My apologies go out to Andrew Owen here; I had drafted this story for publication in late November, and then never got around to actually publishing it. Which is a shame, because this update — however brief it may seem — actually speaks to some very clever software design happening beneath the surface of U3.5: Pax Britannia.

So, back in November, Andrew shared an update as to his then-recent work on U3.5: Pax Britannia on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group:

I’ve improved the character generator graphics in U3.5. They used to be 2 colors per 8×8 pixel cell. Now they are 2 colors per 8×2 pixel cell.

For the technically-inclined, he offered this additional explanation in the comments of the post:

The target platform is limited to 2 colors per 8×8 cell. But I use raster racing code to improve on that. There’s a hardware back buffer so by updating the attributes (sacrificing CPU cycles) for the screen that is not displayed and switching between the two every 2 scan lines I can get 8×2 color. In the game itself I use a different technique to get 8×1 color in a smaller window. The screen is 256×192 but I’m only using 256×160 for these screens as the last four rows of the display are just monochrome text.

The end result, at any rate, is that the images look much, much better than you would expect them to on a Spectrum system.