U2 Upgrade – CGA Composite Mode

The CGA modes of Ultima 2 & 3 are pretty horrible to look at. In fact, that was my primary motivation for starting this project 20ish years ago. But they were never really intended to be viewed that way. With CGA Composite, the alternating magenta-and-black pixels of the water tiles appear as a smooth, deep blue. Alternate them in the opposite order (black then magenta)? The hue becomes the red that’s used on the brick tiles in the towns and castles.

CGA Composite mode is the main feature that I originally had planned for the next release. And it’s still planned (in fact it’s done), but I just had a few detours along the way. Fortunately, I was able to reuse the algorithm I wrote for the Ultima 3 Upgrade with a bit of refactoring & shared code. That was a pretty massive time saver.

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