Contra my expectations, Pix has more or less finished his playthrough of the Apple IIGS port of Ultima 1. Not in the way you might expect, however:

…I’d had plenty of practice rescuing princesses so one more to get the time machine wasn’t going to be difficult or at least that’s what I thought…

This first part went OK but was followed by a scouring of every part of the map looking for the time machine and not finding it. I tried rescuing all the other princesses to see if that would help and searched again to no avail. I can only assume that there is a bug in this port which can stop the time machine appearing and since I didn’t fancy starting from scratch, this playthrough has come to a slightly premature end.

That’s unfortunate. Game-breaking bugs are never fun.

Equally, while this is the most modern (such as it is) port of Ultima 1, Pix doesn’t count it as a favourite:

… I would have to go for the FM Towns version instead. That has the advantage of intro and outro graphics, textured dungeons and no game-breaking bugs that I’m aware of. It has the disadvantage of sharing the music and graphics with 2 & 3 on the system but judged on its own merits has to come out on top as far as I’m concerned.

If any of you happen to have an old savegame from the IIGS port that is located near the end, post-time machine, Pix would be interested to grab a copy of it from you, so that he can see how the game ends for himself. But absent that, he has been stalled in his progress, and isn’t particularly keen on replaying the game in its entirety due to its steep difficulty curve.