Ultima V Hits the… TI-89?

According to a new interview on Fidgit, software developer David Randall has finished porting Origin’s Ultima V to the TI-89 graphing calculator. In case you’re confused – yes, it’s that Texas Instruments calculator you bought for high school/college several years ago:

TC: Was there something specific about Ultima V that made it an easy or a challenging candidate to port to these calculators?

DR: Ultima V was a challenge all the way around. The original DOS version totaled over 1MB across 4 floppy disks. My version of TI-89 calculator has only 188kb of RAM and 384kb of flash [memory] available for me (newer versions have up to 2.7MB flash [memory]). I figured if I could fit it into my calculator, then it would work on every TI-89, TI-89 Titanium, TI-92+, and TI-V200.

TC: What was the work like? Tedious? Fun? Challenging? Did you actually enjoy doing it, or did it feel like an obligation?

DR: All of the above. Redrawing by hand every tile of the 512 tiles was very tedious. The original tiles were 16×16 pixels with 256 colors. The tiles for the calculator are 11×11 pixels with four shades of gray. I tried multiple scaling algorithms but they all resulted in less than perfect results. So I redrew every single tile by hand with a sprite editor. I chose 11×11 pixels because it was a good compromise between tile detail and the way the Ultima viewable map is displayed. All of the classic Ultimas display a grid of 11×11 tiles with the main player in the center of the grid. I chose to reduce the viewable grid to 9×9 tiles in order to get a respectable tile detail while keeping the main player in the center of the grid.

Probably the most challenging aspect of Ultima V programming wise was implementing the NPC interaction between merchant & non-merchant town NPCs.

Bizarre, but very interesting nonetheless.