These pages are generated from the project's internal documentation. References to source files and binary offsets are kept as provenance — so you can see where each claim comes from — but they are not followable yet: the engine is not published. Once it is, they will become links.
What the port does differently
Four documents with before / after comparisons of what this port does differently from the Ultima V of 1988 and — the part that matters a year from now — why each thing is the way it is, and what was given up to get it.
| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1 · Image | Smoothing (xBR), the two skins, sprite and tile transparency, typography, lines and outlines |
| 2 · Layouts | Which layouts the port offers, what each is for, and what it costs |
| 3 · Experience | Touch controls, tap-to-walk, save slots, Spanish, the scrollable log |
| 4 · The debug panel | The full QA drawer, section by section |
The distinction that makes the rest useful
A good third of what is shown here as "before / after" is not an improvement over the original: it is a defect of OURS that got fixed. Mixing that in with the real improvements is what makes documents like this age badly, so every entry carries a tag:
| Tag | What it means |
|---|---|
| 🎯 FIDELITY | The "before" was a bug in the port. The "after" is closer to the 1988 DOS game. We have not improved the game: we have stopped breaking it. |
| ✨ ADDED | The original did not do this. It is a product decision, almost always with a switch to turn it off. |
| ⚖️ DECLARED DIVERGENCE | The port knowingly does something different, and it is recorded as such. |
| 🗑️ REMOVED | It existed in the port, people liked it, and it was taken out for being unfaithful. |
The ✨ entries are the only ones that literally answer "improvements made by the port". The 🎯 ones are most of the actual work, and they belong here — with their tag on.
Rules these documents follow
- Every claim comes from one of two sources: code read in this tree (with path and line), or an internal engineering record cited by name. Where one of those sources has turned out to be stale, that is said.
- Trade-offs get written down. If something was gained at the cost of something else, it is in the text. A comparison without the cost is advertising.
- Figures carry a date. A number without its moment is a snapshot someone will read as the present.
A note on the images
The screenshots on these pages contain graphics from the original game. They are shown here, on this site, because seeing the difference is the entire point of a before/after.
They do not travel to the source repository. The two destinations diverge on purpose, and the reason is worth stating plainly: a deployed site can show screenshots of the work it describes; a repository published under a free software licence cannot carry third-party artwork. Same project, two rules, each declared where it applies.