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Artifact colors shown here are good but not perfect. Blue is blue, not much else to say about that. But what's often called Brown and/or Orange looks too reddish in these screenshots. It should be more Olive and/or Amber in it, but those words aren't pure descriptions either. (Is "Bile" the best name after all?)
Screenshots were also taken in an emulated "old" style artifacting mode which GREATLY exaggerates the eerie glow of old school analog television. Look real close and you'll see green and purple pixels where there really should be no green and no purple anywhere on screen. "New" style artifacting beginning with Atari800MacX v3.3 in 2006 correctly shows only two possible colors, but all the wrong colors, and new artifacting introduced a bug to the game "Stellar Shuttle" bug wasn't there before in "old" artifacting, but the Very old emulator WACKE v1.6 from year 1999 has the similar collision detect bug in "Stellar Shuttle".
"New" artifact drawing style should be the default, Blue and "Bile" should be the default colors, "Ultima IV" should obviously show Blue water by default "normal" NOT "reverse", and, "old" artifacting should be renamed something like "CRT Glow Retro" and become a backwater preference choice.
Another game with identical artifacting caught in screenshots is "Super Bunny", old style with draw errors instead of "new" two-color-only. Super Bunny also has a hacked low res color conversion rerelease in which Blue/Brown are reversed when any colors could have been chosen. How silly is that, they made the carrot Blue instead of Orange, not talking artifacting, they drew a Blue carrot in low resolution, and they spelled Color "Colour" on their credits load screen. All of Europe seems to have always believed their "reverse" way was normal. |
| XL/XE model (64KB RAM or more) is required for the "Ultima V" title screen to show the blue artifact at all, pre-XL loads and runs too, but the blue border on the bottom half of title screen is instead composed of unmodified Atari OS character set. Seems to me like an important point to be noting.
This program is so predominantly unfinished, that both sides of the disk have large empty zones, side one is a collection of many small DOS friendly files which few finished commercial games ever go out that way, and side two is uselessly some sparsely populated map disk that doesn't get recognized by side one... but the animated burning fire (made via artifacting) is a keeper. |
| Artifacting: do not lose these Ultima V screenshots, Atarimania policy is to archive screenshots captured with artifacting turned off ("Stellar Shuttle", "Threshold", "AE", more) but these were taken with artifacting enabled, AND they got the colors Right how I experienced it all through the 1980s on Atari 800 and 800XL models NTSC. This page shows the "brown" (because "bile" is an ugly word and an ugly thing too), the 2nd screenshot on the games list page shows both "brown" and blue, water.
In "Ultima IV" (since Ultima 5 doesn't really exist) the brown artifact is used to depict both the terrain and the fire from the fire breathing dragon on top right of title screen. It's also an animated fire in Ultima V title screen. Brown is supposed to also be used to draw orange usually on a green background in playing-card games to make Hearts and Diamonds look realistic in high res.
Most emulators don't offer the correct colors as default, let alone a possibility. People with propaganda machine implants inside their heads, which affect what they say and do and maybe think, aren't allowed to know this, so I must be wrong. |
| Demo loads up but you cant do anything except view the credits (anyone know Rob?) - You cant form a party but you can journey onward where it asks for the Britannia disk - My guess is if we can find the britannai disk that something was worked on but not finished. A 'genie' chat from 1988 by LB inidcated that a programmer was hired for the XL/XE release (Rob) - but alas we know it wasnt published. |
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