some strange Ultima VI issues - stacks, capital letters, and ALT codes

[Booper]

Hello ScummVM Team!

I've been enjoying Ultima VI in the ScummVM engine (version 2.6.0, July 17 2022) these last few days and, after a little tinkering, believe I've found a happy medium between the game's original interface and the improvements that Scumm provides via the Nuvie mod. It's great having an expanded field of view and being able to drag and drop items between characters, and I really enjoy the save system. For reference, I'm playing the game via a copy I purchased from GOG.com.

But after playing for a bit, I noticed three strange behaviors in the game that I thought I'd bring up here before submitting official bug reports:

1) Outside of entering a name for the Avatar at the beginning of the game, I am unable to enter capital letters in the keyword parser during conversations. I've tried using both capslock and the shift button. I don't think this is a game breaking issue because I don't think the keyword dialogue system cares about capital letters, but I thought it was strange and wondered what might be causing it. It may be related to the next error I found.

2) The ALT codes that are commonly used for cheats don't seem to work inside ScummVM. For instance, ALT 213 is supposed to show you a map of the area you are in and give you a string of numbers that includes your karma score, the date, the time, etc. It's documented on several sites and I'm able to make it work in the vanilla DOSBox version of Ultima VI. But in ScummVM, the text parser returns a "what?" message any time I try to enter the code. I've tried using both the keypad and the numbers along the top of my keyboard, and I've tried getting this to work with numlock both on and off. I also noticed that pressing the SHIFT key returns a "what?" message any time I use it. Is there something about how ScummVM treats the ALT and SHIFT keys that might change the intended behavior?

3) I'm unable to break up stacks of items in ScummVM - whether I'm trying to move 250 coins or 10 torches, the game always moves the entire stack instead of asking me, as the original game does, what amount of each item I want to move. I triple checked this in DOSBox and confirmed it works properly in the original game. I then tried this in the last available build of Nuvie (before it was brought into ScummVM) and realized the same problem exists there too. I wonder if the improvements made to the interface cause this?

For reference, I'm running Windows 11 Home, Version 10.0.22000 Build 22000.

If submitting this as a bug seems worthwhile, let me know and I'll do my best to get it into the system over the weekend.

Thanks!

[Booper]

Just in case anyone's looking into this, I discovered that you can drop stacked items from your inventory to the floor, and then the "how many" or "how much" prompt comes up, allowing me to split up gold, torches, food, etc. on the floor. Just doesn't seem to work when moving items directly between the inventories of different characters.