I’m happy to announce that the Ultima 2 Upgrade v2.0 is now out and available for download! You can find it in the download section.
When I started building this version, I had originally intended to deliver smaller and more incremental releases. My focus area was to break out the CGA and EGA logic into video drivers. However, for various reasons, I realized that there were several additional issues that needed tackling. And for these particular issues a major version bump like v2.0 seemed like the right time to do it.
Over the past month I’ve blogged about the features I’ve been working into this release. Please feel free to drill down if you’d like more information.
- Extraction of CGA and EGA logic into drivers
- Improved Character Creation & Saved Game location
- Themes & custom tilesets
- Patching support for multiple releases
- Time gate bug fix
- Hotel clerk fix
What’s great about items #3 & #4 is that much of the work is reusable for other upgrades. There are already other alternative tilesets for Ultima 3, and the patcher is all shared code. I was also able to accelerate building out #1 due to code reuse. I leveraged all the driver work I did on U3 several years ago to refactor this one more quickly.
With several big items out of the way for v2.0 I’m hopeful I can reach my goal of smaller iterations for v2.1 and beyond.
Next up, Composite CGA emulation!
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