Produced by: Pentagram Team
Website: Pentagram
Releases:
* Pentagram (Windows) (1.6 MiB, 77 hits)
* Pentagram (OS X) (3.4 MiB, 42 hits)
* Mac LibPNG Libraries (253.1 KiB, 31 hits)
* Pentagram Source (5.6 MiB, 29 hits)
Pentagram Map Viewer
* Pentagram Viewer (Windows) (2.0 MiB, 40 hits)
* Pentagram Viewer Source (401.6 KiB, 27 hits)
What initially began as a map viewer for Ultima 8 has evolved into a full-on cross-platform engine remake in the spirit of Exult. Although no official demo has yet been released, there are up-to-date releases of source code available, as well as Windows and Mac OS X Universal binaries.
The best aspect of this is that Pentagram runs very smoothly and without an intense CPU load, unlike when Ultima 8 is run under DOSBox.
Do you think it will be possible to port Pentagram to the Nintendo DS? There is a 4Mb ram limit. It would be nice to use this engine with the touch screen of the DS. Thanks for this great project. U8 is one of my favorite games.
-Magfuse
Beats me whether or not it’s possible — I don’t see why it WOULDN’T be, but then again I’m not the one to ask. I’ll see if I can contact the developers for you, and maybe they’ll know.
Is there perhaps a chance you can provide some information on programming in the Nintendo DS environment? API documentation or something?
There is a library for Nintendo DS programming call libnds heres a link…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libnds
Theres another one which uses libnds called PaLib it makes somethings easier. We would need to scale or crop the resolution down to 256 x 192 if we are using just one screen. Theres a top and bottom one but I think it would be cool to use the bottom screen since thats the touchpad.
Libnds comes with DevKitPro which includes an ARM assembler and a C/C++ compiler basically everything you need to program for the NDS.
Interesting find. I’ll forward that to the Pentagram team, perhaps, and see what they say about it.
I’m having a little trouble installing Pentagram on my Mac – probably because I am new to it. I can up until the point where it asks me to move the game data in directory name ultima8, or to alter pentagram.ini – what game data is it referring to? I’ve tried creating a folder with the name ultima8 and placing the pentagram folder and the pentagram.ini into it, but neither seems to work, so I’m obviously missing something. Care to enlighten me?
At risk of seeming patronizing, I have to ask the obvious question to begin with: do you have the game data files for the original Ultima 8 (that is, do you have Ultima 8 either on diskette or CD)?
How do you play in fullscreen mode on OSX?
You should have a file called Pentagram.ini in or near the same folder as the Pentagram application. Open this, and look for this line:
Change fullscreen=no to fullscreen=yes and you should be good.
Thanks withstand, it worked.
Now unfortunately it seems I’ve run into another serious problem, that of crashing after I exit the east gate to the necromancer in the cemetary right after I retrieval the sacrificial dagger. Every save game I try it crashes going northbound east of tenebrae after I get the dagger. I don’t suppose there is a way to teleport to him? Maybe that will solve the problem.
That’s a bit outside my knowledge, sorry — of course, it’s entirely possible that this is just a bug that hasn’t been fixed yet; right on the main page of the Pentagram site, they’re pretty open about the fact that the game can be passed, but that not everything is working.
Now, Ultima 8 is one of the titles I’m less familiar with, so I don’t recall that area so well; is there another exit that you might make use of? And if so, does it work?