Some of you may recall that Origin Systems historian Pix played through the demo of the Palm OS port of Ultima 1 a few years ago. This port — and its two follow-ups, ports of Ultima 2 and Ultima 3 — were produced by a developer who went by the handle SoftwareByPaul online. He sold his wares — all Palm-focused apps of one sort or another — through a Geocities page, which went offline for several years when that service was shuttered.

SoftwareByPaul did release demos of all three Ultima ports. These allowed for a short experience of each game, but due to certain restrictions — the inability to buy food, for example — they could not be played at length. With the SoftwareByPaul website offline, and with the person or people behind it seemingly unreachable even after it was brought back online as part of one of the Geocities recovery projects, it seemed as though the full versions of the ports were lost to time.

However, somebody reached out to Pix recently with what appeared to be copies of the full versions of all three games

Out of the blue, I was contacted last week by someone going by the name of randomdays claiming to have found the full versions in some undisclosed part of the internet. On first inspection, I thought that these were going to be the same demos as the files are nearly identical in size. However, having had a quick go on all 3, they don’t have the obvious limitations of the demo in terms of buying food and the nag text on death isn’t there either. I’ll withhold some judgement that they are complete until someone has actually played through the whole thing – it’s feasible it may be a hacked version of the demo but I’m guessing that we do indeed have the full games here.

It’s not every day a new Ultima turns up. These should be interesting ports also with Ultima 1 and 2 adding 4 player parties. I’ve dug out my trusty old Tungsten T3, have ordered a new battery for it (which are remarkedly still being sold) and intend to have a go at a playthrough assuming I can get that battery fitted. 

You can find copies of all three games for download at Pix’s site; I’ve also created project entries for the Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 ports, and have updated the project page for the Ultima 3 port here at the Codex. And should those resources fail, PalmDB also appears to have copies of all three games.

As Pix notes, it’s not every day that a new — or, in this case, lost — Ultima fan project turns up. So if you’ve got an old Palm device at home somewhere, you might want to dig it out and give these three Ultima ports a try!