dwk3 wrote:
It seems harder and harder to find Apple Ultima related information now a days. I would like to have 100% verified original and unalterd Apple Ultima disk images for emulation because that is the "original" platform for teh series. There seems to be a pretty good selection available at the apple Asimov FTP site. But I have yet to find pristine versions of the very eary Ultimas, more specifically Akalabeth, Ultima (Original release), Ultima II (Sierra) and Ultima III (I need both the non-mocking baord version and the mocking board version). I always thought it would be useful to have something like TOSEC or some Clear MAME Pro DAT file that could verfy and properly categorize the sets of disk images. Can anybdy provide me with a good souce for this inforamation or the actual disk images themselves?
I suggest you ask this in c.s.apple2 and c.e.apple2 as well, I'm crossposting there if you'll allow.
The problem with the images you want is copy protection. There is no generally recognized file format that covers all or even most copy protected Apple disk images - except for FDI, which is very hard to create and unsupported by existing emulators.
The other alternative would be "minimally cracked" images. Of course it's hard to define what exactly is a minimal crack, but for me this would mean, no "cracked by" messages, no bug fixes, no trainers, no faster DOS etc. Although personally I prefer to at least have those few existing bug fixes included.
Another issue specifically with Akalabeth is the unwillingness of owners to aid counterfeiters by providing such images. As you will know the game is expensive enough to attract some people of that ilk.
Having said that, I do have NIB images of Ultima I (original release). I did not make them and I have no way of comparing them to an original disk, but I have no reason to believe they were intentionally altered. They work in an emulator and I wrote a small program to write them back to real floppy disks, which also work without problems.
-- Finire Dragon UDIC (Linards Ticmanis)