Development
Wizardry was initially coded in BASIC, but was rewritten in Pascal after BASIC proved too slow to be playable. The game was then delayed to wait for a run-time system which would allow the game to be played on any Apple computer. Ultimately the game took two and a half man-years to complete. Wizardry drew influences from earlier games from the PLATO system, most notably the game Oubliette.
The Commodore 64/128 versions of Wizardry 1-3 share a common code base with the Apple originals, as they all use the same run-time 6502 Pascal interpreter which provides support for overlays and low-level functions to interface with the hardware. USCD Pascal was also used for the IBM versions, but with an x86 version of the interpreter.
Lengthy load time and extensive disk access was a problem with Wizardry; however, the Commodore versions, which particularly suffer from this, provided a variety of workarounds. In C128 mode, the VDC memory is used to store overlays and REUs are supported in both C64 and C128 mode. Wizardry 2-5 also detect if 16k or 64k of VDC memory is present and can use the 1571 drive's burst mode for faster load time.
Read more about this topic: Wizardry: Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord
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