Coliseo UO was born in 2002 as a Spanish-speaking Ultima Online shard, built by hand by its people. It opened again in 2008 and once more in 2023. Now its biggest return begins: not another server to download and set up, but the whole of Coliseo, played from a browser tab, on a PC or a phone.
What we recovered
- The world, as it stood on 1 November 2023: 197,349 placed objects and 8,863 creatures and characters.
- The shard's own scripts: its shops, its stones, its arenas and its systems, written over the years.
- Coliseo's own art, which travelled as a patch of the 2003 client: 774 items, 1,017 interface graphics and 6,005 reworked pieces of animation.
What we decided
- Keep the hand-built world and the shard's own scripts. Starting from scratch would not be Coliseo.
- Use the original art, animations and sounds.
- Run the whole game on the server and let the browser only draw it: there is no client to tamper with, and outside programs get nowhere.
- Play with nothing to download, on a phone too.
A new server for the same world
The original Coliseo ran on Sphere 0.55i, a Windows server from 2001. We moved it to SphereServer X, which runs on Linux, with tools of our own that convert the saved world and the scripts. At first the new server did not know 1,028 kinds of item and 462 kinds of creature the world uses; after the conversion it knows all of them but one amulet, and the whole world loads: 189,761 objects and 8,850 creatures. The difference from the 2023 figures was the old server's own bookkeeping, which the new one keeps its own way.