Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay
18This video is a demonstration of the port of Jordan Mechner's Karateka to the IBM PC taken with original hardware. I wanted to do a video of this game for two reasons. First to show the accurate speed of the game loading and playing on the PC, and second to show off the music and sound effects.
Karateka for the IBM PC and compatibles is a DOS floppy, not a PC booter. It was ported by The Connelley Group in 1986 and appears to be the only port done by that company to the IBM PC. Judging by the quality of this port, developers and publishers were not beating a path to their door. The load times are absurdly long compared to the slower Apple II disk interface and the graphics palette used is uninspired and lazy. I kept all of the loading times in, if you want to go to the start of the gameplay, go to 4:08.
The only place where the developers put any effort is in the combat, which is usually at a tolerable speed, and the music/sound effects. The Apple II used pulse width modulation to produce music and the PC porters tried to replicate that technique, but their faithfulness to the pitch of the original music was less than perfect. More annoying is that their PWM routine was speed sensitive. While this may have been justifiable in 1984 when the IBM PC was the only affordable PC compatible on the market, in 1986 that was absurd. Even though the box says the game is compatible with the IBM PC AT and Compaq Pro 286, the music and sound effects come out as high pitched squeaks on those machines. Emulators usually get the music and sound effect speed wrong or produce the wrong pitch. I wanted to get the speed correct with the hardware on which this port was intended to run, the IBM PC, XT and similar machines.
Karateka had many ports, but only the IBM PC port tried to replicate the music by way of PWM and has sound effects that sound like the Apple II's. A lot of the ports have rather tinny sounding sound effects, but some of them use PWM for the "Kai" sound your karateka makes when assuming a fighting stance.
If the game used the unofficial but widely supported cyan/red/white CGA palette instead of the official IBM cyan/magenta white, it would have improved the game significantly. The game does autodetect and support Hercules graphics and looks rather nice, but squashed vertically, on my IBM 5151 dye to phosphor bloom. This port has no Tandy or EGA graphics support and no Tandy sound support. Shamefully, while CGA support composite artifact colors that were identical or very similar to the Apple II's composite artifact colors, this game made not even the minimal effort which would have been required to support them and equal if not better the Apple II version.
I kept an image of the disk's file display in the video. Why are there so many files? Why does this game, which comfortably fit on a single side of an Apple II disk (143K/side) get twice as large for the PC? One element driving up the file size is that the graphics are twice as large because they use 2-bits per pixel rather than the 1-bit per pixel graphics of the Apple II. The game does not support running from a hard drive, it uses a floppy disk based copy protection scheme.
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At present, Nerdly Pleasures has 697 views spread across 3 videos for Karateka, and less than an hour worth of Karateka videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up less than 0.77% of the total overall content on Nerdly Pleasures's YouTube channel.