The Ultima 3 Upgrade v3.0 Has Been Released
It’s been some time since we’ve heard from Michael C. “Voyager Dragon” Maggio, Ultima fans (although we at Aiera will always be indebted to him for his excellent work maintaining The Reconstruction for several years). It has been a decade since he last released an update to his Ultima 3 Upgrade, a comprehensive update package for Ultima 3 that improves the sound and graphics of the game.
But as of yesterday, he has released version 3.0 of the Ultima 3 Upgrade, after teasing us with not one, but two images of Ultima 3 running in different graphics modes. He has also open-sourced the project, and has created a SourceForge page for it as a result.
Naturally, he has released a new download package, which I have mirrored on the project entry here. He has also, however, released a lengthy story telling the tale of this version of the upgrade’s development, and how it ultimately all came to be thanks to a hard drive failure.
Give it a read! And then grab the new download from either here or there and give it a try!
Sweet!!!
Wonderful! I’ve been wanting this for a long time!
It is a pretty sweet-looking package, to be sure!
I tried it out, works beautifully.
By the Gods, Ultima lives.
I never did complete a true version of Ultima III. I did complete the NES version with the strange graphics & strange music (I muted the sound & Metallica’s Master of Puppets album became the game’s soundtrack.)
I remember loading up the C64 version of the game to hear the music in the background whilst doing chores about the house.
It took years of Ebaying to acquire a decent complete version of the game & even longer for the hint book. I had the game sans box prior (after regretfully bartering my Wizardry collection plus other C64 titles…damn being a naive teenager addicted to Ultima; now I seek to replace my old Wizardry collection), but the previous owner inked up the cloth map. Two cans of aqua net hairspray later, I was able to remove 85% of the ink & thus sought a mint map. These were the days before internet usage became common.
This game is historically important because without it, we wouldn’t have Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, or any other tile based game that came out after 1983. We owe the existence of tile-based RPGs to Richard Garriott & Ken Arnold, period.
I -WILL- play this version & -WILL- do something graphically with Ultima III whether it is with the PC version or something completely different & new through Exult (praise be the multi-map support!)
I will probably look into tinkering with the VGA sprites, but I am glad that there is now a PC version with VGA capability & with the classic music!
Ultima III is special because it was -THE- game that got Origin going & is a true RPG & thus is worthy of study. You can clearly see how Garriott matured during the Ultima I & II era. You can certainly feel the remnants when you play Ultima IV.
This is great. I always liked those patches from Voyager and it’s nice to see he is back with more 🙂
I hope he continues his work with the u2 and u5 upgrades as well, but so far, this alone is just more than enough.
Somebody should contact GOG and tell them to link to this new patch.
GOG doesn’t officially link to me; if people ask about patches, they get directed to the forum post at GOG that does link here.
So get thee to GOG and spread the word!
That’s very neat! Now I’ll go and hope about an updated Ultima 5 Upgrade patch!