This novel port of Ultima 3 was released in late March of 2025. VIC 20 Ultima III is a faithful conversion of the original Commodore 64 release of Ultima 3, based mainly on Ultima III Gold, an enhanced C64 version of the game released by MagerValp in 2007. Aleksi also drew inspiration from Sven Carlberg’s Game Boy Color remake of Ultima III, released in 2001.

There are several differences between these versions under the hood, however. Most of MagerValp’s enhancements were not included due to memory restrictions. The remaining code was disassembled, and text had to be adapted to the 12-character-wide text window. Baskerville decompression on-the-fly is used instead of Exomizer (a stylistic choice on the part of the developer), and a tailored map compression algorithm reduces the loading and saving times of Sosaria. Town maps, NPC data, and dialogue were combined into a single file per location to minimize searching and loading times. VIC 20-specific graphics and sound routines were created from scratch. The 16×16 pixel tile graphics from the C64 version were carefully adapted to 8×16 flat-pixel tiles in order to be compatible with the VIC 20.

The VIC 20 was a Commodore computer, the predecessor of the Commodore 64. Its memory was a paltry 20 KB of ROM and 5 KB of RAM, though the latter could be expanded to 32 KB at some cost (the Commodore 64 shipped with 64 KB of RAM and the same 20 KB of ROM). While the VIC 20 did sell exceedingly well, it was not a platform that Origin Systems targeted for game releases…apart from Escape from Mt. Drash, of course.

You can grab a copy of VIC 20 Ultima 3 from the project’s home page, or from the shiny new project entry here at the Codex. The download includes the VIC 20 emulator image (in D64 format) and a player reference card.