XPost: rec.games.computer.ultima.series, rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons
Hi everybody,
I know the on-topic-ness is a little bit tenuous as far as the Apple II
is concerned, and I hope this is OK to cross-post in the Apple group as
well as the Ultima groups.
If you like (or liked, or wanted to like) the Apple II version of
"Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar" AND speak (some) German, I'd invite
you to check out my "Apple-II-ized" and Germanized fork of xu4, the
modernized Ultima IV engine.
Currently my fork runs only on the dreaded Windows PC - a Raspberry Pi
version exists too but isn't quite release-ready; a Linux PC version
would be fairly easy to create.
Unfortunately it does not yet work on the Apple II itself, since it is
very hard to fit the naturally longer German texts into the real Apple
code without overrunning the limited memory areas reserved for the
English texts where they'd have to live. That would need some embedded decompressing code and a lot of restructuring of memory areas.
However I have been careful to require nothing more than a Pentium 4 and
32-bit Windows 7, a lower limit of the MSYS2 software I used to create
this version. Although it will run on current Windows 11 hardware just
as well.
My version tries to closely match the look and feel of the Apple II
version (minus the color fringing, at least for now). Music and sounds
were recorded from real Apple II hardware with a real (DIY clone)
Mockingboard based on a real old General Instruments AY-3-8912
synthesizer chip, and I put some thought into more closely matching the
colors of real Apple graphics than many emulators do.
Fully translated illustrated high-resolution documentation in PDF
format, including History of Britannia, Book of Mystic Wisdom, and the
Cloth Map, is included (the box art is still missing since my original
box is too worn for a good quality scan). This makes the download
larger, it's about 33 MB.
Game data from the original is not included for copyright reasons, but
it will be automatically downloaded during the first start. Without this
game data the included PDF Documentation isn't readable either, to
protect me against claims of copyright violation.
This has been 12 years in the making, and although it's certainly not
perfect yet, I've now decided to release it in time for the 40th
anniversary of the original game, which was released in 1985.
Thanks go to a lot of people who are listed on the GitHub page, so I
won't repeat their names here.
If you want to check it out, it's here, click on "releases" on the right
to go to the download links:
https://github.com/TeaRex73/xu4-deutsch
--
Linards Ticmanis
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