Ultima V Intro Demake

2023-06-12に共有


A demake of the DOS intro for Ultima V, one of my favourite games of all time. You can watch the original intro here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XN1mdyvZvM

Holding down Button 1 (Z) will speed up the animation, pressing Button 2 (X) will skip to the next scene; otherwise this is non-interactive.

Turns out that 16x16 sprites blow out the spritesheet pretty quickly, so I had to pack extra sprites into map data and didn't have enough leftover space for fancy logo lettering; but I quite like how the demade titling turned out anyway. Otherwise I've tried to be as faithful to the original as possible, including reverse engineering the in-memory tile animations they used, which was a learning experience. I scored it using Stones rather than the original intro music though, because Stones is kind of the signature tune of the Ultima series.

The music only lasts for about 2/3rds of the intro and then lapses into silence until the sequence restarts; I could update it to segue into a second track, and I could also try some cart compression techniques to squeeze in larger title art. But I'm posting this now because I suspect it's as done as it'll get.