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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."

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. The answer is.... by woogieoogieboogie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    DOS.... 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.

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  2. Re:Exult by eddy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The "news" isn't that there's a new generic "old-game-loader" out, the "news" is that you can now run Ultima 7 on Windows. For that purpose, Exult is better. That Exult is a re-implementation is hardly a secret and not something that one should feel the need to point out (it's in the domain "so obvious it hurts")

    Furthermore, I haven't checked the source of this loader, but I'll wager it's very executable-specific, and I doubt that many other games would benefit from this particular loader (that is, there's already less intrusive ways of playing most games).

    In short; the whole problem with U7 is the messed up hack of a memory model (real flat mode) the cracksmoking freaks chose to use. Exult, which is newsworthy in itself, solved the problem, and more.

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