2:24 - OT - I need to watch your U2 video, but I thought that was the best Ultima because it had both fantasy and sci fi elements married together throughout. Ultima 2 was the first major RPG I played through as a very young kid.
Ali Baba was my first RPG, but Ultima III was my first Ultima game, which started a long love relationship in our family with the series! I've only done episodes on U2 to U4, cause U4 was almost 2 FREAKIN' hours long, and I know U5 and U6 are going to be huge. Also, I'm helping someone port U5 to the Atari 8-bit (I wrote the music engine and translated all the music he's using in it), so that'll be cool to bring up!
You're good, no worries! I didn't even know it was a thing either, but I kept poking and prodding to see what weird things I could fine, hence how I found the air lock pausing, screen saver, and the map wrap around. That one though just made me sad for a while when I found it... I felt so wrong.
This sets all my nostalgia bells ringing. Thank you so much for reviewing this absolute classic game, much appreciated. Peace, love and happy holidays from the UK.
Koronis Rift from what i remember, as i had the original, played it a lot, the different items you pick up the colours correlate to better hardware and enables you to destroy different UFO’s etc dependant on the colours you have installed. As the colour range increases, it enables you to shoot different colour ships not just the one colour. I think its a bit like, red only shoots red, but purple(red/blue) etc, if i remember it right. You can’t just shoot the ufos to kill. Its actually a well thought out game and i had many hours of fun playing it, working out what the different components were and how they interacted with each other. I did have something written down as you needed to make notes on everything but no idea where that is now. Rescue and Eidolon were also great games. Loved the video and the comedy voice overs.
Oh, I had so many notes for Koronis Rift... I noticed that too with the guns. The issue for me was that I wanted to explore and find every item, and the game gets worse and worse the more you play it, so it actively punishes my style of playing, which drives me a bit nuts.
7:30 - I imagine (but probably not real) that the Cyanuric (sp) acid is also a reference to "Cyan Engineering" that was still part of Atari when Fractalus started development.
Re: The Coco 3 version of Rescue on Fractalus. I had left a rather lengthy comment, but I don't see it now, so here is a more succinct one. The Coco 3 version is quite slow for a couple of reasons. 1) It was ported from a 6502 version in 6 weeks by a programmer (Ken Rogoway) who had never touched a 6809 CPU before. 2) It runs under a full multi-user, preemptive multi-tasking OS (OS-9), so that has some overhead. I think they chose that (rather than a direct to the metal port, which could have been much improved) as it saved them having to write a lot of low level routines (reading joysticks, disk file access, setting up graphics modes, primitive sound, etc.), allowing the port to be done so fast. The 6809 can directly translate most 6502 instructions directly, making it easy to port. But that's not using the 6809's strengths (and in fact slows it down from what a "native" port could do. Ken mentioned that he only changed about 10% of the code to take advantage of the 6809 properly. The weird colors you got (the pinks etc.) are not the proper colors. The Coco 3 had two completely different color palettes; RF/Composite out, and RGB Analog. The colors you saw are from having the game select the opposite monitor type that the computer is using; that can be changed either when first running Rescue (it prompts for RGB or not), or changing the monitor type setting in MAME/MESS. The Coco does not have a sound chip; it has a 6 bit DAC that is completely CPU driven. And they just used the primitive sound that the OS used, not taking advantage of fast IRQ driven sound samples, etc. that a lot of other Coco 3 games used, so that is the weakest part of the port. (One big mistake by Tandy - they did bring out a speech/sound pack hardware card that added a 3 voice AY sound chip plus a speech chip. But it would only run properly at the original Coco 1/2 0.895 MHz CPU speed. The Coco 3 can run at 1.78 Mhz, but the sound card stops working. Tandy never fixed or updated the card; that was a bad mistake). The joystick controls being delayed and off is ironic. The original Atari & C64 versions use digital joysticks, and the "rolling" you described is a weighted change of direction depending on how long you hold the joystick in a particular direction (basically emulating analog controls). The Coco is natively analog (64x64 resolution), but the joystick routines were directly ported from the digital 6502 versions. So Coco is doing: 1) Read analog joystick. 2) Convert that to digital. 3) Use a lookup table to convert back to a lower resolution analog, using the same method as the Atari version. Literally it should just read the analog version and be done. I have to say I like the pilot running animation (aside from speed) much better on the Coco version than the Atari versions; the Atari ones has the pilots limbs flailing all over the place so it looks like they are made of rubber. You mention an optimized version... I am the one who did that. Got about 11-12% speed increased on the stock 6809 CPU (I could go further - that gain was rewriting some routines to take advantage of 6809 rather than direct translating 6502 code). There is a further optimization for the 6309 chip (a drop in replacement chip announced in late fall 1985 and on sale by early 1986 (made by Hitachi) that improved the chip with some additional registers and instructions). The 6309 version runs about 35-40% faster than the original which is much more playable. There is another upgrade that allows the Coco 3 to run at 2.86 MHz vs. 1.78 called the GIME-X; that with a 6309 runs quite fast - I have a video on my UA-cam channel showing the 6309 versions of both running side by side). Aside from the initials on the alien uniform, I should mention that certain key sequences on some (all?) of the ports also shows a hidden message. The Coco version has a dedication to the authors's son, by typing his son's first name while the game is running. Other ports have different messages. If you want to try the 6309 version, it can be found on the Color Computer Archive, and if you download the VCC emulator it is a lot easier to set up than MESS/MAME. At the very least I would like to see you play it with the proper colors. :-)
Thank you for the detailed history behind this port! As I said when I started it, it was hard to even get this to run. I'll have to check out the VCC emulator some time, since I have had to use the CoCo3 emulator (through DOSBox since it's MS-DOS only) or MESS, neither of which seems to do a great job.
Thank you for that in depth review, I enjoyed watching it (twice)! As a side note, David Fox is featured on the box art: Dressed up as the pilot running towards you on the front & sitting in the cockpit on the back cover.. so is he rescuing himself? 😉
Glad you enjoyed it! D'oh, I wish I knew that! I didn't know who it was, hehee. Now I'm imagining an alternate dimensions of all David Fox, and it'd look like Rimmerwold from Red Dwarf... ok, maybe that's a bit too much!
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
2:24 - OT - I need to watch your U2 video, but I thought that was the best Ultima because it had both fantasy and sci fi elements married together throughout. Ultima 2 was the first major RPG I played through as a very young kid.
Ali Baba was my first RPG, but Ultima III was my first Ultima game, which started a long love relationship in our family with the series! I've only done episodes on U2 to U4, cause U4 was almost 2 FREAKIN' hours long, and I know U5 and U6 are going to be huge. Also, I'm helping someone port U5 to the Atari 8-bit (I wrote the music engine and translated all the music he's using in it), so that'll be cool to bring up!
13:45 holy cow that's sad, I never knew that! (sorry for too many comments. Love this game).
You're good, no worries! I didn't even know it was a thing either, but I kept poking and prodding to see what weird things I could fine, hence how I found the air lock pausing, screen saver, and the map wrap around. That one though just made me sad for a while when I found it... I felt so wrong.
This sets all my nostalgia bells ringing. Thank you so much for reviewing this absolute classic game, much appreciated. Peace, love and happy holidays from the UK.
You're welcome! I love sharing old gaming memories. Always up for a bit of nostalgia. Have a great day!
I played it on C64 and this was a REALLY CREEPY HORROR game! So athmospheric and scaring gameplay.. knock knock! knock!!
I would have loved this game in the 80s, I had a less powerful machine a ZX81 so I was happy with galaxians in black and white with no sound
Koronis Rift from what i remember, as i had the original, played it a lot, the different items you pick up the colours correlate to better hardware and enables you to destroy different UFO’s etc dependant on the colours you have installed.
As the colour range increases, it enables you to shoot different colour ships not just the one colour. I think its a bit like, red only shoots red, but purple(red/blue) etc, if i remember it right.
You can’t just shoot the ufos to kill.
Its actually a well thought out game and i had many hours of fun playing it, working out what the different components were and how they interacted with each other.
I did have something written down as you needed to make notes on everything but no idea where that is now.
Rescue and Eidolon were also great games.
Loved the video and the comedy voice overs.
Oh, I had so many notes for Koronis Rift... I noticed that too with the guns. The issue for me was that I wanted to explore and find every item, and the game gets worse and worse the more you play it, so it actively punishes my style of playing, which drives me a bit nuts.
7:30 - I imagine (but probably not real) that the Cyanuric (sp) acid is also a reference to "Cyan Engineering" that was still part of Atari when Fractalus started development.
Oh neat, I did NOT think of that connection at all!
Re: The Coco 3 version of Rescue on Fractalus. I had left a rather lengthy comment, but I don't see it now, so here is a more succinct one.
The Coco 3 version is quite slow for a couple of reasons. 1) It was ported from a 6502 version in 6 weeks by a programmer (Ken Rogoway) who had never touched a 6809 CPU before. 2) It runs under a full multi-user, preemptive multi-tasking OS (OS-9), so that has some overhead. I think they chose that (rather than a direct to the metal port, which could have been much improved) as it saved them having to write a lot of low level routines (reading joysticks, disk file access, setting up graphics modes, primitive sound, etc.), allowing the port to be done so fast.
The 6809 can directly translate most 6502 instructions directly, making it easy to port. But that's not using the 6809's strengths (and in fact slows it down from what a "native" port could do. Ken mentioned that he only changed about 10% of the code to take advantage of the 6809 properly.
The weird colors you got (the pinks etc.) are not the proper colors. The Coco 3 had two completely different color palettes; RF/Composite out, and RGB Analog. The colors you saw are from having the game select the opposite monitor type that the computer is using; that can be changed either when first running Rescue (it prompts for RGB or not), or changing the monitor type setting in MAME/MESS.
The Coco does not have a sound chip; it has a 6 bit DAC that is completely CPU driven. And they just used the primitive sound that the OS used, not taking advantage of fast IRQ driven sound samples, etc. that a lot of other Coco 3 games used, so that is the weakest part of the port. (One big mistake by Tandy - they did bring out a speech/sound pack hardware card that added a 3 voice AY sound chip plus a speech chip. But it would only run properly at the original Coco 1/2 0.895 MHz CPU speed. The Coco 3 can run at 1.78 Mhz, but the sound card stops working. Tandy never fixed or updated the card; that was a bad mistake).
The joystick controls being delayed and off is ironic. The original Atari & C64 versions use digital joysticks, and the "rolling" you described is a weighted change of direction depending on how long you hold the joystick in a particular direction (basically emulating analog controls). The Coco is natively analog (64x64 resolution), but the joystick routines were directly ported from the digital 6502 versions. So Coco is doing: 1) Read analog joystick. 2) Convert that to digital. 3) Use a lookup table to convert back to a lower resolution analog, using the same method as the Atari version. Literally it should just read the analog version and be done.
I have to say I like the pilot running animation (aside from speed) much better on the Coco version than the Atari versions; the Atari ones has the pilots limbs flailing all over the place so it looks like they are made of rubber.
You mention an optimized version... I am the one who did that. Got about 11-12% speed increased on the stock 6809 CPU (I could go further - that gain was rewriting some routines to take advantage of 6809 rather than direct translating 6502 code). There is a further optimization for the 6309 chip (a drop in replacement chip announced in late fall 1985 and on sale by early 1986 (made by Hitachi) that improved the chip with some additional registers and instructions). The 6309 version runs about 35-40% faster than the original which is much more playable. There is another upgrade that allows the Coco 3 to run at 2.86 MHz vs. 1.78 called the GIME-X; that with a 6309 runs quite fast - I have a video on my UA-cam channel showing the 6309 versions of both running side by side).
Aside from the initials on the alien uniform, I should mention that certain key sequences on some (all?) of the ports also shows a hidden message. The Coco version has a dedication to the authors's son, by typing his son's first name while the game is running. Other ports have different messages.
If you want to try the 6309 version, it can be found on the Color Computer Archive, and if you download the VCC emulator it is a lot easier to set up than MESS/MAME. At the very least I would like to see you play it with the proper colors. :-)
Thank you for the detailed history behind this port! As I said when I started it, it was hard to even get this to run. I'll have to check out the VCC emulator some time, since I have had to use the CoCo3 emulator (through DOSBox since it's MS-DOS only) or MESS, neither of which seems to do a great job.
No man's sky in the 80s
yeah, eight old me had panic attacks when i saw a green helmet
Well, at least you could just fire up your systems if you saw the helmet! Do you remember what happened the first time you had an alien pop up?
@@Zolaerla I do remember hitting the pause button and having to calm down
Thank you for that in depth review, I enjoyed watching it (twice)!
As a side note, David Fox is featured on the box art: Dressed up as the pilot running towards you on the front & sitting in the cockpit on the back cover.. so is he rescuing himself? 😉
Glad you enjoyed it!
D'oh, I wish I knew that! I didn't know who it was, hehee. Now I'm imagining an alternate dimensions of all David Fox, and it'd look like Rimmerwold from Red Dwarf... ok, maybe that's a bit too much!