When we looked at Camilo DelCódigo’s Ultima IX: Atonement last month, I mentioned that his GitHub also had a project called Open Sosaria on it. This project is a cross-platform engine for the very first iteration of Ultima, released for the Apple ][ back in 1981. Published by the California Pacific Computer Company, it later became Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. Camilo has been posting releases on the project’s GitHub page for several months now; version 0.5.0 came out in July and marked the point at which the game could be completed in the new engine, from character creation through to defeating Mondain. Version 0.6.0 followed in August with sound in every scene and an option to steal in towns.

According Camilo, the whole game is now in place:

• the overworld and the Time Machine,
• towns and castles,
• dungeons ten levels deep,
• space travel and first-person ship combat, including the road to becoming a Space Ace,
• the princess and the Gem of Immortality,
• the final fight with Mondain.

The sound copies the Apple II’s single speaker, which could only make clicks. Several sound effects aren’t recordings at all; they’re rebuilt from the timing loops in the game’s original machine code. The engine itself is written in C, and the repository includes none of the original game’s files, manuals or disk images.

You’ll need your own Apple ][ Ultima diskettes (or rather, images thereof) to play Open Sosaria. The Windows and Linux builds of version 0.6.0 look for program.dsk and player.dsk in the same folder as the program. There’s no ready-made Mac OS build yet, but you can build it from the source code.

You can grab the builds from the GitHub releases page, or from the project entry here on the Codex.