I kinda agree with Arky (yes, it does happen). Given the lack of a bitmap mode on the PCE, a platformer (or shooter, or other simple, sprite-blitty game) might be an easier start. That said, if you do the first-person dungeon in chunks, un-animated, it probably wouldn't be so bad at all. What I mean by that is instead of walking forward smoothly, you walk forward one square and your perspective on the dungeon jumps forward.
Chunk moving is way easier to do, but it's still a pretty difficult task overall. It's not the keeping track of position in dungeon part.. it's the drawing of tiles that look well, then managing them in VRAM with your other stuff... and then putting them on screen properly. Not to mention it's a pain to test that kinda crap out. You have to make sure you can redraw the screen quick enough so the transition from block to block isn't a boring, laggy process. Some old games fall victim to that crap. Every step you get to watch the screen slowly appear again. Sucks.
Has anyone managed to determine how Double Dungeons does its animated step-forward bit? There are other systems from that era which surely do the same.
It's doing raycasting, IIRC. Raycasting without floating point nonsense is doable on systems of this era (There was a recent MSX2 homebrew game doing it all Wolf3D style), but you will note the playfield is frikkin small... and lacks variety. You can practically see each repeated 8x8 tile every time you turn in that game.
The biggest culprit of that is Phantasy Star. The dungeons have no variety to them! Games that do block-based dungeons usually have more variety. Look at Pool of Radiance.
Don't worry too much about Ultima.
I already said I'd do it, and I usually do what I say.
Besides, the people want KEEN. Truthfully, I'd love to see an Ultima VI port to PCE, that uses the PCE mouse. that would be wicked.
it'd also be a giant pain in the cock. That game did some amazing nonsense with memory management/resources/lack of load times. Seamless transitions! W T F
