About Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress

Requires 64k.
Optional Mockingboard for music during Exodus portion.

This collection and the Apple II platform is notable for having an enhanced version of Ultima II not available in other publishings. It is further notable because it was sold for less than 2 months before being discontinued; making the enhance version of Ultima II a very rare and exclusive Apple II product. Enhanced Ultima II is readily distinguishable by having a blue boarder around the picture. There are many improvments as well. Additionally, the version of Ultima III was enhanced, but this version was also available in other packages. Finally, Ultima I that was ported from BASIC source code to pure assembly code is available in this package (but this Ultima I was released on it own in 1985).

This package is the only way to get the Apple version of the Ultima II remake.

Origin briefly had a publishing arrangement with Sierra On-Line. It went badly. Ultimately it was Ultima II royalties (as in, not being paid at all for non-Apple version sales) that pushed Ultima's creator into exiting the agreement and founding Origin Systems. However, royalties were far from the only issue. Numerous disagreements over Ultima II's publishing where especially memorable to Lord British. Sierra fought efforts by Origin to republish Ultima games. In the case of Ultima II, they succeed in blocking Origin from using certain art that Sierra actually couldn't legally use themselves (but they didn't let that stop them from using the art anyway). Moving ahead; By 1989, management at Origin was no longer interested in investing effort or money into the Apple II platform because it would not make a worthwhile return. No one at Origin was forbidden from making Apple II games; some personal projects were completed for it. Ultima VI was started for Apple II, then changed to Apple IIGS, then abandoned in favor of the IBM-PC version. Many of the features that were possible on the IBM-PC could have been done on the Apple II (witness that the Commodore 64 received two ports of Ultima VI), but the dwindling Apple II market did not justify the effort. However, Lord British just had to do something about Ultima II for Apple II. It received a makeover much as the original Ultima for Apple II had. It was packed with the Ultima I remake and Ultima III with enhancements, presumably to make it more valuable with very minimal additional investment in the Apple II market. The Ultima Trilogy package would be offered in this form to other platforms as well. However, The FM Towns version of the trilogy contained 3 re-remakes.