Your “Ultima 5” Avatar Needs a Red Tabbard

Have you ever noticed that while the Avatar is depicted on the Ultima 5 box as wearing red, in-game the character sprite is clearly wearing green?

Zhelkas was never satisfied that the Avatar sprite in Ultima 5 was depicted as wearing green, when on the game’s box art the character was clearly depicted as wearing red.

As such, Zhelkas figured out how to edit TILES.16 (the file containing all of Ultima 5’s graphics) and swapped out that green tabbard for a red one, in most of the Avatar-specific sprites (including the magic carpet sprites). Sprites that were also used for NPCs in the game were left untouched.

You can grab the modified graphics file at this shiny new project entry here at the Codex. Installation is fairly straightforward: rename the existing TILES.16 file in your Ultima 5 directory to TILES.OLD, and then copy the new TILES.16 file into place.