Pax Britannia! (Updated!)
Akalaupdate: Andrew has released images of all the towns in the game (Britain, Cove, Buccaneer’s Den, Fawn, Jhelom, Lord British’s Castle, Minoc, Montor, Moon, Paws, Skara Brae, Trinsic, Vesper and Yew), as well as the tileset (which is a hybrid of Ultima 3, Ultima 4, and Ultima 5’s tilesets). I have added this as a gallery component to the project entry.
Original Post: Over on the UDIC Facebook group, Andrew Owen has been posting small progress updates for a project he’s working on, which he has now titled Pax Britannia: Ultima 3.5. I think I first took note of the project when he posted a screenshot of Montor back in January:
Technically the two Montors.
In a comment to the Montor picture, he describes the game’s engine thusly:
I’m writing the engine for am 8-bit (Z80-based) computer that never had a version of Ultima released for it back in the day. It has 128K of RAM, a 256×192 pixel display (with two colours per cell – although I have a software workaround for that which extends it to 8×1 attributes in the view window), and no standard disk system (so I plan to do the whole thing as single load from tape). It has no video chip, so the screen is stored in main RAM. Oh and the extra RAM is paged in banks of 16K (hence the 128×128 map limit). I’ve solved the problem of the display size by reducing the view window to 9×9 (as per U6) and using a 6×8 font. You might well ask why I don’t do it on something more modern, but I enjoy the challenge. On the flip side there are emulators for the target machine available for just about any device you care to name (it should look lovely on the Nintendo DS).
As I said, this was all back in January. I took note of it then, but failed to follow up on it. It was brought back to mind when Andrew posted the “in progress” menu screen that he has made for the game:
See? Ultima 3.5!
Thus far, he hasn’t (that I’ve noticed) posted a link to a project website, nor has be posted downloads. Then again, given the platform the game is targeting, that’s really not surprising.
I’ll be adding a project entry for Pax Britannia in the next day or so, but in the meantime I have added a project entry for Pax Britannia. If you’re on Facebook, be sure to follow Andrew’s posts at the UDIC Facebook group for more information and updates as he posts them!
“You might well ask why I don’t do it on something more modern, but I enjoy the challenge.”
The same reason we’re all making 8bit CRPGs, there is a certain challenge to fitting a huge world and gaming system into 64k/128k machines and still having nice graphic output.
This makes four large scale 8bit CRPGs in development at the moment, very cool.
Um, have you heard of this?
http://www.PaxBritannia.com
It’s a series of steampunk novels that go under the name of Pax Britannia, which is also a registered trademark.
Just thought you ought to know.
Good to know! I’ll let Andrew know as well.
To be fair, I don’t think he intends to sell his game, and in fact he probably couldn’t anyway, not if he wants to label it an Ultima.
But I suppose that doesn’t really matter under copyright law, does it?
Update: Based on a cursory review of UK copyright law (where Mr. Owen is located), it would appear that it’s fine for him to use the name. I’m still looking over the details of what the laws say, and may have more to add to this later…but for now it doesn’t look like there’s an issue here.