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name	publisher(developer)	year	description
Ultima III: Exodus	Origin	1984
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar	Origin (Origin Systems)	1985	Comes on two 5.25' disks. In 1997 the full version of this game was 'made available for free download' at selected sites by Origin. However, it remains proprietary and not defined as "freeware" or "public domain" (these downloads can disappear or the priced raised at any time at Electronic Art's option). Several homebrew upgrades exist for this game that add features such as VGA graphics and Midi sound. The xu4 project allows this game to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS 8, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. xu4 Also allows extensive modding of the graphics, enemies, items, and certain game logic. The Ultima series continued to innovate with the release of each game in the series. With the 4th game released for Apple ][ and then ported to IBM-PC, the genre was taken to bran new places. There is no evil big bad enemy to defeat, and the point of the game is not to take advantage of people to get stuff to go defeat the enemy. Rather, the point of the game is for the main character to become a champion of virtue. The goals are literally honesty, humility, honor, spirituality, valor, justice, compassion, sacrifice, courage, truth, and love. Actions, inactions, even words can have less than apparent unhelpful or helpful consequences. Yes, there are still monsters to fight and treasures to find, but this makes up less than 1/8th of the game and the care and purpose in handling these things is more important than the end result. [Zerothis]
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny	Origin	1988	[49]* [83]* [17]* [4]* [22]* [1]* [52]
Ultima VI: The False Prophet	Origin Systems	1990	[124]* [90]* [87]* [62]* [33]* [103]* [83]* [17]* [49]**Originally planned for the the Apple ][GS; but never to be realized. Due to the declining market share of the Apple ][ and poor sales of the ][GS, this game was moved to the older but more numerous Apple ][ platform (though no longer a relevant market force, their were still many, many Apple ][s in active use). That version turned out to be technically impractical and was also canceled. The project was started from scratch for a IBM-PC (MS-DOS) release. It was decided that character portraits could not be done on the 8-bit Apple II. In reality, they could have been done in the Apple II's double hi-res mode, but they would have been limited to 16 colors (32 simulated colors). The music and mouse interface were factors also. Again, the 8-bit apple could have done these also. All these things were built into the Apple ][GS hardware and/or system software The 8-bit Apple could actually do cassette quality digitized music and there was an Apple II mouse. Both of these would have required more software, more memory and a lot more storage space. Unless the customer wanted to be swapping disks or shell out a fortune for an Apple II hard drive (extremely rare and expensive at the time). So these features would have been missing from the 8-bit version. Origin successfully dealt with all of these limitations when they ported Ultima VI to the Commodore 64; then again when they ported another Commodore 64 version. But, the market share for the Apple II began a rapid decline on top of all these issues. The 16-bit version (IIgs) was abandon first then the 8-bit version was scrapped and the IBM-PC version was started from scratch. Note, the IBM-PC version had CGA, EGA, and Tandy graphics options which were all limited to 16 on screen colors. 4 colors for CGA on a non-composite monitor. It also had a greyscale Hercules graphics option. Of course most people played in 256 color VGA mode, but the other graphics options show that an Apple versions could have been done.* [22]* [1]* [52]* [37]***Comes with four 3.5' disks and seven 5.25' disks. Published by GT Interactive in 1992 in smaller box and without a cloth map. Cheryl Chen developed a computer language for the game's dialog called UCS ([b]U[/b]ltima VI [b]C[/b]onversation [b]S[/b]yste. Previous Ultima games had a software limits to how much text could be spoken by an NPC. Versions of Ultima IV utilizing UCS have no such limit. When the guy is channel surfing during the intro there's a man on TV holding a book that gets struck by lightning and turns to dust. The phone number on the screen is (512) 328-0282. People could call the number to buy the Official Book of Ultima by Shay Adams. This was a hint book, collection of Ultima lore, history and behind the scenes info. The Zebra-Centaur poster seen in the intro is based on a sketch by long time Ultima and Wing Commander artist Keith Berdak. A Nagel painting was first choice of the Ultima team and early unreleased version of the game had this instead. Origin was unable to secure the rights to use the copyrighted work, but it can nevertheless been seen on the back of the Ultima packaging in one of the screenshots. Fans sometimes blame censorship when different images are used in various ads and versions of the game. But in this case, the blame rests on another "C word". A full color version of Keith Berdak's Zebra-Centaur can be seen on his Facebook page (along with many NSFWs) Tools were extracted from development of this game so that Origin could, in theory, reuse them to rapidly and for less cost, produce other games. An early attempt to create a full game engine and SDK that would later become a standard practice. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams were fruits of this effort. Mythos: Caribbean Pirates and Legends from Greece, was planed to use these tools as well. But, SE and MD did not sell as well as had been hoped. Plus, the time and expense of developing these games was not much improved over TFP. Reuse of the Ultima 6 tools was abandon. This was not Origin's first try at game engines and would not be their last. An attempt was made with Ultima IV and would be attempted again with Ultima VII. [Zerothis]

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