Computer ports of Ultima VI

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

The SNES-Port of Ultima VI is not discussed here, it has a separate 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. As far as known, Richard Garriott tried to develop the game on the Apple II for almost a year, before giving up. This is very noticeable right away.

The game is much more detailed 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 VI 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. However, sound effects were still only put out through the PC speaker.

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, enabling even beginners to play the game. Only conversations still had to be typed manually.

The game was retailed on either four 3.5" floppies or seven 5.25" floppies. While playing directly from the floppies was possible in theory, this resulted in an orgy of disk-swapping; the game was clearly intended mainly for installation to, and play from, a hard disk.

The game will run on all 100% IBM compatible PCs with at least 512K of RAM and a MS-DOS compatible operating system, but to run it well, a roughly 10 MHz system with VGA, sound card and mouse is needed. On systems that are much faster than that, it will run much too fast, ruining sound effects and making the player "zip" around the landscape at lightning speed, especially when the mouse is used for walking. This condition requires use of a slow-down program or an emulator.



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 obvious.

Since the Amiga 500 could only display a maximum of 32 colors at the same time and the Atari ST 16 colors, the VGA graphics simply couldn't be used. So they scaled down the VGA graphics to the palette of the two systems. While the result on the Amiga was pretty good for the platform, the Atari ST version was rather ugly with many color artifacts. This is especially noticeable in the introduction and the character portraits. On the Atari, the graphics also have a reddish tint that is rather distracting.

Sound is another issue. The full soundtrack 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: some tracks such as the Ultima Theme or Audchar Gargl Zenmur were simply removed and other tracks were simplified beyond recognition, notably Stones.

The ports are both very slow since only meager reprogramming was done and the computers just couldn't handle the engine, resulting in a game that essentially still would run better on a PC. When playing from disk, the game loaded every step characters walked, at least on Amiga 500. Also the number of floppy disks (three 3.5" for the Amiga and four 3.5" for the Atari ST) make the game inconvenient to use (require for instance to switch floppy every time you speak to a NPC, having a secondary disk drive solved that issue). This issue could be resolved if the game was installed on a hard drive, for those Amiga and Atari ST users who had it.

It should also be noted that the game had to be reinstalled from scratch (on floppy or HD) whenever one wanted to create a new character, a lenghty procedure. Obviously, the game ran with a much better speed if used on an Amiga 1200 or an Atari Falcon, combined being HD installed, thus resulting in fewer frustrations for the users.


 * Amiga Intro



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 PC-98 Port
Roughly a year after the original, this port for the japanese PC-98 system was released by Ponycanyon. Despite the name, this is a completely different computer system from the standard IBM-PC.

While the resolution of the game was 640x400, only the japanese writing and other text took advantage of this. All the graphics were not redrawn and instead simply scaled up for the new resolution. Also, since the PC-98 is only capable of displaying 16 colors at the same time, the EGA-palette of the original was converted, which makes it look similar to the ports on the Amiga and Atari ST.

As of now, no samples of the sound have come up, therefore nothing can be said about it and possible differences. Also, because of the Japanese language, it is difficult for persons who don't speak that language to find out if there are content differences.

The game was retailed on either two 3.5" floppies or two 5.25" floppies. However, it needed an extra save disk (the was no hard drive on the PC-98).



The FM-Towns Port
This port is something different. Graphically and content-wise, the port is a replica of the PC original. The music was overhauled and sounded nicer than the Soundblaster of the original and there are now proper sound effects. However, there are several 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 most important thing is that the game has a complete voice track. 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.

Even though it seemed like a great idea, the voice track is legendarily bad, as at that time Origin had little experience with voicing video games. Also, the developers usually weren't trained voice actors (the intro of Ultima VII Part Two proves this with Richard Garriott).

Another difference to the original is the fact that the conversation system had been overhauled. It is now similar to Ultima VII, with the player only being able to speak about topics that the Avatar is expected to know about. This closes numerous shortcuts in the game and makes sure that the plot has to be followed. This also means that the cheat menu had been removed.

Note that the screen layout didn't need to be redesigned since the higher resolution of the FM-Towns made it possible to store more screen content. The higher resolution also means that when there isn't a conversation, the game-system icons occupy the lower fourth of the screen.

In the main menu, another point named "voice credits" has been added, while the copy protection has been removed from the game.

A technical weakness of the port is a missing speed limiter, and as it's designed for a computer of the early 90s, the animation is very fast on newer systems. Despite this, there is lots of loading time.

The FM-Towns version has been completely solved, and a walkthrough can be found here:
 * The Walkthrough