Ultima IV

The game had sound just no music (no matter how much memory you had). Also, artifacting was used to produce color.

You probably had an 800 with 64K for sound to be included with Ultima IV; I certainly did not and therefore this game doesn't have the same lasting memory for me as did Ultima III. Still, this was an awesome game; trying to find Magencia in the middle of that huge ocean was a monumental task; such a vast landscape to explore was entirely unheard of in this era.

Direwolf; I don't know about the sound, but judging by the screenshots above, I'd guess this game used "artifacted" colour. This was a trick which exploited a limitation of the NTSC TV signal to get colour in the supposedly monochrome hi-res mode. It did this by using certain patterns of black and white pixels which gave colour interference (similar to the type you got on TV when someone wore a finely-patterned jacket or whatever).

Unfortunately, a "perfect" emulator display doesn't suffer from this "problem", so you don't get the colour. Fortunately, most emulators now include an option to simulate the effect, but you may have to turn it on.

BTW, the patterns required to generate colour on NTSC Ataris didn't work on our European PAL ones, so all American games that relied on the technique looked lousy on our systems. :(

I don't understand.. I played this on an Atari 800 back in the day and it had color AND sound. Plus the sound was superior to the PC version. What gives?

I eventually completed this game on the PC version (the 3rd platform I'd played it on). This game was arguably the first great open-ended RPG (the previous Ultimas led up to it), with a huge area to explore and all sorts of things to find out, not to mention the unusual aim of being a 'virtuous' person. Chatting to townspeople, exploring dungeons, hunting for artifacts, searching for spell reagents....I played Morrowind recently and was constantly reminded of this game. The Atari 8-bit version is sadly not the best (the lack of music hurts the 'mood' somewhat) but the essence of the game is still intact.

Lack of music hurts this installment of the Ultima franchise. It would have been nice to see them support music on 64K or 128K machines. That said, the game does look and play as well as the other 8-bit versions.