Exult - Ultima VII port for AGA

[NovaCoder]

I've had a few people ask me if I'd release my old Ultima VII port which I did as part of my AGA SDL development.



Features:

• CAMD MIDI support
• AHI Sound support
• Double buffered 256 color GFX
• SDL based
• OGG compressed audio support
• Fullscreen and window mode support for both AGA and RTG
• International keyboard mapping support
• Ability to set the thread priorities of both the AHI and MIDI device
• Supports both big and small endian graphics cards automatically

Missing:

• Nothing

Requires:

• 040 for RTG and 060 for AGA (faster the better)
• An unknown amount of FASTRAM
• AGA/RTG
• AHI (v4.18 recommended)
• External MIDI device for MIDI

[ Show youtube player ]

http://exult.sourceforge.net/

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

This port uses AHI, it's really important that people use v4.18 of AHI with one of the 'FAST' modes set to be used in the AHI Prefs otherwise it will run slow on a real Amiga (this is true for any of my ports that use AHI).

BTW Boing Bags 3/4 will upgrade your Amiga to v6.x of AHI so check what version you are actually running.

[ Show youtube player ]

[trixster]

[Gzegzolka]

Nice

[jbenam]

Finally! I'll test this on my A4000/040 as soon as I get the chance Not sure how well it'll run on a 040, though!

OGG Support and RTG would be the cherry on top of this

[Minuous]

I don't see any download link for this? The link given doesn't mention any Amiga version.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by Minuous

I don't see any download link for this? The link given doesn't mention any Amiga version.

Hiya,

No it will be on AmiNet with my other releases. I'll upload it in the next couple of days, just got to package it up.

[trixster]

I've just had a quick play at this. It's very good, runs pretty well! Amazing memories, thanks for the conversion! I really never thought I'd play Ultima 7 on an Amiga. Incredible.

[trixster]

What are the best settings for audio? any way to get music working if you dont have an external midi unit?

Any way to slow the mouse movement down, and maybe smooth it out?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by trixster

I've just had a quick play at this. It's very good, runs pretty well! Amazing memories, thanks for the conversion! I really never thought I'd play Ultima 7 on an Amiga. Incredible.

Thanks

I think it's very cool to finally have Ultima VII playable on AGA (and DOTT )

Originally Posted by trixster

What are the best settings for audio? any way to get music working if you dont have an external midi unit?

The AHI device used will be the one configured in your AHI Prefs (Unit 0), I'm pretty sure it's unit 0 anyway

First off, install v4.18 of AHI, then run the Prefs application and make sure it opens without any error messages appearing. Switch to Unit 0 and select something like '8bit FAST stereo++' and set the rate to 11025 khz. to match the setting used by Exult.

I don't think it's possible to play MIDI on an Amiga using CAMD without a real device??

Why don't you do your ears a favor and get an nice [ Show youtube player ]

You also be able to use the SC-55 with ScummVM

The other way that Exult supports music is by using OGG files but they didn't work for me and I didn't have time to figure out why so I just disabled support.

Originally Posted by trixster

Any way to slow the mouse movement down, and maybe smooth it out?

Move your hand slower

Seriously though, this was just a quick port to help develop my SDL for AGA....I didn't spend much time fine tuning it for 68k.

[Amicol]

Looks great on the video
Been trying for hours to get it to work without success, keeps telling me it can't find the game files (i.e. 'Looking for 'black gate' at 'Games:Exult/Ultima 7 Black Gate'... but it wasn't there.')
I placed Exult on the route of my Game: drive then unzipped my Ultima7.zip into 'Ultima_7_Black_Gate' and my Serpent.zip into 'Ultima_7_Serpent_Isle'
The 2 zip files were from the Ultimate Collection CD.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[trixster]

Get rid of the underscores on the directory names.

The config file is looking for Games:Exult/Ultima 7 Black Gate

I had to change my config file to look in "Games2:Exult/Ultima 7 Black Gate" in order to get it to match my setup.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by Amicol

Looks great on the video
Been trying for hours to get it to work without success, keeps telling me it can't find the game files (i.e. 'Looking for 'black gate' at 'Games:Exult/Ultima 7 Black Gate'... but it wasn't there.')
I placed Exult on the route of my Game: drive then unzipped my Ultima7.zip into 'Ultima_7_Black_Gate' and my Serpent.zip into 'Ultima_7_Serpent_Isle'
The 2 zip files were from the Ultimate Collection CD.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

You should put your games in exactly the folders that I used (eg 'Games:Exult/Ultima 7 Black Gate'), if you want to use different folders (eg 'Games:Exult/Ultima_7_Black_Gate') then you'll have to update the config file to match.

[Amicol]

Sorted, thanks chaps!! :-)
Black Gate works great!!!!

Thanks for another great port NovaCoder

[klx300r]

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by trixster

Any way to slow the mouse movement down, and maybe smooth it out?

Actually, on second thoughts that might be a bug in my SDL port....I'll have a quick look to see if I can fix it easily.

[Mad-Matt]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Thanks


I don't think it's possible to play MIDI on an Amiga using CAMD without a real device??

You can install GMPlay and SoftSynth that comes with camd.library in order for the Amiga to play the music.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

You can install GMPlay and SoftSynth that comes with camd.library in order for the Amiga to play the music.

Cool info

Remember that this will cause an additional CPU load though..

[rodpulsar]

NovaCoder thanks for this great work !

I ran it yesterday on an A1260@55/75Mhz (256MB Fast, 3.9 Roms, FastATA IV, Indivision MK2) :
- I got a bit of lag in 640x512, but it worked very well in 640x256 (modified in 800x600 with the Indi)
- I first choosed no MIDI sound but I will test again this evening since I only discover now this topic about libraries and AHI tuning

I started to play the game (Yay ! Stables investigation lol !) but had to stop mainly because of two reasons :
- Mouse speed makes it unplayable for the moment. However I use a RYS USB adapter so it may be better with a true DB9 mouse, I will test that asap.
- When moving the Avatar, the game needs to load DATA to display the surroundings. The HDD starts to work and during this time the game freezes. I wonder if it may come from the fact that my 060 is fully used during IDE transfers, I will test asap with an SCSI disk. For information my transfer rate is around 6,2 MB/s using PDS3, an SSD, and PIO3 mode. PIO4 gives 7,x speeds but is touchy with certain files.

I felt very proud making run a PC title on an Amiga ! I played Ultima 7 on PC and I still have my Exult compatible savegames, I can't wait to check if I may be able to finish the game on Amiga

[NovaCoder]

thanks for the kinds words

I've just fixed the mouse speed, should be better now.

I'll upload version 1.4.9.003 to the Zone.

Yes I noticed the pauses when it is loading data, this is a well know IDE limitation (you need CPU cycles to load data so the game slows down). SCSI should be much better, also make sure you are using PFS3 060 version because FFS is very slow.

[Amicol]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Yes I noticed the pauses when it is loading data, this is a well know IDE limitation (you need CPU cycles to load data so the game slows down). SCSI should be much better, also make sure you are using PFS3 060 version because FFS is very slow.

I get about 2.3mb/s transfer speed but I don't have an IDE Express or Fast ATA. I didn't know there was a 060 specific PFS, would this improve speed?