It has been quite some time since we last heard any news from Zedex Dragon regarding the development of U3.5: Pax Britannia, an Ultima 3-inspired RPG for the ZX Spectrum. However, as of 2025, he has resumed working on the project, and has even posted a new development log to the Pax Britannia subdomain here at the Codex.
It’s 2025 and Pax Britannia is back in active development. Most of the codebase is about 11 years old at this point. But, it was written in a fairly modular way. The first task is stitching it all together. The easiest way to do that without breaking anything was to make a virtual devkit. The target platform has 128K of program (the game and data). The devkit includes an additional 64K of space for a monitor and test routines.
At present the world map, town maps, encounter maps, font, tile and audio tests are working. It’s also possible to export the game package. Exiting from the monitor starts the game, and you can return to the monitor by pressing the NMI (non-maskable interrupt) button or quitting the game.
[U3.5] The basic world map viewer is done. It reads a 32×32 chunk of the world map (128×128) into the buffer. So now you can see the whole map. But it’s quite slow because it’s refreshing the entire buffer every time you move (1,024 bytes). Next up is to scroll the buffer and fetch only the missing 32 bytes, which will be around 32× faster.
You can even see a short video of the development kit in action, in Zedex’s most recent post as of the time of this article going up.
If you want to follow development of Pax Britannia, the Ultima DragonsFacebook group is probably the place to go to find the most up-to-date news. That said, the project has its own subdomain here at the Codex, which Zedex will hopefully continue to update periodically, as he makes more progress on the game.
Zedex Dragon's tarot card deck, which he produced for U3.5: Pax Britannia. Much of the artwork was inspired by the major and minor arcana cards featured in Ultima Forever.
