Lord British’s return to Britannia is old news – Richard Garriott’s Kickstarter to fund his new game, Shroud of the Avatar, is already up to more than 75% of its stated goal of $1 million – but did you know that pledging at the “Lord of the Manor” level, a $10,000 donation, would have secured for yourself a copy of Garriott’s original game, Akalabeth?

What differentiates this perk from the high-priced copies that occasionally show up on eBay, is that these have been assembled from Garriott’s private stash of left-over parts from when he was originally selling ziploc-bagged copies at his local software store.  Unfortunately, all 10 backer spots at that level have sold already (the Kickstarter launched just three days ago) so if you missed out, you’ll just have to dream about what might have been.

You can read all details at this Wired article.  Is a hand-assembled copy of the original Ultima game worth $10,000?  It was to a few eager fans.

We first mentioned Egan Ford’s Apple Game Server Online! last week.  Today Egan posted to comp.sys.apple2 that, with the help of Michael J. Mahon, he has updated the server to version 0.2.  The game count is up to more than 200 now, and he and Michael were able to speed up the 12kHz/6kHz 8000 bps HIFI to 12kHz/8kHz 9600 bps.  A significant bug was fixed, and the old CRC check was replaced with faster checksum + file length check.

Check out the new version here.