Ultima III Atari 8-bit Soundtrack on Original Atari 400 Hardware
15I bought an Atari 400 three weeks ago and wanted to post a video like this, but I needed a few extra things first. First I needed a 48K RAM upgrade board and a floppy drive emulator. Then I needed to replace the POKEY chip in the system to get it to boot floppy disks. Now that I have acquired those things I can show off my fully functional Atari 400 to the world.
This Atari 400 is running off its stock video and audio circuit, which supports RF output only. Ultima III on the Atari uses artifact colors like it does on the Apple II and IBM PC. However, games using artifact colors were generally designed with the Atari 800 in mind, which uses a video circuit which provides composite video and separate luma and chroma in addition to RF output. Every model of the Atari 8-bit computers will show different NTSC artifact colors. Atari 400s show red/green but Atari 800s show blue/green, which is what Lord British intended.
In order to give an idea of what the Atari 800 would show, halfway through the video I have altered the hue to show what the colors would look like on an Atari 800. I could not do this with the capture card, its range is too limited, as are most TVs. I used VirtualDub's hue control, which has full range controls.
The audio playback routine sometimes goes directly to the next track, but other times requires a cycle of the main menu to go to the next track. Some themes repeat for a bit as a result. As you can hear, Chuckles clearly struggled to bring the music from the Apple II Mockingboard to the POKEY of the Atari computers but within those limitations the soundtrack is complete, unlike his conversion for the C64. I apologize for the Slack notification sound heard during the first few seconds while the game is loading.
Track Listing :
Wanderer / Sosaria & Main Menu View Theme - 01:15
Towns - 03:27
Lord Cantabrigian British's Castle - 04:31
Dungeons / Ambrosia (Washed Ashore) - 05:27
Combat - 05:53
Shops - 06:45
Castle Death - 07:24
Fanfare / Rule Britannia / Lord British's Theme - 08:25
Alive / Shrines / Time Lord / Final Victory - 08:41
Ambrosia (Post-Shrine Entry) - 09:04
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