To celebrate the release of Ultima 6 on Good Old Games today, Sergorn Dragon wanted to take a look at some of the different ports of the game…most of which were nowhere near as good as the PC version.

The 16 Bits Ultima VI ports obviously needed to be toned down a bit on account of the Amiga and Atari ST lacking the horspower that the PC had. This happened on the graphical front of course (with the Amiga and Atari ST ports respectively scaled back to 32 and 16 colors), but almost more surprinsigly — especially for the Amiga — on the musical front (most likely to cut on disk space usage).

So, a few musical tracks were basically removed from these ports, notably three of the returning tracks from Ultima V: “Ultima Theme”, “Engagement&Melee” and “Capn John’s Hornepipe”. Also missing are “Audchar Gargl Zenmur” (which is replaced ingame by the “Character Creation Theme”) and the “Ending Theme”.

The remaning tracks actually sport a few differences, notably the introduction, but most importantly “Stones”…which sounds pretty much butchered. The Atari ST version also has musical tracks that are a bit shorter than their Amiga counterpart, resulting of a bit of musical mess. But still, interesting to hear!