Origin historian Pix has fired up a copy of the Apple IIGS port of Ultima 1, and will be playing it through over the coming days. Or weeks. Let’s face it, it’s Ultima 1.

The IIGS was the final variant of the Apple II series coming out in 1986 two years after the Macintosh. The GS stood for graphics and sound with the GS supporting a 12 bit palette of 4096 colours up to a resolution of 640 x 200. Only 16 colours could be shown at once without CPU intensive scanline palette swapping techniques but this still put it ahead of most of the competition back in 86. It also supported wavetable music which is of surprisingly high quality. As so often with Apple the pricepoint was well outside of the mainstream consumer and the main client remained schools with one of the key selling points here being that it retained compatibility for previous Apple II software.

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The IIGS port was programmed by veteran developer Bill Heineman who had previously worked on the Bard’s Tale series among numerous other titles. Bill had already ported other classic titles to the IIGS such as Out Of The World/Another World and used the same team small team for this project. These games were only sold directly through Vitesse for a brief time and later through Shareware Solutions until the all too early death in 2010 of Joe Kohn who ran the company. The rights for the software reside with Rebecca Heineman these days and while it will hopefully see a new release eventually, it is unavailable for the moment.

It’s not clear from the text, but I wonder if Pix is aware that Bill Heineman is now known as Rebecca Heineman?

At any rate, it would appear that he’s finding it a bit of a slog:

At first glance the gameplay doesn’t appear to have been altered but I’m soon finding myself struggling to progress. The creatures in this port deal out far, far more damage than any other version I’ve played. This damage appears to increase the lower down a dungeon you go. I was finding myself unable to go past level 2 for fear of not getting back out again. This improved to a degree once I got some better equipment and raised my stats but with the best equipment in the game I’ve still been hit for over 400 points of damage in one hit by a lich on level 8 of a dungeon. I’m finding it difficult to the extent of being close to broken with my only chance of getting in and out of the lower levels being loads of ladder spells. I’m coping but it’s certainly adding some challenge to proceedings. I could normally blast through Ultima 1 in an hour or so but I’m many hours past that already without the end in sight.

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As for other differences, I was unable to buy an aircar anywhere on the starting continent despite levelling up to level 3 (which has always worked in the past). I ended up having to buy a frigate first and go elsewhere. Also, the signposts which raise stats would previously do so by an ever increasing amount as you got nearer 99. Here they work the opposite way around and raise by decreasing amounts.

Like I said above…weeks.