C64-port of Ultima VI

Ultima VI has an interesting design history. Originally, Richard Garriott wanted to again make the game with the Apple II as a basis, an 8-bit system. However, after roughly a year he'd noticed that it was useless for the scope of the planned game and scrapped everything to instead move the development platform to the IBM-PC with VGA graphics and soundcard. Development went very fast after that decision.

However, after the game was finished and in the stores, the matter of ports came, since the PC by 1990 still wasn't the ultimate top dog in gaming. While the ports for the Amiga and Atari ST were simple, they just had to create a 16-bit conversion with less colors and sound, the still sizable market share of the Commodore 64 8-bit computer was tempting for Origin, especially since then they could have the complete second trilogy on that system as well. That essentially turned back the wheel of time, despite Garriott having designed Ultima VI especially for 16-bit systems.

Origin got the help from Axel of Imagitec Design and created this port that hit the shelves roughly one year after the release of the original. The result is... interesting, to say the least.

Technical
Obviously, porting a game of this size and complexity to the C64, with its rather severe limitations (64KB memory, 16 color graphics at 160x200 resolution, and disks formatted for at most 170KB per side), required a huge effort. While it is quite frankly amazing such a port could be attempted at all under the circumstances and still be a commercially viable product, many compromises and sacrifices had to be made in order to pull it off.

The final version of the game comes on 3 double-sided 5,25" DD floppy disks. The sides are named Surface, Dungeon, Populace A, Populace B, Populace C and Game. The Surface disk contains the overworld of Britannia and the Gargoyle lands, divided into cities and the wilderness. The Dungeon disk contains all the dungeons of the game, while the three Populace disks are filled with all the conversations. Lastly, the Game disk holds the intro, endgame and character creation, and is used to initially boot the game.

While the division of the areas is at least (mostly) logical, the game designers shot themselves into the foot with how conversations are handled. Instead of (for example) dividing Britannia into three chunks with the conversation data for each individual section included, the method ultimately used requires the player to do the following whenever talking to someone in-game, be it Lord British or a random NPC: Considering that this must be done for every person in the game, it quickly exhausts many players' patience and is often considered the biggest failing of this port. This is made even worse by the slow loading times, even for its era, of the standard Commodore 1541 floppy drive. (While there were faster disk drives available for the C64, not all of them were 100% compatible with the 1541 and thus were not gauranteed to work with all software on the market.)
 * You attempt to speak to a character.
 * You have to insert the appropriate Populace disk, and then wait for the data to load.
 * Then you have to re-insert the Surface disk, and wait through another disk access.
 * Only now you can talk to this person.

Since the C64 has no native mouse support (a mouse was available, but the hardware would recognize it only as a joystick), the control scheme had to be significantly altered. Most notably, the icon-driven interface is gone; instead, everything is done with keyboard commands, much as in the previous five Ultima games (U for use, D for drop, etc.). The joystick is used for moving and for aiming a crosshair, which is used to indicate an object you wish to perform an action on; a keyboard command is used to switch the crosshair between the main window and the inventory. This proved to be a very complicated command scheme, and is another often-cited criticism of this port.

What is missing
Because of the limitations of the system, they had to axe a number of things to make the game possible on the C64. A list of the missing things follows below:

These spells are missing from the game:
 * The game has no music outside the intro and endgame. It also has no Sound FX at all.
 * There are no character portraits at all. Obviously this otherwise would have bloated up the amount of data significantly.
 * The number of different usable items has been reduced. There are for example no Triple Crossbows and no powder kegs (meaning that doors have to be blasted open with the spell "Explosion").
 * The number of spells has been reduced, the list is below.
 * The size of the party is reduced from 8 to only 6.
 * To save space, the conversations have been streamlined so that they take up less space on the disks.
 * Horseriding is eliminated. The programmers use the excuse that the Gargoyles have eaten all the Horses. Only Smith the Horse is still there.
 * Peering is impossible, meaning that Peer Gems and the spell are missing.
 * The interactivity of the game world is reduced. For example, you can't any longer look into closets to find clothing and telescopes can't any longer be used.
 * Casting can be done without a spellbook. There is still one in the game, but it has no use.
 * The world itself is less detailed. For example, lots of the decorative items are missing and there are no tables in the game (when one is needed, they use wooden floor). Also there are no bags, they are all replaced by barrels.
 * The intro has less text and some pictures are missing.

1st Circle
 * Detect Magic
 * Detect Trap
 * Douse
 * Ignite

2nd Circle
 * Reappear
 * Trap
 * Untrap(Destroy Trap)
 * Vanish

3rd Circle
 * Repel Undead
 * Peer
 * Mass Awaken(Awaken All)

4th Circle
 * Poison Field
 * Animate

5th Circle
 * Insect Swarm
 * Pickpocket
 * Reveal
 * Seance

6th Circle
 * Clone
 * Confuse
 * Negate Magic
 * Replicate

7th Circle
 * Enchant
 * Fear(Cause Fear)
 * Wizard Eye

8th Circle
 * Eclipse
 * Turn to Slime
 * Armageddon