regarding games that used illegal opcodes of the 6502 (the original Ultima's space battles are an example), the Enhanced //e is just as good as the IIe with a numeric keypad.

Apple //c+ and Accelerator cards -  The Apple //c+ is an Apple II running at 4 MHz.  Many accelerators for the II-//e run at 3.58MHz.  While rare, these accelerators can really help with games that use double high resolution graphics like Rampage or King's Quest.  However, most games assume that the Apple will be running at 1.02MHz and time everything by that speed.  Moreover, transfers from and to the 5.25" floppy drives will occur at the 1.02MHz speed.

Upgrades Not Useful for Gaming :

Apple II/II+ 80-Column Cards - Games would simply not support 80-column text prior to Apple standardizing it with the IIe.  Earlier cards had no particular standard, but the Videx Vidterm was a popular choice.  Games also do not like lowercase characters until the Apple IIe became popular, so there is no immediate need for a shift-key modification or a character ROM replacement.

Microsoft Z-80 Softcard - This card enabled Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system.  CP/M games are generally text-based and platform agnostic.

Apple IIe Video Upgrade Cards - No game is known to use one.

3.5" Floppy Drive - The Unidisk 3.5" drive required its own special controller because the Apple IIe could not quite keep up with the drive.  The 3.5" drives on the Apple //c+ provides the same functionality.  Very, very few games were released on the 3.5" disk format, and all have more common 5.25" versions.

Modem - Only two games I know of, The American Challenge: A Sailing Simulation and Battle Chess, support modem play, and the latter game is too slow to be enjoyable on an unaccelerated Apple II.

This blog entry does not cover the Apple //gs, which deserves its own discussion.

Ultima IV - Best on the PC

If you actually wanted to play Richard Garriott's masterpiece, Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar, on real contemporaneous hardware, and had a choice of the platform to select, which platform you choose?  Would you choose the original Apple II, the Atari 8-bit version, the Commodore 64 version, the IBM PC version, the Atari ST version, the Amiga version, the NES or the Sega Master System (Europe Only) version?  Outside of Japan, these were your choices.

Putting the console versions aside, which are not quite 100% faithful to Garriott's vision (the SMS is very close and quite enjoyable and easily puts the NES version to shame), the version to play is the IBM PC version.  That version may not have the nicest looking introduction and has no music, but what it does have is the advantage of speed.  It is the only version that can officially be installed to a hard disk.  All the other versions had to be run off floppy drives.  The 8-bit home computer versions typically required disk swapping with four disk sides.

Ultima IV accesses the floppy drives a lot.  Every time you enter or leave a town or castle, the game needs to load the next area from the disk.  Every time you initiate a conversation, the game needs to access the disk to load the NPC's responses.  Every combat requires a load.  There is a load for each 16x16 tile boundary crossed.  On the 8-bit systems, entering or exiting a dungeon requires flipping the disk over.  8-bit systems have slow floppy drives.  The Apple II is the fastest but does not really have a hardware disk controller.  The Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit machines have hardware disk controllers in their drives but their systems speeds are crippled by the slow serial buses these systems use to connect their floppy drives.  Try any of these versions in an emulator with the authentic disk drive speed on and see how much fun you will have. IBM had a true disk drive controller and an adapter solely for the disk drive, so its disks transfer with comparative speed.  Hard drives were not standard on the Atari ST and Amiga in the first few years of their lives, so these ports were not designed to be hard drive installable.

Ultima IV on the IBM PC suffers from an absolute lack of music.  When the port was released in 1987, supporting the EGA card was considered a big deal.  Sound cards were at best an emerging technology, and the only PC compatible systems that had a music chip were the discontinued IBM PCjr. and Tandy 1000 series.  Although there is a patch for the PC version that adds music, and later combined with a patch that adds VGA graphics, it requires a 386 to run at all.  Moreover, the PC Speaker sound effects and spell effects are lost due to the increased speed.  It is not suitable at all for machines which Origin targeted.

The music is not really a big deal.  Relatively few Apple II owners owned a Mockingboard and the game itself, and without that, there was no music on the Apple II.  Atari 8-bit users did not get the music due to Origin not feeling the need to support 64KB Atari machines.  The Commodore 64's music is not that great, neither is the Atari ST or Amiga's.  Besides, there are only eight music pieces in the game (Towne, Castle, Wanderer, Combat, Dungeon, Shoppe, Rule Britannia and Shrine), and they get old very quickly.

Ultima IV scales reasonably well on low end machines.  It runs extremely well on my Tandy 1000SX in the 16-color Tandy Graphics mode at 7.16MHz, and it also runs well in 4-color CGA mode at 4.77MHz, making it suitable for IBM PC and XTs.  The IBM PC version requires 256KB RAM.  The Apple II and Commodore 64 versions require 64KB and do not utilize extra RAM.  The PC can load conversations and combat scenes in memory. The increased loading speed of a hard drive means that loads from a hard drive can occur much more quickly than even the 16-bit machines.  With real floppies, the game will check the floppy to ensure that the genuine article is being used, but there are cracks and the CD compilations do not suffer from the checks.

Ultima IV is not atypical of the Ultima series or PC ports in general.  While many PC ports were graphically or aurally inferior to their Apple, Commodore and Atari counterparts, they can run far better than any of those on real hardware.  The 8-bit machines required accelerators (except for the IIgs, which could accelerate 8-bit Apple II software), which are hard to come by and can screw up timing.  Non-PC 16-bit machines also tended to be tricky to get working faster.  PC ports by the mid to-late 80s were programmed to be at least somewhat flexible in regard to system speed.  In this case, once you get beyond character creation, the 16-color EGA and Tandy graphics are almost on par with the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga graphics.

The only issue I have with the PC port is with the keyboard movement buffer.  The keyboard movement buffer will buffer up to eight keystrokes if you hold down a directional key.  At the 4.77MHz speed, however, the keyboard movement buffer will always store up to four to five presses of a directional key if you hold the key down.  On AT-class machines you can terminate the buffered movement keys by pressing the space bar, but that does not work at the 4.77MHz speed.

How to Destroy a Great Game Series - Eye of the Beholder

SSI will forever have a place in the hearts of computer RPG fans for bringing the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ruleset to personal computers, beginning in the form of the Gold Box games.  The Gold Box engine was originally designed for the Commodore 64, and its top-down tactical turn based combat was one approach to interacting with a game world, other approaches existed.  The game Dungeon Master was very popular in the late 1980s on the Atari ST and Amiga.  Its real-time first person 3D perspective was innovative, even if you could only turn 90 degrees.  A port of this popular game to the IBM PC platform was slow in coming, so SSI commissioned Westwood Studios to make a game in the same style using the AD&D license it had.

Dungeon Master, the original 1st Person Dungeon Crawler

Eye of the Beholder, of course they didn't copy everything about Dungeon Master, as you can see

The result was Eye of the Beholder, which was slightly simplified or streamlined compared with its inspiration.  One feature that EOB had over DM was that the player could create four player characters from scratch, adjust (or max out) their stats, and choose their character class.  The graphics supported 256-color MCGA/VGA, an improvement over the 16 colors of DM.  The sound of EOB was fairly simple, supporting the PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice chip or the Adlib.

This game was all about slaying monsters, solving puzzles and trying to avoid traps.  Since fights occurred in real time, fast maneuvers became important, especially with tough enemies.  You can attack enemies on their flanks, but they can attack yours as well.  Being surrounded meant that you could not move and unless you killed your enemies quickly, you were doomed.  Only the front rows could attack with melee weapons, the second and third rows could only use thrown weapons or spells.  Since this was a first person perspective game, all characters could only attack one way.  Automapping was not a feature in the original DOS version, but was available in some of the later ports.  Like DM, the EOB series required the player to find food for the party to eat, either in the form of rations or with a Create Food spell.

You will encounter many of these in your travels

The style of the game meant that the actual implementation of the AD&D, 2nd Edition system was simplified. Classes were basic, but the game engine imposed limits on the more unusual classes like the Bard and the Druid.  Item manipulation on the main window required the use of a mouse, just like DM.  Spells were generally limited to attack, defense and healing spells.  Magical items concentrated heavily on weapons, armor and wands.  Attribute bonuses, saving throws, THAC0 and Armor Class were all present. Alignments were generally not important to the game.  Your party is good, the monsters you fight are evil, and that is as morally complex as it gets.

This being 1990, and not 1987, players expected a bit more than to just read the manual and then thrust themselves into the game.  There was an opening cinematic outlining the plot and music (until you entered the game).  The plot was thin, even by 1990's standards, but if people wanted a good plot in a computer RPG, they would play Ultima VI.  The various levels of the dungeon had different designs, from the red brick and slime of the sewers to the stone work of the dwarven levels and the onyx designs of the drow.  Sound effects were especially important, as the various noises could tell you how close enemies were.  There was a special portal system to allow your party to warp to various levels in the dungeon.

Drow architecture, ornate yet oppressive

The game was a big success, and successes equal sequels.  The next game in the series, 1991's Eye of the Beholder II : The Legend of Darkmoon, used the exact same engine but made several improvements to the gameplay. The opening cinematic was pretty spectacular when people first saw it.  Outdoor areas were added, and the game was far larger than its precessor.  There was an ending cinematic, which was sadly absent from the MS-DOS version of Eye of the Beholder.  The monsters were more varied and more devious.  The game was more difficult and could at times be cruel to the player.  Items were not quite as nice as the first game.

From the EOB2 Intro : Look into my eyes, you will accept my quest!

The starting level for characters began just about where EOB left off.  Westwood Studios took inspiration from the Gold Box games and allowed you to import your characters from EOB.  Imported characters retained virtually all of their equipment, unlike the Gold Box games which generally found a way to nerf your characters almost every time you imported them from the previous game.  Even with your high-powered and over-developed characters from the first game, it was still hardly a cakewalk.  Perhaps due to the increase in difficulty, the game offered multiple save slots whereas the original game only supported one save.

Do you really have a choice?

Even without support for digitized sound, the second game was successful and improved on the weaknesses of the first game without alienating the fans of the first.  Both games ran pretty well on modest (386SX) hardware, and did not require EMS other types of exotic memory management.  For 1991, this was acceptable.

Priestly discipline at Temple Darkmoon

Dungeon Master was finally ported to the MS-DOS platform in 1992, and it was starting to look really creaky as it was the same game people had played on their ST and Amiga in 1987 and 1988.  Its Expansion Pack, Chaos Strikes Back, was never released for MS-DOS.  However, with 1993's Eye of the Beholder III : Assault on Myth Drannor, everything took a turn for the worse, a really bad turn.  Playing the port of Dungeon Master, going back to go through EOB 1 & 2 again or trying Ultima Underworld suddenly seemed very attractive

Westwood Studios was not involved in the development of EOB3.  Instead they used the engine to make the well-regarded game Lands of Lore : The Throne of Chaos.  SSI chiefly wanted to add digitized sound support to the EOB engine.  To do that, they hired John Miles, later famous for his middleware Miles Sound Drivers, to revise the engine.  The original EOB1/2 engine was strictly meant for real mode and 640KB of RAM.  Instead of just requiring EMS, which would have solved the problem of storage for sound samples, Miles rewrote the engine, called AESOP, to use the 16-bit protected CPU mode.

From the EOB3 Intro : Seriously, would you accept a quest from this guy?

16-bit protected mode was supported by the 286 and above processors.  By contrast, DOOM used a 32-bit protected mode and only worked on a 386 or better CPU.  By the time the game was released in 1993, nobody cared about the 286 and SSI did not even state that the game worked with a 286 on the box.  The engine's performance on anything but high end hardware was dreadful.  There is a patch to convert the game to use a 32-bit version of the engine, but it has issues with sound stuttering with real hardware and current versions of DOSBox, (it works in DOSBox 0.73) but apparently plays more smoothly than the original 16-bit engine.  Regardless of engine, loading a save game takes far longer than it should especially compared to EOB 1 or 2.

EOB 1 and 2 shared a connected plot.  EOB had no connection to the previous games other than it occurs after your party returns victorious from Darkmoon.  The plot is not particularly developed in the game, and the story in the manual has, at best, only a thematic connection to the game's plot.  The opening cinematic for EOB3 is nowhere near as impressive as EOB2's was.

The digitized sound that SSI and Miles were so keen to incorporate into the game detracts from the immersion instead of adding to it.  The ghosts in the opening level and the undead warriors in the mausoleum make machine-like noises.  The sound is extremely loud, usually unpleasant and it never seems to stop.  Turn down your speakers or your significant other will make you turn them down or order you to put on your headphones.  On lower end machines, the game will pause at times for the sound samples to load off the hard disk and into memory.  Playing with the digitized sound on on these machines can make for a really choppy playing experience.  In addition to FM music, the Roland MT-32 and compatibles is also supported, but outside the introduction music is heard so infrequently in the game that it does not really add to the game.

Eye of the Beholder : Lumberjacking Simulator

The greatest innovation this game could boast is the All-Attack Button, which let all party members selected attack at the same time.  There are some new portraits for your characters this time around.  Characters with polearms could attack from the second row, but that is it for the positive innovations.

The difficulty in this game was all over the map.  The first level of the mausoleum, which is usually the second level you encounter in the game, is almost certainly the hardest level in the game.  Most of the rest of the game is comparatively easy, even the final level.  There is a very difficult part just before you meet the Lich, however.  Other than that, the game is easier than its predecessor.  The Lich himself, who is supposedly the main antagonist in the game, is a pushover.  The game is (eventually) generous with items, but your mage will have a difficult time gaining the levels needed to memorize all the high level spells in the game.

These guys will make you wet your pants, but they are the third monster you encounter in the game

The opening level in the graveyard is extremely tedious due to all the time you spend hacking away at trees to find hidden alcoves and eventually the exit to the forest path to Myth Drannor.  Its also almost an entirely open space, and with no automap it is difficult to figure out where you are and where you need to go.  Import axes with your characters from Darkmoon.  As a result of EOB3, SSI declined to make more games in the series and it is now fondly remembered by its fans as the last of the great games from SSI's AD&D license.  It did release a tool called Dungeon Hack to allow players to make their own levels using the EOB engine, but it was not as successful as the similarly featured Gold Box engine tool Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures.  SSI would make more AD&D games in the first person format, but none of them garnered the critical acclaim or sales figures of the Gold Box or the first two Eye of the Beholder games.  Westwood Studios would go on to make Dune 2 and the Command and Conquer series.  FTL only made one more Dungeon Master game before going out of business.

The 64M GB Smart Card - Diamond in the Rough for your Game Boy

Update 10/15/17 : This device is on the list of risky, dangerous and flawed products for your retro consoles : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2017/08/flawed-risky-and-dangerous-devices-for.html  Don't buy, don't use, spend the extra money for a properly designed flash cart.  I threw mine away.

Update 12/29/15 : This device is almost totally obsolete compared to the EverDrive GB.  Read my review of the EverDrive GB here : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-everdrive-gb-game-boy-and-game-boy.html

Some years ago, I felt my Game Boy Advance SP (backlit) was not receiving the 8-bit love it deserved.  Tired of chasing down all the games I wanted to play on a real Game Boy, I decided to purchase a Game Boy flash cart.  The days of the Game Boy were long past in 2010, and handheld systems get precious attention from multi-cart designers.  The old devices from Bung and others had not been manufactued in a very long time, and who wants to deal with parallel port programmable devices in the 21st Century?  Nintendo manufactured an official flash cart called the Nintendo Power GB Memory Cartridge, but it only supported a select number of original Game Boy games, required a special commercial burner, and only had 1MB for ROM and 128KB for SRAM.

Fortunately, while interest in Game Boy games is fairly low, interest in Game Boy sound is high.  Chiptune music has become more and more popular, and the Game Boy's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is very similar to the NES's APU.  However, a Game Boy is portable, it can be brought to a party, a club or a rave and be controlled with the buttons on its face and run off batteries.  A NES requires a gamepad and a monitor screen of some kind, its not very portable and requires a free wall socket.  While you can make music on a laptop, its not very exciting to bring a laptop to a rave and emulation does not have the allure of real hardware.

A ROM program called Little Sound Dj (LSDJ) was developed to allow music programmers easy access to the Game Boy.  There was a need for a cart to store the music that would be played on the Game Boy at these parties and recording sessions, so a new breed of flash carts became available.  One of the most common ones, and one I purchased, is the following : http://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/usb-64m-smart-card

You can also purchase it here : http://www.nonelectronics.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=112&zenid=b54fe49ab9c28ca36063e603674744bc

At $40.00, the price is very reasonable and 64 Megabits / 8 Megabytes means that the cart can hold two of the largest Game Boy Color games.  There is also a 32 Mbit /4MB version.  It also has 1Mbit / 128 KB of SRAM.  It has a mini-USB port, no external programmer is required.  It will not work with Game Boy Advance games.

That 8MB is divided into two 4MB pages.  ROMs can be stored on either page.  When you insert the cartridge, the contents of the first ROM page is always displayed.  To get to the second ROM page, you must quickly turn off and then turn back on your Game Boy.  Game Boy Color should not be on the same page as regular monochrome Game Boy games, glitching will result otherwise.  The first thing you see after the Nintendo scroll is the menu (unless only one game is in the ROM page).  The menu uses the name in the game's header, not the filename of your ROM.  Some Game Boy and Game Boy Color games use a Japanese name even though the language of the game is English.

The cartridge is a cheap Chinese-manufactured device, but its essentially the only device around.  It does not fit in a Game Boy Advance SP slot quite as nicely as a real licensed cart, you need to listen and feel for the "click".  It sucks your Game Boy's batteries much faster than real cartridges, even Game Boy Advance games.  It backs up SRAM via a coin cell battery.  Writing to the card is slow, about 3.5 minutes for one 4MB page.  Each page must be written to separately, and writing a new game or games to the page will erase all the old games (because its flash memory).  A single game like Shantae or Dragon Warrior III can use one whole 4MB page.  Multiple games in a ROM page can use no more than 3.75MB because the menu for the page is stored in the last 32KB of the ROM page.  Usually that means that no more than three Game Boy Color games can be fit in a single page, because almost all Game Boy Color games are at least 1MB.

Game Boy (B&W) games range in size from 32KB to 1MB.  Like the NES, the first games released for the Game Boy fit inside the CPU's addressing space and did not require any additional hardware inside the cartridge.  However, almost immediately it was understood that 32KB (the limit of the CPU's addressing capabilities) was simply not going to be enough for games that aspired to something better than first generation NES games.   However, Nintendo kept much stricter controls on mapper hardware than on the NES, which had dozens of different mappers.  Nintendo in the early days of the Game Boy used two "mappers" called MBC 1 and MBC2 (Memory Bank Controller).  All licensed third party companies were required to use these two mappers (if their game was larger than 32KB) and did not use their own custom hardware except in a very limited way.

MCB1 could support 2MB of ROM with 8KB of SRAM or 512KB of ROM with 32KB of SRAM.  Games in the US were released with up to 512KB ROM with 8KB Battery Backed SRAM .  MBC2  games used 256KB ROMs with 512 nybbles of Battery Backed SRAM integrated into the MBC chip.  Much, much later, when the first Pokemon games were released, they used the MBC3 with support for 2MB of ROM and 32KB SRAM.  Additionally, the MBC3 also included a battery backed real time clock chip driven by an external oscillator.

For the Game Boy Color, Nintendo made a MBC5 chip that was included in virtually every Game Boy Color game.  This chip could support up to 8MB of ROM (no US game ever required more than 4MB) and 128KB of Battery Backed SRAM.  It could also support a rumble feature, but not a real time clock chip.  Only Game Boy Color games requiring a real time clock used MBC3.

The flash cart will work in a Super Game Boy or the GameCube Game Boy Player.  In the Super Game Boy, any game with Super Game Boy features will work fine if it is the only game in the page.  If it is not, then you must start the game from the menu, then reset the game to utilize the Super Game Boy features.  Otherwise, the Super Game Boy will play the game as if it were a regular Game Boy game.   It may be unreliable in a Game Boy Pocket due to the power draw, I would find the highest rated mA AAA batteries you can find if you used it in one.

While many, many games work correctly on this cartridge, quite a few will not.  Some write to the flash cart's registers and screw things up.  Some games written for MBC1-MBC3 hardware will sometimes fail to work properly or at all because they use a feature which does not work or works differently on an MBC5.  The only solution is to patch your ROM.  Virtually every game that has had problems reported on the NESDEV forum has a fix.  Most of them you can find here : http://thegaminguniverse.org/ninjagaiden4/mottzilla/ and some you can find in this thread : http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=5804.  According to this, the first revision of the 32MB carts had an functional MBC1 emulation mode : http://blog.gg8.se/gameboyprojects/week09/EMS_FAQ.txt

When I termed this flash cart to be a diamond in the rough, the main issue is the stock flashing program.  Engrish aside, the chief problem with the program as it runs on the Game Boy is that it only allows for one game to save at a time!  So if you play The Legend of Zelda : Link's Awakening, save and do not download your save to your PC, when the next game you play is Metroid II : Return of Samus, you will have wiped out your Zelda save.  Most Game Boy games only use 8KB to save the game and the cart has 128KB of SRAM available.  A NESDEV user named Mottzilla made a custom version of the PC loader that will allow for multiple save games on the cart.  It is a must-download, find it here : http://thegaminguniverse.org/ninjagaiden4/mottzilla/

With his addon to the flasher program, each game with save features has an 8KB slot in the SRAM reserved for it.  (MBC2 games still take 8KB even though they only save 256 bytes).  One 32KB game save (for games like Pokemon) is supported, so you can have up to 16 or 12 save files in the SRAM at any one time.  You can see which games currently have saves and you can delete saves from the flash cart's menu.  However, the SRAM is saved between the two ROM pages, so it is generally best to use one ROM page for games with save features and the other ROM page for games that do not save.

There are a few weird games that will never work with this cart.  Some Japanese games used more exotic mapping hardware like the HuC-1 and HuC-3, which supported an infrared sensor for wireless communication.  None were released in the US or Europe except for a Pokemon clone called Robopon - Sun Version, which used the HuC-3 and came in an oversized black cartridge.  It has an infrared port for commications with other Robopon carts.  Uniquely, it has the capabilities to make simple sounds from the cartridge when the cartridge is not in use.  It has a speaker and an extra (user replaceable) battery for this function in addition to the battery backed internal RAM.  Finally, it has a real time clock.  Kirby's Tilt 'N Tumble used the MBC7 due to its motion sensor.  The Game Boy Camera is another piece of unique hardware that includes a ROM which functions like a game cartridge.  Finally, there is an official ROM of Mortal Kombat 1 & 2 which uses MCB1 in an odd way to support its 1MB size, just use the standalone versions of the games instead.  Unlicensed games, such as those released by Sachen and Wisdom Tree, use their own custom mapper and are not playable with this flash cart..

Those of us who love Game Boy games have been yearning for years for a proper Game Boy flash cart like the PowerPak.  One that accepts microSD cards, does not suck down batteries, properly supports all four major MBCs and a real time clock, and whose menu hardware can be shut off from the system upon game loading.  It does not exist as of yet (but Gamegear carts do, strangely), so at the moment we are stuck with this device, which is much better than nothing.

The Sound Blaster 2.0 and the C/MS Upgrade

I decided to make this post to gather all the known, accurate and current information about the C/MS Upgrade for the 2.0.  This post supersedes anything I have said in prior blog posts.  As you should know, Creative Labs' first PC sound card of any note was the Creative Music System card (C/MS), later re-marketed as the Creative Game Blaster.  This card was based off two sound chips CL labeled as CMS-301, but were actually Phillips SAA-1099s.  The C/MS card was not a great seller, and even the name change failed to dislodge the Ad Lib card from its increasingly dominant position in the affordable PC sound card market.  Thus Creative came up with the "killer card", the Sound Blaster.  This card combined the full functionality of the Ad Lib card with almost all of the functionality (detection chip was eliminated) of the Game Blaster card and more.

While the Sound Blaster, with its joystick/midi port and digital sound processor began to sell well, the design was definitely in the past with lots of TTL logic chips.  The card was originally marketed as a "stereo" card, but the only thing stereo about it was the Game Blaster chips.  In the first production runs, the two Game Blaster chips, marked with a CMS-301 sticker were soldered onto the motherboard (so were the Ad Lib chips, marked FM1312 and FM1314).  However, almost nobody really cared about Game Blaster when the Adlib was also present, and virtually all games that supported the Game Blaster also supported the Adlib, so for the 1.5 version of the Sound Blaster, the chips were not installed by default.  The two empty sockets could be populated with chips purchased from Creative Labs fr the low, low price of $29.95.

After CL released its new flagship product, the Sound Blaster Pro, it redesigned the original Sound Blaster as a budget card and released it in late 1991.  CL enhanced the new card's capabilities by allowing it to record up to 44.1kHz, but it was still a mono card.  The C/MS chips were left off the board again, but this time there was a third empty socket.  A special version of the upgrade was required from CL, one not really well-identified in the catalog accompanying the card.  The third chip had a sticker marking it as 0048013500, and underneath it was a pre-programmed PAL (Programmable Array Logic) chip.  (A PAL16L8 chip with the security fuse blown so it could not be dumped).  Eventually, CL stopped advertising the upgrade completely, and without the PAL chip the CMS functionality would not work even with the Phillips chips were installed.  Given the rarity of boards with the upgrade found in the wild and the lack of advertising, few upgrade kits must have been sold.

However, in 2012, a long-time member of the Vintage Computer Forum named Chuck(G) devised a method to determine the way in which common PALs were programmed.  He analyzed the PAL on an officially upgraded Sound Blaster 2.0 and released the instructions to replicate the programmed logic on a GAL (Generic Array Logic) chip.  Unlike PALs, GALs can be reprogrammed and do not require expensive and hard to obtain hardware to program.  The GAL required is a GAL16V8 and the file to program the chip can be found here : http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/entry.php?328-Cloning-a-HAL-PAL-Part-11.  The programmed chip is inserted in the only empty socket that can fit it, the one just above the FM1312 /YM-3812 chip.  However, in almost one year following the first successful report of a GAL SB 2.0 CMS upgrade, not all boards have worked with the upgrade.  Below I try to identify each board known whether or not to work with the upgrade.

Board Types :

The earliest known boards are CT-1350B boards marked with a rev 2, 3 or 4 and do not have "SOUND BLASTER" silkscreened.  Here is a photo of a rev. 3 board :

And here is a rev. 4 board :

Between the rev 2 and 3 and the rev 4 and later boards, there is one obvious difference.  The rev 4 added a DMACTL jumper.  This jumper will disable the DMA capabilities of the Sound Blaster, virtually eliminating its ability to reproduce digitized sound.  However, and it may not be truly visible in the photo, but both share a CT1336 Bus Interface Chip and a CT1351 DSP chip, version v2.01.  You can identify the DSP chip by this silkscreened text on the chip "CT1351V201", with the "V201" indicating the version number.

These boards have been proven time and time again to work with the CMS upgrade, whether a GAL or PAL.  Apparently there is no difference between Lattice Semiconductor and National Semiconductor GALs. Apparently SGS Thompson GALs do not work.

Later boards look like this :

Now the words "SOUND BLASTER" are next to the CT1350B.  This board's revision can be determined by the six digit number silkscreened to the lower left of the address jumpers.  The above board is a 049151 and it works with the upgrade.  059316 and 069328 are also known to exist and shown below :

Note the new CT1336A and DSP v2.02 on these boards.  The 059316 also has small surface mounted versions of the YM3812 and Y3014 chips and a 1993 copyright date silkscreened onto the board.  The last four digits refer to the design date of the revision in year-week format.  The 059316 and 069328  are the first boards confirmed not to work with the CMS upgrade, regardless of whether a CL PAL or a modern-programmed GAL is used.  However, the 049151 is not guaranteed to work, as can be seen here : 

It seems that the first two digits, 04, 05 or 06, refer to a revision number.  There are some mysteries remaining.  For example, will either one of these boards work :

The first is a 049151 with a v2.02DSP and a CT1336 chip, the second one is identical except for the word "SOUND MACHINE".  

After further testing, it has been determined that that the DSP version does not matter, the CT1336 version does.  If your card has a v2.01 DSP or v2.02 DSP, the upgrade will work.  If your card has a CT1336 Bus Interface Chip, the upgrade will work.  On the other hand, if your card has a CT1336A Bus Interface Chip, the upgrade will not work!  Since v2.02 DSPs tend to be paired with CT1336A chips, be very careful to check the bus interface chip before you buy.  Make sure your seller shows you a photo of the exact card you will receive.  

2019 Update

In the past year or so, one or two people found a Sound Blaster 2.0 card with an original Creative PAL, the two Creative-marked CMS-301/SAA-1099P chips and a CT1336A Bus Interface Chip, and the Game Blaster functionality worked!  Apparently CL revised the programming for the PAL to work with the CT1336A chip at some point, presumably when they started manufacturing CT1336A chips.  That way, when a customer called with an upgrade request, one PAL would work for all SB 2.0 cards.  This newer PAL has been reversed engineered and can be purchased as a GAL, see here for details : https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30242&view=unread#p726379

Ultima VII on Real Hardware

Ultima VII - The Black Gate is, in my opinion and in many others, the greatest Computer Role Playing Game of the first half of the 1990s.  But like many Origin games (Wing Commander I & II) of this time period, it is extremely sensitive to hardware speed.  It runs faster than the ideal on my 486DX2/66 (the characters move like they are on speed).

While on my 486DX/2 66 Wing Commander I & II can be tamed by disabling the internal cache, it doesn't work with Ultima VII.  The game re-enables the internal cache in my machine if I disable it beforehand either with a software utility like ICD.EXE or through the BIOS option.  Slowing the RAM speed in the BIOS does nothing substantial to slow down the game.  The turbo button will show real slowdown, but the slowdown is a little too great and the game runs at a suboptimal speed.  Its close to a 386DX40.  Its like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, too hot and too cold are easy, but getting the speed "just right" is not easy.  Pentium computers will begin to run Ultima VII insanely fast.  The game's sequel, Serpent Isle, runs on an updated version of the Ultima VII engine.  Serpent Isle has a frame limiter to prevent the action from becoming sickeningly fast, however a powerful machine can still make it play faster than it should.

The ideal system to play Ultima VII on is a 486DX33 with 4MB of RAM, so I have been told.  Scorpia made the claim in Computer Gaming World.  Apparently this is indicated somewhere on or in the game's packaging, but I have reviewed all the items included in the box and I see no such assertion.  It may be on the system requirements label on the underside of the box cover.  Like most games, the more things that are happening on the screen, the slower the resulting gameplay.

The best advice I have for people with a 486DX2/66 is to use the jumpers to lower the FSB speed from 33 to 20MHz.  This will turn your CPU into a 486DX2/40, a CPU that never existed in the wild.  However, it will produce a correct balance of speed, very close to the ideal.

The next issue is the Voodoo Memory Manager.  Ultima VII and Serpent Isle use a custom memory manager that is wholly incompatible with all expanded memory managers, including EMM386, QEMM, CEMM, you name it.  All these drivers put the CPU into Virtual 8086 mode, whereas Ultima VII requires true Real Mode for its voodoo memory manager (which the game puts into the so-called "Unreal Mode") to work.  Origin specifically informs the user that it used this memory manager to avoid the problems with EMS, but it does not indicate what those problems were.  My guess is that the performance hit from using EMS was too much for the game to handle.  Ultima VII is also incompatible with Windows for the same reason; it must be run in DOS unless you use the unofficial U7WIN9X patch (for Windows 95-ME).

The problem with these games' EMM386 compatibility is that EMM386 provides Upper Memory Blocks.  Device drivers, such as those for the mouse, CD-ROM and disk cache, can load in UMB to save precious conventional memory.  Ultima VII and especially Serpent Isle require lots of conventional memory free, up to approximately 585K free for Serpent Isle with all sound options.  No EMM386, no guarantee of UMB.  While CTMOUSE is small enough (3K) that it can be loaded without a substantial impact on the conventional RAM, SMARTDRV and MSCDEX require about 25K a piece.  Without UMBs its virtually impossible to load a normal DOS configuration.  The official solution was to create a barebones boot disk.

It may be possible to create UMBs in systems without loading EMM386.  In Pentium and later systems, UMBPCI works with proper PCI implementations.  In 386 and 486 systems, you can try HIRAM, URAM (1988), RDOSUMB or LastByte Memory Manager may also work, depending on whether the software supports the chipset and its use of shadowing memory.  You will probably not get as many UMBs as you would with EMM386 (forget B000-B7FF), but if it works for you, it will avoid having to specially boot your system for these games.

The final issue is that this game will thrash a hard drive like Simon Legree.  To avoid those annoying short (or not so short) pauses as the game scrolls the screen, the standard 16-bit IDE controller is not going to cut it.  Fortunately there are many options to speed up disk access.  On the extreme end of the scale, if you have 32MB of RAM, consider creating a RAM drive with the DOS utility RAMDRIVE.  A full install of Ultima VII + Forge of Virtue is 19.5MB without savegames.  Serpent Isle and The Silver Seed runs to 22.5MB.  Thus your RAMDISK needs to be about 1.5MB larger than the install size.  Just remember to copy the game back to your system.

Other improvements include SCSI, whether IDE, VLB or PCI; VLB or PCI IDE, and the use of fast hard drives and compact flash cards (with IDE or rare SCSI adapter).  SMARTDRV, a disk caching program, will also assist with slower hard drives (i.e. hard drives you would actually have used at the time).

Ultima VII does not really care too much about the VGA card used, but I would recommend a Tseng ET4000AX if you are forced to use an ISA card, otherwise use a PCI or VLB card.  It only supports Adlib & Sound Blaster & Roland MT-32 (and compatibles) for music and sound effects.  Roland is obviously the best choice, the game uses stereo panning for sound effects and loads custom patches.  Adlib and Sound Blaster rely entirely on FM synthesis for music and sound effects.  Voice samples (for the Guardian in the intro and occasionally in-game) require a Sound Blaster or Sound Blaster Pro or compatibles.

Roland MPU-401 : The Vintage Computing Part that Simply Works

I have, and have owned lots of vintage PC items since 2006.  I used to have an Apple II Platinum with dual Mockingboards, that was quite the system.  I have an Atari 800 that works, but I have no software for it.  I also have had lots of PC compatible cards and components.  I have owned one of every major iteration of the 3dfx Voodoo cards except the Voodoo 2 (and I had one of those back in the day).  At one time I possessed a representative of every major ISA Sound Blaster.  I currently possess a Game Blaster complete in box with all manuals, and while that is an exceptionally rare card, it is not what I consider the highlight of my collection.  The quality of the music for the card or its chips is often third-rate (behind MT-32 and Adlib).  I have the true IBM VGA 8-bit card, and while it is also extremely rare its not especially impressive in what it can do.  I have a Gravis Ultrasound ACE, but from what I hear the full Ultrasound is not particularly incompatible with the Adlib or Sound Blaster, so its Adlib port disabling feature is not a great selling point.  The 286 Express Tandy 1000/SX accelerator is also quite a find, but it can overheat with software.  The ADP-50L is a fine 16-to-8 bit IDE card, but it has a very long bootup screen.

Perhaps most prized item in my possession is my Roland MPU-401 MIDI Processing Unit.  Equally as important is the interface card that came with it, the MIF-IPC-A.  The MPU-401 is essentially a computer in its own right, with a CPU, ROM, RAM and a bus interface.  The external unit contains all the intelligent circuitry and can be connected to an Apple II, a Commodore 64, an MSX, Sharp X1, a Fujitsu FM7 or an NEC PC-88 or PC-98 machine in addition to a PC compatible.  All you need is the appropriate adapter card or cartridge.  The external unit connects to the interface card/cartridge through a DB-25 male/male cable.  In my cable, pins 7, 8, 19, 20 and 21 are not connected and pins 13 & 25 are tied together (both GND).

Just as important, it came with all documentation and manuals.  It had the Roland MPU-401 Technical Interface Manual, the MPU-401 Booklet and the sheet for the MIF-IPC(-A) with the schematic on the back.  Finally, the equipment and manuals are in beautiful shape.  It didn't come with the box as I recall.  Later a friend of mine donated a second MPU-401 to me, but I don't have a second interface card for it.

What is the most important thing about this interface is what it represented.  The principal function of this interface was to connect to a Roland MT-32 or CM-32L (have both of them).  Unlike the Game Blaster, when a game supported the MT-32, the game almost always sounded best on it (not too hard when the competition was the Adlib Music Synthesizer Card and to a lesser extent the Game Blaster).  Roland LA Synthesis had a very long reign in the PC sound realm, from 1988 to 1992 when General MIDI devices began taking over.

The interface card provides two I/O ports to the interface at I/O 330 & 331.  By its design, it cannot use I/O 332-337 because pins A1 & A2 are unconnected  The traces next to the comparator allow it to be put virtually anywhere in the PC's 10-bit address space.  It can also use any interrupt request available on the ISA bus, but to use an IRQ other than the default 2/9, you also have to cut a trace.  Essentially the card is a traffic cop and a buffer for the 8 data bits and a few other signals.  It also supplies an Interrupt Request when the MPU-401 needs to assert an interrupt. The card uses a DB-25 female connector and bracket, four 74LS TTL logic chips and decoupling capacitors, one resistor and one electrolytic capacitor.  The card is as simple as you get and can easily be recreated.  You can find the schematic in my Tutorial : How to Get the Roland MT-32 working with DOS Games.  Without it, the complex interface unit is useless.

The card can be used in every PC compatible system, including PCs, XTs, ATs, Tandy 1000s and others.  The original MIF-IPC was a more complex card but has issues working in AT-class machines.  While the MPU-IPC and MPU-IPC-T can also work with everything, the interface is on the card, and if lost the breakout box is useless.  The last in the series, the MPU-401AT is not guaranteed to work in something less advanced than an AT system.  However, it was released in 1994 when the XT class machines were no longer a strong market segment, so it may not have been tested in them.  It is an 8-bit card, and probably will work without trouble in standard and near-standard (Tandy 1000) PCs.  However, it, like the MPU-401 SCC-1 and LAPC-I card go for very high prices when they are auctioned off on ebay.  MPU-IPC and MPU-IPC-Ts are often auctioned off incomplete.  In those cases, the card is important and the external MIDI IN and OUT ports can be recreated easily.

The MPU-401, MPU-IPC, MPU-IMC, MPU-IPC-T and LAPC-I all provide two MIDI OUTs.  Thus you can control a Roland MT-32 and a Roland SC-55 with one of these devices and not have to use a MIDI THRU, which can add latency and eventually lead to loss of data integrity depending on how many modules are in the Thru chain.  In practice, the first module in a MIDI THRU loop will be fine.

In my experience, the interface cards are much more difficult to find than the external interface.  If you find one, some things to note :

On the card itself, the traces by the silkscreened I/O and Int boxes should be at A7 & A& and 2/9, respectively.  If the unlikely event they are not, then you will need to connect them with wire and obliterate any other traces made.  Otherwise the card will not be at the ideal settings and your games will not work with it unless they have an option to manually set the I/O and IRQ values.

The external interface unit has a cover secured by four Phillips screws.  You should remove them.  Inside, depending on the age of the board, you may or may not have an EPROM/ROM.  Versions 1.2A, 1.2B, 1.3, 1.4, 1.4A, 1.4B, 1.5 and 1.5A exist.  Version 1.5A is the version found in the MPU-IPC, MPU-IMC, MPU-IPC-T and LAPC-I, so that is the version you should look for.  If the CPU inside is a HD6801VOB55P, then the ROM is embedded in the chip.  Serial numbers above 588000 are safe.  Look on the underneath of the box to find it.  You can find the version number, if not identified by an EPROM sticker, with a program called mputhru.  In the end, I am uncertain if it makes any difference what the ROM version is, at least if you have a 1.3 or above.

Second, inside the box there is a silkscreened "ADRS" with four positions numbered 1-4.  This must not be modified in order for your unit to work with the MIF-IPC-A or at I/O 330-331.  If it is, you must set it back to #1 with a jumper wire.  This was there to allow a single MIF-IPC and other cards to control up to four external interfaces.  It will not work with the MIF-IPC-A, with the MIF-IPC-A only address #1 will be valid.  You need an original IF-MIDI/IBM or MIF-IPC (functionally identical) card to get this to work.  Here is how the address lines were configured on the IF-MIDI/IBM and MIF-IPC :

A0 - 0 or 1 (selects command/data or status port)
A1 - 0 or 1
A2 - 0 or 1
A3 - 0 or 1 (Unconnected at MPU-401)
A4 - 1
A5 - 1
A6 - 0
A7 - 0
A8 - 1
A9 - 1

The MPU-IPC-A connects the lines as follows :

A0 - 0 or 1 (selects command/data or status port)
A1 - 0 (Not connected to MPU-401)
A2 - 0 (Not connected to MPU-401)
A3 - 0
A4 - 1
A5 - 1
A6 - 0
A7 - 0
A8 - 1
A9 - 1

For all cards, the traces can be cut and a jumper block can be soldered on to select 0 or 1 for A4-A9, which gives 64 choices, not all of them would work.

As I understand the function of the LS138 in the MPU-401 box, it is responsive to ISA A1 and A2. Typically, they are both 0 and the third '138 input is always 0, only Y0 will be active (low). If A1 or A2 become 1, then the MPU-401 should be unresponsive. You could control up to four MPU-401 boxes in software just by setting the right address. A1 = 1, A2 = 0, I/O 332-333; A1 = 0, A2 = 1, I/O 334-335; A1 = 1, A2 = 1, I/O 336-337.

The ADRS block in the MPU-401 should allow you to rearrange the addressing of the 138 with only cutting a trace and installing a jumper block or wire. I have never done this and see no reason to do it, but it is definitely possible, but only with the older boards.  These boards have flaky compatibility in an IBM AT or systems with faster speeds, but the MIF-IPC-A is sold in any system with an ISA slot, including Tandy 1000s.

Fascinatingly, this unit, which was released around 1984, combined with the MIF-IPC-A card released in 1986, functioned perfectly as a MIDI interface for well over fifteen years after it was released.  I am positive that driver support exists for it in every version of Windows from 3.0 with multimedia extensions to Windows XP.  It has no hanging note bugs and any game or software requiring Normal, a.k.a. Intelligent MPU-401 features will work with it.

Unlike virtually every other contemporary sound card, the Roland MPU-401 + MT-32 or SC-55 never requires any kind of software driver to use with games or programs.  Drivers always accompany the software or can be found as patches (floppy versions of LOOM, Secret of Monkey Island & Day of the Tentacle).  Usually the same can be said for the Adlib, Game Blaster and Sound Blasters, but some games do require drivers supplied on the card's installation disks to work.  Once you get to the Sound Blaster Pros and 16s or your Pro Audio Spectrums and your Gravis Ultrasounds, you will need your installation disks.

Unknown to me for the longest time, but there was secretly trouble in this paradise.  One game that required MPU-401 was It Came from the Desert.  That game would simply not work with the MT-32 option in my 486 with the MPU-401 and MIF-IPC-A.  I put it down to marginal code which did not like my system and I did not think of it again for a long time.  However, eventually I found there were problems in trying to use the MIDI IN of the MPU-401.  I eventually isolated the issue to the 74LS04 Hex Inverter on my MIF-IPC-A.  The interrupt line goes though that IC and was not being raised by the system, thus breaking many MIDI recording programs and It Came from the Desert.  I replaced that IC and everything worked thereafter, including that Cinemaware game. Roland did not use all the inputs (6) on the hex inverter and left the unused inputs floating.  Apparently this is a bad thing for the life of the chip, and all the unused inputs (pins 1, 11 & 13) should be tied to ground (pin 7) .