Dino the Dark Dragon has restarted his attempt to reverse engineer Ultima 1, which he has long called Ultima 1 Revenge (REVENGE being an acronym for REVerse ENGineering Effort):

A few weeks ago, I rebooted my old engine port of Ultima 1, which I call Ultima 1 Revenge. It’s got a home on BitBucket where you can get info, the source code, and some downloads.

Today, I have released the first demo since the reboot. You can grab it from the downloads page. Just configure the path to your original Ultima 1 folder (instructions are on the homepage) and you’re good to go. You can roam around Sosaria, use Inform and Search (‘I’ key) to identify locations, toggle full screen (F10), and cycle through different means of transport (square bracket keys).

This project has always been a casual one and will inevitably experience periods of rapid or slow progress. In fact, very soon, this project will go on hiatus for a few weeks – you can blame that on the Ultima Dragons 25th Anniversary Bash. 🙂

If you’re a member of the Ultima Dragons group on Facebook, you already knew about this; Dino posted a progress report there a few days ago:

…water is now animated, Inform & search is partly done, and an intermittent crash has been fixed. Text rendering and positioning is now virtually indistinguishable from the original, and hits/food turns red when below 100.

And, indeed, he announced the release of the demo there as well.

You can download Ultima 1 Revenge, in its current state, from Dino’s page on BitBucket, or from the newly-refreshed Ultima 1 Revenge project entry here.