But, in order to assure that even new IIGS owners could partake in the same joys as previous generations of Apple II users, Rebecca Heineman and Joe Kohn teamed up again to make the IIGS version of Ultima I available from Joe Kohn's small software distribution business, Shareware Solutions II. Ultima I for the IIGS was available for sale for only a short time, as Vitesse is no longer in business. With super hi-res graphics and a synthLAB-based musical soundtrack, Ultima I for the IIGS was brought to market by Vitesse, and it received critical acclaim from Apple IIGS game players. (Text from ) In 1994, IIGS programming master Rebecca Heineman assembled the same team of programmers, musicians and artists who ported "Out of this World" to the IIGS, with the goal of creating an updated GS/OS-specific version of Ultima I for the IIGS. The port was sold on a single 5.25" floppy disk and is still commonly available on various compilations. For example, armor does not protect the player at all while in the dungeons, which makes the fights in there much harder than on the Apple and C64 versions of the re-release. Since the PC has a CPU that is very different from those used in the C64 and the Apple II, the assembly code for the game had to be rewritten, introducing some new bugs. The port however does have a problem: there is no frame limiter built into the game, which makes it virtually impossible to play it on a modern system, unless being artificially slowed down. The port also got a new title screen, which looks nicer than the one on the other two ports, but in turn is only minimally animated. The game is using a 16-colors EGA mode, which is the same number of colors as the C64, but unlike the C64, the PC EGA hardware has fewer limitations on placement of colors than the C64 with its color cells system. Right from the start, the graphics of this port are clearly superior to the ones on the C64 and Apple II. Since it is a 16-bit system, things are quite different here. The port for the IBM PC was finished one year after the other two. The game was released on a single double-sided 5.25" floppy disk. This does make mapping virtually impossible. Due to a bug with the dungeons, their layout never stays the same, as it should be, and instead is changed every time when entering the level again. The symptom of this is that the space combats are not winnable on the mentioned newer Apple models, which makes completion of the game impossible. Additionally, the game is incompatible with the enhanced Apple IIe, the Apple IIc, Apple IIc+, and Apple IIGS, because the outer-space combat section uses so-called illegal opcodes of the MOS Technology 6502 CPU used in the first Apples, which do not exist on the Western Design Center 65C6 CPUs used in the later systems. The keyboard assignment for the movement keys only forms (roughly) a diamond on the original Apple II and Apple II+ systems, which makes the game awkward to use on the later Apple IIe system. The game is also plagued by glitches and other programming errors (something that was common at the time). Much of the game was programmed in Applesoft BASIC, making it hard to port it to other systems with different BASIC dialects. He himself was amazed he still got the job done properly. The graphics tablet he had to use was so poorly made, it constantly broke down. A fun fact is, that the title picture was drawn by no other than Denis Loubet. However, nothing was yet animated (animation of water tiles came in Ultima II, animated characters made their debut in Ultima III). The game sported a (for the time) impressive representation of the terrain with the help of tiles. This was the very first incarnation of the game, the one that held the name " Ultima" for the first time.
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