Five years back, I had a very quick look at the Palm OS port of Ultima 1 but wasn’t able to get very far with it. The first 3 games in the series were ported to this unlikely platform around 2004 but all I was able to find were demo versions. I wasn’t even able to buy food in the demos if I recall correctly severely limiting how far I could get.
Out of the blue, I was contacted last week by someone going by the name of randomdays claiming to have found the full versions in some undisclosed part of the internet. On first inspection, I thought that these were going to be the same demos as the files are nearly identical in size. However, having had a quick go on all 3, they don’t have the obvious limitations of the demo in terms of buying food and the nag text on death isn’t there either. I’ll withhold some judgement that they are complete until someone has actually played through the whole thing – it’s feasible it may be a hacked version of the demo but I’m guessing that we do indeed have the full games here.
It’s not every day a new Ultima turns up. These should be interesting ports also with Ultima 1 and 2 adding 4 player parties. I’ve dug out my trusty old Tungsten T3, have ordered a new battery for it (which are remarkedly still being sold) and intend to have a go at a playthrough assuming I can get that battery fitted. In the meanwhile, I’ve put the games up for download below. There are PalmOS emulators available for Android and Windows (none of which I’ve tried) which should be able to run them all in the entirely likely event you don’t have the appropriate 20 year old PDA available.