Over at the Wing Commander CIC, there’s an article about a new generation of AI-powered video enhancement tools that can upscale even the grainy, low-resolution cutscenes from Wing Commander 4 all the way to 4K…and have the result come out looking much, much better than the original.

By now you’ve probably seen ODVS‘ amazing enhanced video footage, but you haven’t seen it quite like this! Due to previous limitations in what the AI/neural net tools could do, the best quality material he was able to generate in 2020 worked out to 1080p resolution. Aside from a few limited upscaling tests early on, he hasn’t gone for Ultra HD until now. This is still a first cut at the new resolution, but even this preliminary 4K experiment is very impressive!

You can find a sample video here; the results are impressive, to say the very least. Not perfect; there are some noticeable artifacts in areas of high motion in the upscaled video. But for a low-resolution image upscaled to 4K, it looks far, far better than it should.

Which…has me wondering. We know from some years ago that it’s trivially easy to swap out videos for (at least) Ultima 9. Could similar technology to the above — if not the same software — be used on some of the cutscenes from, say, Ultima 9, Ultima 8, and maybe even Ultima 7?