Ultima 6 German Translation
Produced by: Sir John
Website: Deutsche Übersetzungen für Spiele der Ultima-Reihe
Sir John’s translation of Ultima 6 into German.
Sir John was one of the principal contributors to the German translation of the Ultima 6 Project, and with the lore of that game so fresh in his mind, he decided to tackle the task of translating the original Ultima 6 to German as well. It’s an ambitious project, especially for what appears to be a solo effort, but Sir John has been making excellent progress with it:
The biggest technical hurdle that Sir John faces is that, because he must make most of these changes with a hex editor, he has to find ways to translate phrases in German using the same number of characters as the English equivalent. This isn’t a universal restriction, I don’t think, but where it asserts itself it presents significant challenges, since German phrases tend to be longer (in terms of character count) than their English equivalents.
Thus far, Sir John has changed all of the in-game graphics, all the barks, all the item names, and all the books. All conversations in the game have been translated, as has the magic system, and some of the system barks. Additionally, the murder of Quenton can now be solved. These changes are available in the version 1.0 (beta 3) patch above.
Just for the record. Maybe this could be of use: I was able to apply the patch with the Ultima VI-version I got from GOG. On my OS X-system I just had do right click the container and view its content. After that one has to click his way through Content\Resources and view the package content of the file “Ultima6.boxer”. In there you find a file folder named “C ULTIMA6.harddisk”. I copied the extracted files of the language-patch in there and started the game. Worked!
Good to know, thanks. He just released a new version today, so I’ll be sure to mention your discovery when I report about it.