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It was Ultima III that first made me realize that all data lived on the disk and that I could alter all of it. And I did. Maybe I'm weird but it's fun to read

It was Ultima III that first made me realize that all data lived on the disk and that I could alter all of it. And I did. Maybe I'm weird but it's fun to read the assembly for Ultima 3. I was stuck in the Apple world so I stopped playing after U5. I bought the Ultima-giftpack on GOG.com before Christmas, but still have only had the time to work through the first 3. I'm savoring them, still.

T-hawk 14y ago
Me too... Ultima III was part of my introduction to hacking, but on an entirely different platform. I had it as the NES cartridge, mostly oblivious to the franchise's history on the computer platforms. I also had the Game Genie cheating device, whose codebook had a fairly rich set of codes for the game, changing your characters' health and stats and such. There were enough closely related codes (30 strength, 60 strength, 90 strength) that I started seeing the patterns, working out how the Game Genie code letters mapped to bits and represented the data values. So then I started synthesizing more codes that weren't in the book: hey, adding one to this letter changes the next stat instead, that must be a memory location. What happens if I add 16 to it, nice it changes the next character. Ultimately I never really played the game with hacked characters, since the challenge of the game wasn't the stats but in exploring and mapping the dungeons and hidden areas. (I had nightmares for years about getting lost in Ambrosia.) Other NES games were much more interesting with hacked stats, notably Final Fantasy I. Ultima III on the NES also contained the first major loophole exploit I discovered in a game. When in a dungeon, your magic power would slowly recharge with every step, but also risk running into a monster encounter. But I happened to realize that _rotating in place_ did the former and not the latter. So just by pressing the right arrow 300 times between encounters to recover 75 MP, you could cast the top-end magic nuke spell on every single monster group, virtually achieving god mode.
- danielweber 14y ago
  I'm not too familiar with the NES port of U3. Could monsters walk over chests? Did monsters in dungeons drop chests? In dungeons, if you were standing on a location already holding something (chests and strange-winds, basically), a monster couldn't show up, because it would have no place to drop its treasure chest.

T-hawk 14y ago

Me too... Ultima III was part of my introduction to hacking, but on an entirely different platform. I had it as the NES cartridge, mostly oblivious to the franchise's history on the computer platforms. I also had the Game Genie cheating device, whose codebook had a fairly rich set of codes for the game, changing your characters' health and stats and such. There were enough closely related codes (30 strength, 60 strength, 90 strength) that I started seeing the patterns, working out how the Game Genie code letters mapped to bits and represented the data values. So then I started synthesizing more codes that weren't in the book: hey, adding one to this letter changes the next stat instead, that must be a memory location. What happens if I add 16 to it, nice it changes the next character. Ultimately I never really played the game with hacked characters, since the challenge of the game wasn't the stats but in exploring and mapping the dungeons and hidden areas. (I had nightmares for years about getting lost in Ambrosia.) Other NES games were much more interesting with hacked stats, notably Final Fantasy I. Ultima III on the NES also contained the first major loophole exploit I discovered in a game. When in a dungeon, your magic power would slowly recharge with every step, but also risk running into a monster encounter. But I happened to realize that _rotating in place_ did the former and not the latter. So just by pressing the right arrow 300 times between encounters to recover 75 MP, you could cast the top-end magic nuke spell on every single monster group, virtually achieving god mode.

danielweber 14y ago
I'm not too familiar with the NES port of U3. Could monsters walk over chests? Did monsters in dungeons drop chests? In dungeons, if you were standing on a location already holding something (chests and strange-winds, basically), a monster couldn't show up, because it would have no place to drop its treasure chest.