Ultima 4 Remastered, by MagerValp and the Genesis Project, is a vastly improved version of Ultima 4 for the Commodore 64, Ultima 4 Remastered features improved graphics, enhanced art during cutscenes and the character creation sequence, and numerous bugfixes.

This project began life as Ultima 4 Gold, the primary feature of which was a rewritten loader for the game that ostensibly supported larger hard drive capacities. However, after finding that the loader from that release was…not particularly functional, MagerValp took it upon himself to rewrite and improve upon his original work.

The result is Ultima 4 Remastered, which also includes numerous bugfixes…including some that have been adapted from the patches hosted here for the PC version of the game. In all, MagerValp estimates that around 90% of the bugs in the original C64 version of Ultima 4 have been eliminated in his version. Dialogue paths — along with numerous typos — have also been corrected and adjusted.

The biggest visible change, however, is in the game’s graphics; MagerValp was able to transplant many of the colour tables and graphics from Ultima 5 into Ultima 4, and was also able to bring over features such as the ability to select an active character in combat. Equally exciting was his enlistment of Vanja ‘Mermaid’ Utne to redo the art for the game’s cutscenes, including the character creation sequence. Her work thereupon is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Other features of Ultima 4 Remastered include the ability to quit and save the game when in dungeons, a prompt asking players if they want to return to Britannia when they draw near to the edge of a town or other area, joystick control, and a new system of gradual lighting in dungeons that gets darker as torches grow close to burning out. The game runs from a single disk; no swapping is necessary at all. And the game’s music will not be interrupted when data is loaded from the disk.

You can dowwnload Ultima 4 Remastered from its brand-new project entry here, or from its entry at the C-64 Scene Database.