Ultima 7 in Windows?

trotski writes "In its day, Ultima 7 was one of the most complex and detailed RPG's ever made. Lets put it this way, in 1992 it required 20 mb of hard drive space and a 386 processor; cutting edge equipment that at the time retailed at well over $2000. Unfortunatly, until now getting Utlima 7 to run properly under win9X or worse, win2K or XP was heart-breaking. Fortunatly, someone has designed a utility that allows you to run this program under all versions of Windows as well as Linux! Very exciting for people out there who want to play this classic." Actually, Linux support seems to be only hypothetical at this point; along with the link to download the code is a note that says "Anyone who wishes to study the source code, or to port it to Linux or any other OS, is welcome to download this file."

Comments

Exult

[eddy]

Just use Exult instead. Must be a slow newsday?

Re:Exult

[Marton]

Exult uses a totally different approach - it is a rewrite of the game engine. The memory manager & hack in this case is a much more generic piece of software that could be adapted to other old software that does not run under emulated DOS sessions anymore.

Re:Exult

[auntfloyd]

Exult is fantastic. I've been using 1.0 (under Linux) to run BG and SI (with their respective expansion packs) with no problem.

Exult has a ton of extra features over the original U7 engine, including:

SI-style "paper doll" support in BG

The ability to use the "T" button (pause and click on someone to talk) in BG

Configurable display size. This is great because you can configure Exult to show more of the game world on screen. The original U7 only did 320x200, but if you have a bigger screen, why not take advantage of it?

Unlimited save and restore slots. Each save also has a party list and screenshot associated with it

Sound support, including speech. I don't think I could ever get this to work with U7 under DOS

*Much* more stable. U7 was fairly buggy - random lockups were distressingly common. Exult hasn't crashed on me once.

Normal play speed. Exult doesn't require any sort of slow down utililty like moslo

The need for food seems to have disappeared. I beat BG recently and only had to feed my party once. I guess the Exult developers thought that the food system was a bad idea and just didn't implement it fully. In my book, not having to deal with Shamino whining "I must have food" every 2 minutes is a plus.

Advanced cheating system :)

So get Exult. It's better than the original, and runs under unix, too.

Ultima!!

[Beetjebrak]

Ultima runs exceptionally well inside a VMWare virtual machine under both Linux and Windows. I have an athlon 2000+ on which I do this, and it works perfectly. No sound though, which is sad because the Guardian's voice is awe inspiring at times!

is everyone sleeping or ?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's been possible to play u7 since eons under linux

exult.sourceforge.net

Flat Real Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

The cause of all the problems with ultima 7 is flat real mode, or 32 bit real mode. Turns out it is possible to switch to protected mode, change the segment limits, and when you return to real mode, the segment limits are not changed back. This allows access to the full 32 bit flat memory address space, while still being in real mode. This is much faster than a DOS extender (DPMI), which rapidly switches back and forth between real and protected mode. Unfortunately, flat real mode is incompatible with anything except pure DOS with himem.sys as the only memory manager loaded. It is even incompatible with emm386 and qemm.

Re:Flat Real Mode

[caspper69]

We OS developers like to refer to this as "unreal" mode. It works like a charm, but is technically considered "undocumented" processor behavior by Intel.

It can be very useful in getting a 32-bit protected mode operating system running. This is because as soon as you switch to protected mode, you need to write all of your own interrupt code (i.e. if you've ever written code in x86 assembly under DOS, you have access to a ton of INT(errupt) instructions that do things like write to the screen, read from a disk, etc, but in Pmode, YOU must write the code to do all of this yourself - quite tedious and time-consuming). Well, in unreal mode, you switch to pmode, then switch back to real mode without resetting the segment registers, and gain access to the entire 32-bit flat address space, and still use the real mode interrupts.

This mode is therefore most useful for a second-stage bootloader, and/or other miscellaneous times when you need to access memory beyond 1MB, but using real-mode interrupts. Plus, it can be a hell of a lot easier than setting up V86 mode (vitual-8086 mode), with the necessary Global Descriptor Table entries (GDT) and getting your Task State Segments (TSS's) correct. Eventually, you'll need V86 mode if you wish to execute 16-bit code from your 32-bit protected environment, but it's nice to be able to work on different parts of an operating system at different times without being relegated to do so in a certain and well defined order.

Re:Flat Real Mode

[NMSpaz]

Actually, there is a wonderful utility called umbpci which allows access to high memory for loading device drivers while keeping the processor in real mode. This is a godsend for paying U7 since it's near impossible to load everything needed (sound drivers, mouse support, possibly CD-rom support) and try and cram it all into 640k...

Re:No, it doesn't even work with emm386

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultima 7 does not work in virtual 8086 mode (yes, that means no emm386.exe or qemm). It uses a bug in the x86 CPU to access 32 bit real mode. That is, accessing the full 32 bit flat memory address space while still being in real mode.

Re:Ahh! MIDI warning on the link!

[Silh]

That would be 'Stones', probably the song most associated with the Ultima series. Probably my favourite song from the series as well.

Too bad from U7 onwards it's missing its last verse.

Some Ultima fans may argue it's overplayed though...

Newer computers may not boot to DOS

[yerricde]

who would have thought that something as simple as installing a real copy of DOS and some real mode drivers, or creating a real DOS bootdisk with real mode drivers would make playing an antique game easy on a modern OS.

What if your Really Recent PC no longer has support for real-mode apps that use VGA graphics? In theory, it's possible to make a PC that can boot to Windows XP (with appropriate drivers) but can't boot to DOS.

Still pretty sure it won't work...

[Hrothgar The Great]

If you have a PCI sound card, I seriously doubt you will get this thing to work under Windows. There is some sort of ISA SB emulator available for Windows NT/2000 called VDMSound, but I'm still running lowly Windows 98.

As about a billion other posters have already pointed out, however, Exult is a solution that is very nice, and does not have this limitation.

Other Ultima remakes

[DoctaWatson]

Like many others have said, Exult is by far much more impressive than some front-end app.

Here are some other open-source Ultima remakes that you may want to contribute to if you have the time, skill, or inclination:

[a href=http://xu4.sourceforge.net]XUltima4 [/a] is an opensource rebuild of the classic Ultima 4 in an effort to make it easily portable to many modern systems. I imagine after this is complete, much of the code could be used to build similar versions of the other older Ultimas like 3 and 5.

[a href=http://low.sourceforge.net]Here,[/a] : [a href=http://uw2rev.sourceforge.net]here,[/a] and [a href=http://uwadv.sourceforge.net]
here[/a] you can find various open-source projects to faithfully rebuild the Ultima Underworld games. As a bonus, Ulitma Underworld shares an engine with the original System Shock, so that classic game would benefit from an engine rebuild as well.

People that want to contribute to a rebuild of the much-maligned Ultima 8 should talk to the developers of [a href=http://exult.sourceforge.net]Exult[/a].

Now we just need someone to start a project to rebuild Ultima 6 (and Martian Dreams & Savage Empire).

Re:We need a complete DOS machine emulator

[compwiz3688]

Bochs?

It's slow enough that WinME complains it's too slow to install (or maybe I didn't configure it right). The only problem is that sometimes it might emulate things a little to fast (1 second on the host computer may equal 5 seconds in the emulation).

Somebody else suggested VMWare, which is ok, but I couldn't get the sound to work in DOS (and I'll know when it will work with my trusty must-have-a-sound-card-to-install game called Privateer 2).

Virtual PC is another PC emulation, but I haven't tried it yet.

Exult and U7run...

[DrCode]

For some reason, I'm a bit partial to Exult. But without U7run (the utility this story refers to), Exult would be a lot farther behind. U7 with U7run was often run to see how things were supposed to work in the original, since Exult is a complete re-implementation.

Re:as cheap as older pentium machines are

[The Raven]

Because original Ultima 7 runs like crap on anything FASTER than a 386.

It had no speed limitations. It runs as fast as it can given the CPU, which means it is very fast on a 486, and unplayable on a Pentium.

Having a new way to play that does not require a reboot, a second PC and monitor, etc, and also adds in speed limiting is a good thing.

Like some kind of "DOS box"?

[Rayonic]

Might I suggest you try out DOSbox then? It's still somewhat early in development (no protected mode games), but it's both promising and open-source.

Re:Still need another project

[Sycraft-fu]

Oh man, if only I had mod points. :)

I have no idea what their programmer though they were doing but U9 is SUCH a peice of crap. MY roomate and I bought it the DAY it came out. Now amazingly enough we did get it to run (I understand it didn't run on most systems with teh intial release) but it was SLOW. Even when the final patch came about, it was still SLOW. We both had systems that met or exceeded teh recommend specs in every way. and it still drug along.

Also it was so 3dfx/Glide friendsly that is actually ran slower when I got a GeForce. finally now, with a P4 1.6 and a GeForce 4, I can run the game at acceptable speeds (though it still lags in some parts). Of course it crashes all teh time so what's the point? :)