Development
The development of the Ultima series originated on the Apple II series and every game thus far had been developed primarily on that platform. However, by 1990, the 8-bit computer market was declining rapidly and the plans for the game had finally outgrown the hardware's capabilities (excluding the 16-bit Apple IIGS, however its market size was too small to justify a port). Ultima VI became the first Ultima game to not be available on Apple II.
It was one of the first major PC games directly targeted to PC systems equipped with VGA graphics and a mouse, when the big gaming computer was still the Amiga. The game supported sound cards for music as well, which were not yet common when it was released. Other sound effects, such as the clashing of swords, magical zaps, or explosions, were still played through the PC speaker. The Amiga version was itself ported from the PC and due to a lack of reprogramming it was very slow and was generally considered unplayable without accelerator card on a first- or second-generation Amiga. The only 8-bit computer system to which the game was ported was the Commodore 64 due the fact that it still had a very sizable market share. The C64 version lacks many features of the PC version, not just in aesthetics (no portraits), but also in gameplay (no horses, no working gems, reduced NPC dialogs, simplified quests etc.); it is generally considered much worse than the earlier C64 Ultimas.
A port of the game for FM Towns platform was made primarily for Japanese market. This CD-ROM-based version included full speech in both English and Japanese. Remarkably, in this particular version voice acting was recorded at Origin, mostly by the people the characters were based on (with Richard Garriott as Lord British, Greg Dykes as Dupre, etc.), though not all personnel could be reached at the time of recording, so some substitutes were used.
The game came with a cloth map of Britannia and a Moonstone made from a black colored bit of glass. Slightly improved versions of the Ultima VI engine were also used for the Worlds of Ultima spin-off series.
The DOS version of Ultima VI may have sound and speed problems when running on modern computers and operating systems. However, it can run reliably in a DOSBox environment. An engine remake project called Nuvie, similar to the goals of xu4, Exult.
Read more about this topic: Ultima VI: The False Prophet
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