Apple II Game Demonstration Series - Ultima IV with Mockingboard Sound

Channel:

Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

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Published on November 10, 2020 5:23:23 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYGFh3I3IG4

Game:

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)

Duration: 37:28

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Here in this demonstration series I bring you one of the best RPGs for the Apple II platform and one of the most important RPGs of all time, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This video showcases the introduction, character creation process and the in-game play from talking to people in the town and castle to combat to dungeon exploration.

To play Ultima IV, I have used the two drive method. Drive 1 is the Floppy Emu, drive 2 is a real Disk II drive. Ultima IV comes on two disks with each side of the disk containing different data. Disk 1 contains the Program on Side A and the Town data on Side B. Disk 2 contains the data for Britannia world map and the player save files on Side A and the Dungeon maps and data on Side B. When I went to enter the dungeon, I forgot that the Dungeon disk shared the disk with the Britannia overworld map and had to copy the image onto the reverse side of the disk. This is why the stats change as I enter the dungeon.

I wanted to give an impression of the true drive speed, Floppy Emu does a good job at simulating the timing of the disk drive but it does not have to position a read/write head over the correct track and wait for a disc to rotate to sector 0 on a track. You may wish to compare the Apple II's speed to the IBM PC/XT's version's speed here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DWlJbv0KFY or the Commodore 64's speed here : https://youtu.be/0DbsMUF0qZM

I have not tried to edit out any disk loading times, although on the Apple II they are far, far shorter than on the Commodore 64. However, the disk loading will cause the music to slowdown during the introduction sequence and when crossing data boundaries on the overworld map. You should also note that with the original floppies there is a load for every time you talk to an NPC.

The sound card I have installed in my Apple //e is the ReActiveMicro Phasor, a clone of the Applied Engineering Phasor, which has all the relevant capabilities of two Mockingboard sound cards. Ultima IV is one of the few games that supports a stereo Mockingboard with one music chip dedicated to the left audio output and one music chip dedicated to the right audio output.

I have had serious issues with my Phasor clone, which I document here : https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2020/11/review-of-products-three-for-my-apple-e.html. At the end of that blog entry I describe a modification to obtain line out from the music chips and the internal speaker passthrough. The music and internal speaker passthrough have been recorded with that mod applied. The mod is still a work in progress, there is some high pitched audio in this recording that can and should be filtered out. But the music is less muffled (filtered) than it would play on an original Mockingboard or Phasor.

I had to use the Phasor to mix in the Apple speaker audio, which is used for sound effects, but as you can hear it does strange things to the sound. Hopefully I can find a way to record the speaker separately from the audio in good quality. I was able to get good results by having a free-standing microphone positioned next to the speaker, even better than the alligator clips recording method, but the microphone method does not work well for games which require the keyboard like Ultima IV.

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