4 ms·
I'm the Dan Schmidt mentioned in the article. A few years back I wrote a few anecdotes about the technical side of working on Ultima Underworld: https://dfan.o
by dfan 8y ago
I'm the Dan Schmidt mentioned in the article. A few years back I wrote a few anecdotes about the technical side of working on Ultima Underworld:
https://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/20/the-dangers-of-self-modifying-code/ https://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/20/the-dangers-of-self-modifyi...
https://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/21/ultima-underworld-bugs/ https://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/21/ultima-underworld-bugs/
https://dfan.org/blog/2011/03/17/one-more-ultima-underworld-story/ https://dfan.org/blog/2011/03/17/one-more-ultima-underworld-...
- vanderZwan 8y ago> Speaking of graphics… well, probably most of you are far too young to remember the Apple ][, but it had a seriously weird graphics mode, which had not only a crazy palette (black, white, green, blue, orange, and purple) but also placed additional restrictions on how you could use the colors near each other (see here if you really need to know the gory details). Paul Neurath, our CEO, never tired of telling stories of what a pain it was to work with that system when he had written his earlier game Space Rogue. So naturally we added code that would specifically look for a certain file we had planted on Paul’s computer, and if it found it, would switch to a green-blue-orange-purple palette for one frame every half hour or so. Unfortunately I honestly can’t remember whether Paul ever actually noticed it. Please tell me this code shipped and that it is possible to trigger this mode by creating the right mock file on an emulated system!
- dfan 8y agoI am 95% sure we removed it long before ship, unfortunately.