...the Nuvie team is starting to develop what is probably the most sought after feature of all time, a full-screen mode similar to what was seen in the SNES version of Ultima VI. It’s still very much a work in progress, and a lot of features such as conversations are not yet supported full-screen, but they’ve already added a new spellbook GUMP which I think looks great.

Pax Britannia, as its creator [Andrew Owen] describes it, is an Ultima fan game set between Ultima 3 and Ultima 4, which will presumably tell the story of Britannia’s unification and the breakaway of Fawn, the two Montors, and Moon. Your character in the game, summoned by Lord British 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.

I’m writing the engine for 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. Oh 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).​