Otmar's Ultima maps

Back in '86, when I first started to play Ultima IV on my old Commodore 64, I started to use a disk-editor to peek at the inner workings of the program. After a bit of fiddling around I found out how the map was stored, so I wrote a simple BASIC program to print a map on my puny 9-needle printer. Some time later, I managed to decipher the layout of the dungeons, too. That was pretty pointless, since I had them all in neat handdrawings by that time.

Anyway, when I started to play Ultima V on a PC some years later, I took out my C compiler and started digging into the files again. The layout had changed a bit, some chunks of sea were left out (space reasons, I guess. 360KB floppies aren't that big...:-)), but it didn't take long before I had a nice map on my printer again.

I never really finished Ultima VI since I didn't run that well on the computers I had access to at that time, but one summer I borrowed my brothers PC + printer to delve into it. The result was a 24-needle picture of the U5 map, but no map of U6, let alone a solved game.

It was some years later when somebody gave me hint about the map-layout of Ultima 6, that I started to look into U6 again. This time I used perl to generate PPM files, but I never really finished them, so I can offer only unpolished and undocumented picturs..

A nice soul sent my the map file from the PC version of U4, making a port of my printer program to the PC possible. Additionally, I made a picture in GIF format.

< Ultima 4 | Ultima 5 | Ultima 6 >

Otmar Lendl (lendl@cosy.sbg.ac.at)

Last update: 2006/12/30