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!

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.

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.