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

[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.

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.

as cheap as older pentium machines are

[night_flyer]

why not just purchase one of those and install all the old games you love?

pricewatch has a pentium 166 listed at 48.00 including shipping!

Re:The answer is....

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Who wants to reboot to play a game?

That would be like doing all your productive stuff in one operating system and all your game playing in anot-

Uhm, nevermind.

Re:Wow Ultima 7!

[Idolatre]

It may be an old game, but being able to run it on a modern OS is amazing, while running the more recent Ultima 8 on a modern OS wouldn't impress me at all.

It was so complex to configure a working operating environment that could run Ultima 7, you had to understand the whole i386/MS-DOS memory model with all its hacks and subtleties just to run that game. Being able to start a game for the first time was the first quest of the game, even before that of solving the murder in Trinsic.

I've always used Ultima 7 as a hardcore test when I try an emulator. If it runs Ultima 7, it must emulate every feature and bug of the i386 architecture/MS-DOS and passes the test, if it doesn't, it fails. I've only tried VMWare that passed the test (but with no sound), all others failed.

Now thanks to Exult I don't really care anymore if an emulator can run Ultima 7 or not, but it's still a good way to check if an emulator does its work well.