Ultima IV (yes I *KNOW* its old) .. please help

[McTrinsic]

Hi all.

In my old AMIGA-days, with an A500, I used to play Ultima IV for months. And I think I can assume that I mean real time, not "for months" ...

So, having had the opportunity to get a grip on a Phoenix-Board for the A 1000, I finally came to play it again.

I set up a play-disk and was about to listen to the music I loved back then, when something disturbing happened. While copying some files from the bootdisk of Ultima IV to the play-disk, the music played, but not continuously, it rather sounded like spluttering. It seemed like Paula was having a problem doing the copy and playing the music at the same time.

SoI went and tries the same on an original A 1000 and all worked fine. Now I am worried. Is it because of Ultima IV is sort of incompatible with my Phoenicboard (2MB Chipmem, high-res-denise, Fat Agnus) , or because of my Board or one of its chips is broken?

I use Kickstart 1.3. On the original A 1000 I used Kickstart 1.2. No Fastmem in both cases.

I would like to ask you if any of you can reproduce this error on a different ECS-ed A500 or similar machine?

Thanks a lot,

McTrinsic

[lempkee]

this is a hard one, i cant really help here.  but there is one option , go to whdload.de and ask them to do a patch for it , that would basically mean that you need to make a disk image of your orginal and send it to them, then they will make a patch + installer for it and it would most likely work after that.

its worth a try.

www.whdload.de

patchers i can recomend to do it , Psygore and Cfou and jotd ,  they are the only ?? ones left who do ADos images i think...

[McTrinsic]

Thanks for the info about the patchers, but that would only partly  help me. The other side of my problem is that I am worried if my board or one of the chips is broken. I did replace Paula and the CIAs, so they are probably not the problem here. Othe games like Wings dont show any problem anyway.

What might be the problem is Fat Agnus, since the game reads from disc into memory and then writes back to disk to create the play disk.  Or it simply is an incompatibily.

So if anyone is able to reproduce this error on a beefed-up and known as working A500 or A2000, I can be sort of sure I dont have to worry bout the hardware.  That wouldn't be nice but I could live with it.

So, is there anyone around who could test Ultima IV on an A500/A2000 (or A1000) with Fat Agnus / 2 MB ChipMem and a Highres Denise?? Or on an A3000?

For testing purposes, I could send you an image of the disk. In case you worry, (Ultima IV *may* be distributed by the UDIC / Ultima Dragons! I am one of those (Banquo Dragon).


Thanks in advance,
McTrinsic

[pudpudjef]

I've seen this problem many times.  But for me anyway it seemed to be a combination of 030 and kickstart issues.  Ulitma IV works best on Kickstart 1.2 and 1.3 on A2000 or A500 for me.  Otherwise I have sound issues.  I've never been able to get it to work without sound glitches on my A3000 even in 1.3 Kickstart mode.  

[freak]

I just played Ultima IV about a month ago.  I tried playing it on my expanded A2000 68060, Kickstart 3.1, ECS Denise, and 2MB chipram.  But I couldn't get it to work even with the 68060 disabled and the fastram disabled.  After loading from the floppy it would just freeze.

I finally got it to work on my A500 with Kickstart 1.3, 512KB chipram, OCS Denise, and no fastram.  With fastram installed I would get graphic corruption and sound problems.

This game seems to be very picky.  I don't think that it likes your extra chipram or your ECS Denise.