VIC 20 Ultima II
Produced by: Aleksi Eeben
Website: VIC 20 Ultima II
The VIC 20 emulator image and player reference card for the VIC 20 port of Ultima 2.
VIC 20 Ultima II is a from-scratch conversion based on both the original Commodore 64 and Apple II releases of Ultima 2. The title screen is from the Apple II version, its pixel resolution adjusted to fit the VIC 20’s capabilities. Tile graphics were adapted from Commodore 64 version of the game, but at half the horizontal resolution (the font was similarly adjusted). The colour palette is based on the Apple II version, offering more muted colours than the Commodore 64 version.
Aleksi slightly optimized the line drawing in the game engine, and fixed a few bugs with the monster drawing routine in dungeons (which also sped it up significantly). All the game’s code and data files were fit on a single disk side (the original game required two or three sides, depending on platform). This was partly accomplished by reducing the total number of files from 140 to about 50 by, for example, combining town maps, their NPCs and the NPC talk into one compressed file, and condensing almost all of the game’s code into one executable.
