<story><title>Ultima (2012)</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2012/02/ultima-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dekhn</author><text>As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?).  I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn&amp;#x27;t I present at his kiosk?&lt;p&gt;Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally.&lt;p&gt;I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close.  These days... there&amp;#x27;s a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xu4.sourceforge.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xu4.sourceforge.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;  and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.6502workshop.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;nox-archaist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.6502workshop.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;nox-archaist.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician.  I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying.  I learned how to hex-edit my player&amp;#x27;s disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ultima (2012)</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2012/02/ultima-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CamperBob2</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;I do wonder that no one thought of it in even the relatively brief history of videogames prior to Ultima; it does seem a fairly obvious approach, after all. On the other hand, I can’t point to a specific example that would give me grounds to really challenge the claim. ... Ultima‘s tile-graphics engine was not so much the work of Garriott as of a friend of his who was the only other person to have a significant role in the game’s design and implementation: Ken W. Arnold (not the Ken Arnold who created Rogue).&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll comment briefly on this as someone who spent a couple of years trying to build an Ultima-esque tile graphics game on the Apple II.  Ken had a clever insight that eluded me completely: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t try to draw the tiles one at a time, dummy.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Ken&amp;#x27;s code was fast enough to be useful in an interactive fullscreen game because it drew an entire row of 280 pixels at once, then went back over the same row of map data, reusing the indexes for the next 14 lines in that row of tiles.  There was less indirection and practically no overhead compared to drawing individual 2-byte-by-14-row block shapes.&lt;p&gt;Conversely, anyone trying to draw one tile at a time would have ended up with a low update rate, or would have been forced to draw the map in a small window.  Either way, a worse gameplay experience would have resulted, especially if you were (as I was) comparing your work to Ultima.</text></comment>