Re: Ultima 2 strength increase bug

[greathierophant@gmail.com]

For overdumped games, I have the two seemingly-uncracked Ultima I: The
First Age of Darkness disks at 147,456 bytes.  Also, three out of four
of my The Bard's Tale III: The Thief of Fate disks at 2 bytes shy of
143,360 bytes.  Getting them to work reliably is more than simply
adding or subtracting the bytes at the end.

It would be really nice to have an unhacked, fresh copy of the one-disk
version of Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness.  I believe it is only
included in the Ultima Trilogy.  Unfortunately, they didn't decide to
convert Ultima III to ProDos like Ultima I and Ultima II in the Ultima
Trilogy.

Only early copies of Ultima III should be without Mockingboard support.


It is good that Ultima III did not have a write tab.  Many copies of
Ultima and Ultima IIn did not either.  This forced people to cut their
own into their original disks or to copy them.  Ultima I, II and III
all irrevocably change the contents of any save disk.  They cannot be
restored to their pristine state once written to.  Wasteland is another
example of a game that does not have write notches and requires four
blank disks.  Ultima IV and V do not irrevocably change their disks'
contents, so they have write notches.

> All of my stuff, Ultimas included, are pristine and deprotected.
> (Protection removed/bypassed and no hacks added.)  I never played on my
> original disks so my originals are also pristine.  I'm working on
> getting all my stuff into a 'clean archive'.  But who has time?

Believe me, I would not be the only unappreciative recipient of such a
great archive.  Someday we may even modify the games so that they work
on hard drives (I, II and V already use ProDos.)