U3.5: Pax Britannia is an Ultima-inspired fan game written by Zedex Dragon that will tell the story of Britannia’s unification and the breakaway of Fawn, Montor, and Moon. Your character in the game, summoned as a diplomatic agent to drive the unification of Britannia forward, may be from Earth…but will not be the Stranger of the previous three games, or the Avatar of the games following.
As the Envoy, you may be any one of 11 character classes; Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief, Bard, Druid, Barbarian, Ranger, Paladin, Illusionist, and Alchemist. Character generation is similar to Ultima 4. There are 16 NPCs throughout Sosaria who may be willing to join your party. You can have up to five NPCs accompanying you at any one time. There will be some familiar if unexpected companions as well as the usual crowd. The magic system a reworking of Ultima 3’s (leveling up will improve your magic ability).
The game is being written using a custom engine that I have created myself called the ZXodus][Engine. It runs on an 8-bit (Z80-based) computer that never had a version of Ultima released for it back in the day. It has 128K of RAM, a 256×192 pixel display (with two colours per cell—although I have a software workaround for that which extends it to 8×1 attributes in the view window), and no standard disk system (so I plan to do the whole thing as single load from tape). It has no video chip, so the screen is stored in main RAM. And the extra RAM is paged in banks of 16K (hence the 128×128 map limit). I’ve solved the problem of the display size by reducing the view window to 9×9 (as per U6) and using a 6×8 font. You might well ask why I don’t do it on something more modern, but I enjoy the challenge. On the flip side there are emulators for the target machine available for just about any device you care to name (it should look lovely on the Nintendo DS).