A Red Tabbard For Your Avatar
Produced by: Zhelkas
Website: Ultima V: A red tabard for your Avatar @ Reddit
A re-coloration of the Avatar tiles for Ultima 5 that adds a red tabbard (making the in-game sprite match the box art).
Zhelkas was never satisfied that the Avatar sprite in Ultima 5 was depicted as wearing green, when on the game’s box art the character was clearly depicted as wearing red.
As such, Zhelkas figured out how to edit TILES.16 (the file containing all of Ultima 5’s graphics) and swapped out that green tabbard for a red one, in most of the Avatar-specific sprites (including the magic carpet sprites). Sprites that were also used for NPCs in the game were left untouched.
To install this patch, simply rename the existing TILES.16 file in your Ultima 5 directory to TILES.OLD, and then copy the new TILES.16 file into place.
Awesome! Can you post some hints on how this was done? I tried to do this myself and got very stuck on the lzw decoding / encoding. Any tips, code, articles to read to get me in the right direction?
Thanks!
Sorry, I don’t really have the details. Your best bet would be to reach out to Zhelkas via the Reddit thread.
Hey Tom, the Reddit user behindtimes built an executable file that allows you to extract and re-compress the TILES.16 file. The link is here: https://github.com/BehindTimes/U5Lzw/releases/tag/net3.0
Hopefully this helps!