System Shock on the VFX-1

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Pix

The main reason I got the VFX-1 was to play System Shock on it. It is one of only a small handful of games which supports stereo 3D on the hardware in addition to the head tracking. This only works with the CD version which has built-in support out of the box. Head tracking is supported at all times and (if you have it switched on) stereo 3D when in full screen mode.

Stereo 3D on the VFX-1 is incredibly convincing and far better than I’d hoped. Without the required glasses associated with your usual 3D technology, there is none of the image darkening resulting in a clean bright image. Nothing pops out of the screens as such but with such giant screens the added depth is all that is needed. Being able to explore Citadel station like this is just awesome. It makes the game far more atmospheric and should be the only way to experience System Shock.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good. As mentioned in my review, the VFX-1 supported two 3D modes. The alternate lines approach was introduced with new drivers well after the initial release and System Shock only supports the original side by side image mode. With the high horiztontal and low vertical resolutions of the VFX-1 LCD’s this is exactly the opposite of what is needed. The result of this is a very low resolution image which can only really support one of the pop up screens in the bottom corners at a time unless they overlap. This isn’t ideal but wouldn’t have been insurmountable and I could have easily lived with it.

What is insurmountable is that the cursor flat out doesn’t work in stereo 3D mode.I have to aim way off to the bottom right to attempt to shoot or pick anything up that is straight in front of me. If anything is at the bottom right of the screen then it’s out of reach completely. With all the items to interact with, the game is totally unplayable like this. To make matters worse, when swapping back from full screen, the image on my monitor is fine but the headset remains in 3D mode making the screens garbled and unusable. If this one thing worked I could have swapped between the two modes as required, but no such luck. Resetting the headset requires a restart every time.

This problem isn’t unique to me. The guy who wrote the VFX-1 FAQ 15 years back had to play the game in 2D also. This is a crying shame as it so nearly works and could have been fantastic. The only sections which I’m playing in 3D are the cyberspace bits which don’t need the mouse. The added 3D makes those wireframe corridors a lot less confusing as I can clearly see where they are in a 3D universe. The giant cyberspace heads are surprisingly scary when they are life-size and coming straight at you. With the 360 degree movement, head tracking is turned off in cyberspace and it’s only when it’s no longer there that you realise quite how much you were using it in the rest of the game.

Other than cyberspace, I’ve been playing in 2D the whole way. This isn’t at all bad as it means I can play in SVGA and I’ve still got the head tracking. This is done in the same way as Terra Nova with a flexible neck allowing me to look sideways while walking forward. There is no indication of which direction I’m looking in though and it’s all too easy to end up looking slightly to the side of your starting position and walking like a crab.

This hitch aside, the game is highly playable. The screens are still not as clear as I would really like but the head tracking works extremely well and combined with the giant image did draw me into the game more. I only had to swap to my monitor for reading notes and spotting cameras on the map, which weren’t always clear on the LCD’s. Much like Terra Nova being able to look up and down can be a big advantage. This was especially true on level 8 where I was craning my neck to spot the flying robots and hidden cyborgs in the higher reaches of the security level. With the head tracking, I’d also find myself tilting my head to get a better view when peeking around corners. Even without the 3D, all of this did add to the experience.

The immersion did come with a price this time in that combined with some lengthy play sessions I did get very slight motion sickness, although I was only really aware of this after I stopped playing. System Shock is a huge game and if I was going to follow the advice and finish this in 15 minute sessions, I’d still be playing it a year later. I can’t be having that when I’ve got 3 more versions of Wing Commander lined up to play (among many other things). Besides which, the game quickly got me hooked again and I’ve been enjoying it far too much to quit just after I got started.

Cyberpuck support was included. This worked ok for moving around but was more or less useless for doing anything else. Popping the puck down for a moment while doing something with the mouse would result in my character spinning round in circles. This would have left me trying to control my keyboard and mouse with my left hand, while using the puck in my right. Bearing in mind that I’m effectively blindfolded during all this, I unplugged the puck and stuck to conventional controls.

This may well be the best game with VFX-1 support but I don’t think it was the best game to play on a VFX-1 I’m sorry to say. It seems to me that VR is suited to games where you don’t need to move your hands off set controls. It also needs to be a game where you don’t need to interact with complicated interfaces, read too much text, or spot small items/switches due to the limitations of the LCD’s. On this basis, I’m expecting Wings Of Glory to be the best of the 3 Origin/Looking Glass games with its joystick controls, lack of HUD and also the head-tracking being a far more useful component of gameplay.

Playing System Shock for only the second time, it’s suprising how dry an experience it is. There isn’t all that much text/dialog, there are no stats, no upgrades, etc. It’s basically an FPS with a big inventory but I think the gameplay stands up extremely well for all that with plenty of options on how to play. There is so much more freedom than your typical modern FPS with massive levels to explore as you please. The controls are still far from ideal at the best of times and do detract from the experience.

The ending of System Shock is as much of a letdown as I remembered but other than that it’s still a great game. I’ve never tried it but I expect the best way to experience the game would be to bypass the original controls entirely with the fan-made mouse look patch. The better controls would probably outweigh the gains from the VFX-1 but the VFX-1 is still a great option be it in 3D or not. I do think other FPS’s like Quake and Dark Forces would work better on it due to their simpler nature and I’m looking forward to trying some of them out.

I’ll leave the VFX-1 for now and give my eyes a rest. I can’t seem to get enough Wing Commander lately and will pick another port of that next.

Ultima – The Ultimate Collector’s Guide

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Pix

Ultima – The Ultimate Collector’s Guide was written by Stephen Emond and as you might expect is a guide to all the Ultima games, books and paraphernalia every Ultima fan like myself feels a deep-seated need to own. It weighs in at a hefty 826 pages and an even heftier 1973 items. I always knew there was a lot of Ultima out there but this is going some. I thought I owned my fair share but I totalled up that I have maybe 60-70 of the items in here. That’s less than 4% and I’m writing this from a room where the walls are nearly entirely obscured by piles of games. I’m not sure if a guide like this inspires or makes a complete collection look insurmountable.

Thankfully, I’ve never aspired to a complete collection. Apart from anything else, I like being able to move around in my house too much. That doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in what is available though and this provides the perfect way to cherry pick and see what I’m missing out on. While doing so, it gives a glimpse into the history of one of gaming’s most significant series.

It’s organised by game with each release and variation getting a photo and content list. If you wanted to know what the contents of the Italian budget edition of Ultima 6 were, this is the place to look. Each of the variations of manual and media are covered separately with brief descriptions of the differences. Aside from the games, there are magazine adverts, books, soundtracks, and so on. All the games and spin offs are included, with the exception of Ultima Online which warrants its own book. UO is still covered in brief right at the end but without all the detail.

There are check lists for anyone who wants to keep track of what they need to look for. Some of the items included seem a little unfair such as unreleased games and one-off items like the Lost Vale box. Good luck to anyone trying to get hold of anything along those lines. The most interesting items for me are in the miscellaneous category. All the slight variations on games are all very well but there is no way in the world I’d attempt to collect them all. However, who could resist an Ultima 4 writing kit, or an Ultima phone card to pick out 2 from the multitude.

As a contributor (purely cash rather than content), I get an added extra book containing lists of everything Origin which I’m just as interested in as the Ultima stuff. This is far briefer and doesn’t have all the photo’s unfortunately but does contain lists of near enough everything Origin that was ever put out. Apparently there was a second Wings Of Glory guide that I’ve never heard about, although I can’t find any evidence of it having searched in the usual places. It’s gone straight to the top of my wanted list. A previously missing System Shock guide is in the post.

Inevitably, no collector’s guide can be 100% complete and I would imagine that the mere act of publishing a book like this will draw new items out of the woodwork. Largely thanks to the stuff I picked up before Christmas, I’ve got some bits and pieces that aren’t in there myself. Looking at the monumental list it is hard to imagine that there could possibly be all that much missing though and this is as complete and thorough as you could wish for and then some.

Having recently discovered an interest in scouring Japanese auction sites, my main use for the book is going to be identifying all the bits and pieces that come up when I search for Ultima. Assuming I still have a job in a months time (which isn’t a foregone conclusion), I’m planning on something of a shopping spree.

Ultima – The Ultimate Collector’s Guide is a fantastic resource and every bit as collectible as all the items it describes. I can’t imagine the time that must have gone into collating everything and it’s a true labour of love. This is aimed squarely at the collector rather than the casual fan but if the number of people prepared to contribute to the project is anything to go by there are clearly a lot of us out there. It’s not the sort of book you sit down and read cover to cover, and mainly consists of lists but if you have an interest in Ultima it’s a must have.

You can pick up a copy from Amazon among other places. It gets 5 out of 5 from Warren Spector himself which can’t be bad as endorsements go.

Console Manual Scans

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Pix

I’ve added a batch of new scans to the downloads for the console versions of various Origin games, some of which were available elsewhere already but they are on here now as well. The new pdfs are manuals for Ultima 3 (NES & Famicom), Ultima 4 (NES & Famicom), Ultima 6 (NES & Super Famicom), Ultima 7 (Super Famicom), Wing Commander (Mega CD & Sega CD) & Wing Commander Secret Missions (SNES).

In addition to all of those, I’ve been kindly sent a scan of the Lands Of Lore clue book by Matt Larson. This isn’t anything to do with Origin but I love the game so I’ve added that also.

VFX1 – First Impressions & Playing Terra Nova

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Pix

Having got the VFX-1 working, I thought I’d do a playthrough of each of the 3 supported Origin/Looking Glass games that I’ve already looked at. They are all games that I’d only played the once and wouldn’t have been adverse to trying a second time without the added intrigue of VR. Before I get to Terra Nova, a quick run through on the hardware.

The Forte VFX-1 was first sold in 1995 around the height of the brief VR bubble. It was arguably the leading home use product of the time although there were plenty of alternatives. While hardly cheap to pick up these days, it sold for $1,000 at the time putting it way beyond the means of most of us.

The headset is surprisingly lightweight at 1.1 kg and despite its age is still a great looking bit of tech (at least when not being worn). Whether you would want to let anyone see you using it is another matter.

It comes with an ISA card which connects to your graphics card via a VESA cable. The VESA interface restricts the headset to 256 colours although I’ve heard that the displays can cope with more than this. A prototype adapter was built by Forte which took the signal directly from any graphics card’s VGA output although I understand this still relied on the ISA card for head tracking. There is an electronic schema available on the internet to build your own but the cost would be prohibitive with other alternatives available for modern games.

Aside from limiting the palette, the VESA connection means that the VFX-1 is extremely picky as to which graphics cards it will work from. I had to find a 1996 FAQ with a list of supported cards and then track down one of the few I could find on Ebay. Many of the cards on the list are VLB or ISA cards which didn’t leave a huge selection. The time the VFX-1 was being sold coincided with the move toward 16-bit games and early 3dfx cards none of which worked with the VFX-1 with the exception of the Voodoo Rush. This lack of compatibility, combined with the price must have been a major hindrance to uptake and certainly killed the longevity of the product.

The helmet connects to the ISA card via a 26 pin RS232 cable into the back of the headset. Aside from the video, this cable carries the power (surprisingly drawn directly from the ISA bus) and the audio for the built-in headphones. A second connector is built into the helmet for the included Cyberpuck controller.

The built-in headphones are sizable and have a bellows style arrangement to accommodate different head sizes. This means they form a tight seal from the outside world and while they aren’t up to the quality on my usual Sennheiser’s they still sound fairly good after all these years.

The two eyepieces at the front are on a liftable visor, allowing return to the real world without removal of the helmet. They are independently adjustable left and right and can be twisted to focus. Getting this set up right is tricky as your eyes will compensate for focus to a large extent. With the visor down, the ideal position seems to be to get the lenses as close to the eyes as possible. The edges of the covers dig in a little when doing this leaving telltale grooves above your eyes after use.

The picture through the lenses is fairly clear although I rarely manage to get it 100% focused across the entire image. The field of view is a mammoth 45 degrees making it hard to take in the whole thing in one go. I wouldn’t say using this feels like reality as such and is more along the lines of having an extremely low res cinema screen strapped to your face. It’s also apparent that I’m looking through lenses as the light tends to catch around the edge of the eyepieces giving the impression of looking through a porthole.

I’ve found getting the two images in each eye to come together into one image is often quite tricky. Once done it’s fine but it does appear to require focusing your eyes at some point behind the screen which I find quite unnatural. A lot of blinking and large moving 3D landscapes help me out here, but if I just have to focus on something flat in 2D I often can’t do it at all.

The resolution of the two LCD’s is slightly odd at 789×230. This means that no matter what resolution you play a game at, it needs to be scaled by the hardware which doesn’t help the image quality. It’s also way short of the required pixels for 640×480 making small text difficult to read. Whether this is an issue depends on the game you are playing. Each dot in the image is clearly visible in a honeycomb pattern, as can just about be made out in my attempt to take a photo through the lens.

The system came with a serial bus interface built into the helmet allowing for hot-swappable hardware. The interface is a precursor to USB although it was barely used outside of the VFX-1 itself. According to a promotional video, the initial intention for Forte was to release dozens of extra bits of hardware to improve on the experience but I can only speculate as to what they were. The only hardware which ever used this was the Cyberpuck controller which came with the VFX-1.

The Cyperpuck is a 3 button mouse replacement which detects its pitch, yaw and roll over a 180 plane in all directions. I’ve not tried to make extensive use of this yet as I’m not entirely convinced by it. I can see the idea of not being confined to sitting at a desk while using the helmet but the included cable attached to the helmet is barely long enough to achieve even that so I can hardly go walking around with it on. Extension cables were available at the time but finding one now could prove extremely tricky. In its favour, use of the cyberpuck is intuitive and works well enough in games not requiring more than basic controls. It is not all that precise however. I’m something of a Quake veteran but you wouldn’t know it when I try to play it with the Cyberpuck and accuracy suffers badly. I daresay I would improve with practice but I stuck solely to mouse and keyboard when playing Terra Nova.

Terra Nova shipped with built-in VFX-1 support for head tracking and the Cyberpuck which is turned on using command line options when starting the game. There are two modes for the head tracking. One uses an independent neck so you carry on walking straight on when you look around. The other mode steers when you look. I went for the flexible neck option. I’m sorry to say that there isn’t any stereo-3D support.

The first thing to note when playing this on the VFX-1 is that since all the menus are in SVGA, they aren’t all that usable through the headset. Throughout my playthrough, I only ever used it during the missions and flipped up the visor as soon as they were over to watch any FMV and read news/email.

Having the head tracking is an interesting experience but not entirely natural for numerous reasons. First off swinging your whole head while looking straight ahead isn’t quite how you would do things in real life. Combined with years of monitors not following me around the room, it’s far more natural to keep staring straight ahead while playing the game and look using the usual keyboard controls. I started to look around more as I got further but it’s breaking a habit generated by years of gaming. Also the all too short cable and extra head weight make swinging your head around considerably more effort than it would be normally. The helmet is hardly going to give you neck ache or anything like that but it does have a certain momentum to it.

Where head tracking does come into its own is looking up and down which for no obvious reason comes more naturally than side to side. It’s a big advantage when drones attack to be able to look in the air and scan around for them. The tracking on the VFX-1 is excellent and way better than the VR-920 I tried some years back which lost its center constantly and needed frequent recalibration. Using one of those was a recipe for serious nechache when you ended up having to look backwards to see ahead of you.

I found that the colours tended to merge together on some of the levels and it didn’t make for the clearest view of the world. The games 320×400 graphics mode doesn’t suit the hardware especially well either with most of the extra resolution wasted. With the low resolution and super-sized view, I was almost too close to the action to see it clearly and battles could be a little confused in terms of telling who I was firing at and locating where the cursor was on the screen.

The hardware cable comes with warnings not to use for more than 15 minutes at a time, which I of course took no notice of. I can’t say I’ve suffered any ill effects so far and it’s quite comfortable to use on the whole. The bit that feels strange is that a central piece of the helmet comes right down over your forehead applying a reasonable amount of pressure when the visor is up.

Having played the whole game, the VFX-1 is probably is the best way to experience it but it both adds and detracts. The colour palette didn’t always suit the VFX-1’s LCD screens and the view wasn’t as clear as I would have liked. I certainly enjoyed myself but I’ve been more impressed with my experiences on some of the other titles I’ve tried.

I think my opinion of Terra Nova remains the same after the second playthrough. It’s fun but could have been so much better. The story is largely throwaway and the missions only get going right at the end of the game. The engine and game mechanics are excellent though and it was a prime candidate for a mission pack if any game ever was. The game I really want to play on the VFX-1 is System Shock which will be the next candidate for a replay.

Bioforge Review – Edge

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Pix

Ultima 4 on the NES will have to wait for now as my Trio64V+ card arrived earlier than expected and despite the warnings in my motherboard manual it appears to work perfectly. It’s cured the problems I was having getting 3D to work in some games on the VFX-1 meaning that I can actually play System Shock in 3D. Being able to walk round a VR Citadel Station is truly glorious although still not without issues which I’ll get to another time. I’d already started playing Terra Nova with the old graphics card so I’ll get back to that first.

While that has my attention, here is a surprisingly critical review of Bioforge from the June 1995 Edge magazine:-

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