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 Two phantom related bugs.
Author: fufufu ()
Date:   12-03-08 14:23

Noticed two bugs in latest XU4 build:

1) In Minoc, the weapon shop was lined with stationary phantom icons, meant to represent shields/swords hanging on the walls, but they aren't supposed to move (they don't in the DOS version). But in XU4, they're animating like they're actually phantom monsters (though you still can't interact with them).

2) In Dasterd/Destard, level 4, the level with a ton of gold. The room in the middle of it contains (in both the original Apple II and DOS) the rarer flashy purple field phantoms (the other type of phantom being the sword+shield ones), but for some reason in XU4 the room is completely empty. Were the purple field phantoms forgotten somehow?
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 Re: Two phantom related bugs.
Author: sunsparc ()
Date:   12-06-08 18:43

1) This is definitely a bug. Ultima 4 probably distinguishes between phantoms that are part of the background (not animated) and those that are monsters (animated).

2) Here's what I found out:
The room in level 4 of dungeon Destard has the index 7, so it's at offset 0x900 in destard.dng.
The monster tiles are listed at 0x910. There are only 13 monsters in the room, so the first 3 bytes are zero. The remaining 13 bytes all have a value of 0x46.
If you look at the Ultima 4 tile list, you can see that tile 0x46 is the fire field. The next tile is the sleep field, which is why the monsters flash purple.
xu4 doesn't show the monsters because the fire field isn't a "valid" monster.
Ultima 4 doesn't care if a monster is valid. Non-valid monsters are simply assumed to have 2 tiles, and the game calls them "phantoms".
It looks like this is a bug in the original Ultima 4, but maybe Richard Garriott put the purple phantoms there on purpose.

Does anybody know if this room has other monsters in the Atari ST or Amiga versions?
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 Re: Two phantom related bugs.
Author: fufufu ()
Date:   12-07-08 11:42

2) That's strange. But it would explain something I noticed yesterday - you're able to walk right through them, but you take damage. Didn't notice a sleep effect though. The real question is if they're a bug monster or not. It's tough to say. I haven't been able to get Ultima IV working on the Amiga... it hangs whenever I try to create a play disk for some reason, and I haven't found anything on any forums that's helped yet... and in general WinUAE's interface sucks balls. ><

It's obvious they're rare though, although I'm tempted to say that like the really rare Twister enemies (that so far I've only ever seen in that one room in the Abyss) they're just a strange monster. I've never seen either monster in any other rooms, so there is a slim, slim chance that they each only exist there. I'll try and see if I can check the C64 version at least, and maybe Amiga if I can get it working for once.
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 Re: Two phantom related bugs.
Author: fufufu ()
Date:   12-07-08 13:12

Okay, here's what I got:

C64 Version: Appears same as original Apple II and DOS. Still purple and red, can still walk through them, they don't appear to induce sleep when you do. Tried this on Ultima IV Gold for reference.

Atari ST Version: Why is it this and the Amiga are so damn hard to emulate? Granted, it'd probably help if I'd ever owned one... It took me quite a while to get it up and running and even then it asked me for a play disk... without a menu option that at least the amiga did to make one. I did get it to run by just hitting Journey Onward with a char named Zippy on the disk image... yay? And why is the music's tempo so damn slow?

Er, anyway, the room in Dasterd (or Destard in Atari ST's case) is the same, phantoms appear all red and purply.

Amiga Version: WinUAE... DIAF. You're the absolutely worst emulator I've had the displeasure of using. Why the hell you don't come with a built in disk formatter when you provide a blank ADF creator is beyond me. I've looked for hours for somekind of utility to do it without having to get an Amiga OS up and running, and frankly, I can't be bothered anymore. More than likely though they have the same phantoms since Atari ST did, and the Amiga port appears similar enough to the Atari ST port.
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 Re: Two phantom related bugs.
Author: sunsparc ()
Date:   12-07-08 18:56

Which emulator did you use for the Atari ST version?
I tried Steem 3.2 with Ultima 4 from GamebaseST, and I didn't have any problems.
Getting into Destard was easy once I found out where the party's coordinates are stored in the disk image.
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 Re: Two phantom related bugs.
Author: fufufu ()
Date:   12-07-08 22:11

For the ST I tried Gemulator then Pacifist, then when I got fed up with trying to get them to locate the disk image, I tried another one (SainT) and lucked out that it had a quicker, easier GUI. I just used a list at Zophar.com and kept going down the ones it recommended. It was the bit about a play disk that scared me when I got it running finally, especially since that's what prevented me playing the Amiga one. The Journey Onward worked though, so I didn't bother trying to make a new char, it was a fresh druid char, so it was easy enough to run to Paws from Yew and dump the starting 200 gold into a few Light, Blink and Z-Down spells to quickly run to Dasterd/Destard and check the room.



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