Computer ports of Ultima VI

Ultima VI was the last game in the series to recieve a port to various systems. The gap between the ever-growing PC technology and the other systems started to become really noticable and caused Origin to make the decision to soley produce the games on the PC in the future.

The SNES-Port of Ultima VI is not discussed here, it has a seperate article.

The IBM-PC Original
The original game for the first time was developed on a IBM-PC, after development on the Apple II was scrapped. This is very noticable right away.

The game is much more detailled than its predecessors with everything being on a single-scale map. The graphics are now shown in 256 color VGA at a resolution of 320x200. It makes a huge difference, all the black of the previous installments has vanished from the screen, Britannia now looks really alive and very colorful.

Sound is also a new feature on the PC. While previous installments on the PC didn't have the music of the others ports, Ultima has it from the start since by 1990, sound cards for the PC were available. The music can play on something low-class as an Adlib card up to high-end sound boards like Roland Sound.

Also the game is finally fully playable with the mouse and icon driven. The interface of Ultima VI is a lot more user friendly than the previous ones.

The game was retailed on either four 3.5" floppies or seven 5.25" floppies. 

The Amiga and Atari ST Ports
The Amiga and Atari ST ports of Ultima VI were based on the PC original. By now the limitations of these two computer systems became painfully obvious.

Since the Amiga and Atari ST can only display a maximum of 32 colors at the same time, the VGA graphics had to be scaled down. The result were rather ugly graphics with many color artifacts. The is especially noticable in the introducion and the character portraits. The alternative of using the PC EGA graphics was not used, despite being more fitting for the task.

Sound is another issue. The full sountrack of the PC original was impossible to implement because of the strain the game put on computer power and floppy space. To compensate, the music was vastly reduced.

The ports are both very slow since only meager reprogramming was done, resulting in a game that essentially still would run better on a PC. Also the number of floppy disks (thre 3.5" for the Amiga and four 3.5" for the Atari ST) make the game inconvenient to use. 

The C64-Port
This port, the only 8-bit port of the game, was changed so much, that it has got its own article: C64-Port of Ultima VI.



The FM-Towns Port
This port is something different. Graphically and content-wise, the port is a replica of the PC original. However, there are two things that make the Japan-only port stick out:

Besides an English mode, the game also has a Kanji mode, which is shown in the screenshots.

The more important thing is, that the game is completely voiced. It is notable that mostly the people from Origin representing the characters (like Richard Garriott voicing Lord British and David Watson voicing Iolo) were used, but not all, since not everyone was available.

It has to be noted that although it was a nice idea, the voice track is legendary bad, as at that time, there wasn't yet any experience with voicing video games. Also, the developers usually aren't trained voice actors (the intro of Ultima VII/2 proves this with Richard Garriott).