My personal site
by Karl Jan Clinckspoor
In this post, I’m sharing my personal story with the Ultima series. This seems like a weird theme for a post, especially on a “CV”-type blog, but whatever, I wanted to share something. Maybe it’s nostalgia speaking.
Disclaimer: This recollection is the best version I could remember. The actual facts might be different, so there might be some inaccuracies and discrepancies.
Growing up in the early 90s, I had limited access to computers. Not only were they expensive, but I had absolutely no idea how to use DOS, configure memory, and couldn’t read English very well. This limited my capacity to play games on the computer, so I played mostly on my SNES and N64. My father bought a collection CD, maybe around 95-96, with a ton of really good games (perhaps a type of EA classics?). In it, there were 3 ultima games, Ultima Underworld, Ultima VII and Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire. Other notable examples are Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, Shadowcaster, Populous and Space Hulk. We had some other games before, most on floppies, but this CD was an absolute gold mine.
My father knew English the most in our home, so he could read the manuals and install stuff. These were DOS games, so you had to quit out of Windows and restart in DOS mode. There, you had to type the commands to install and run the games. After installing, he would leave handwritten notes on the margins with what commands you had to type to run the games.
Still, the complexity of these games was too much for kid me. I think the only one I could play was Air Combat, because we had a joystick, and the interface was relatively easy. Since many missions started and ended while airborne, no difficult takeoffs or landings were necessary. And there were cheats for infinite ammo and no damage. The other games I just watched my father play.
I have very little memory of this. The only game I remember him playing was Ultima Underworld. Specifically, I remember the creepy skull that appeared when you died, and the creepy blue face of Garamon during the intro. He never got very far, at most level 3 I think (from a talk a few years later).
These were good times, and I was innocent, and very very bad at videogames. Morton’s castle (nr 2) in Super Mario World was too tough for me. Zelda Ocarina of Time was a matter of exhaustive trial and error (couldn’t read) and playground rumors. Sometimes, someone’s cousin or uncle would get past an obstacle and then pass the knowledge to the younger generation. I remember studying and theorycrafting about a ton of aspects of these games. I think that in Zelda, there’s some passage a Kokiri kid says that suggests a curse befalls the forest when a Kokiri leaves, or something to that effect. This got distorted by the game of telephone of the playground, and a kid was 100% sure that, when you leave the forest as a kid, after beating the Great Deku Tree, you doomed the forest. Actually what happened was that the day-night cycle advanced in Hyrule Field, and the creepy Stalkids appeared at night. We were deathly afraid of these skeletons, so we couldn’t leave the forest anymore. To top it off, it was dark, because it was nighttime, so it looked cursed. We were convinced we had doomed the land. I remember one day just braving the skeletons and running past them. I even visited this friend of mine and showed him how to get out. He almost took the controller out of my hands because of how frightened he was.
You can notice these stories are mostly about console games. My overall story playing PC Games, especially Ultima, is mostly a lonely one. I never really got into multiplayer games all that much. And I’m the only person I know that knows of Ultima, so I don’t really have people to talk about that.
Anyway, going forward a few years, after 2000. We had moved and upgraded our PC. The internet was starting to catch up. We had that really really slow dial-up internet that cost a fortune. My knowledge in English, due to study at school, sheer hard-headedness and determination while playing videogames, was growing. I could, and did, read stuff in English for pleasure. This is when that collection CD comes into play. It came with a thick manual, which I treasure dearly, containing details from all the games included in the CD1. In those times, game manuals were good. They came with background story, lore, and often a lot of vital info that wasn’t available in the games themselves, in a sort of crude copy-protection scheme. Shame the CD didn’t come with the goodies of each game, a staple especially of Origin Systems games.
I would read and re-read the sections of the Ultima games. Savage empire has a great “Indiana Jones” -esque introduction, while Ultima VII had a book that told the story of the world through the lens of the Fellowship, trying to make them less perverse at first glance. Reading all of this game me great pangs of nostalgia. At this time, however, Windows compatibility with DOS was severely lacking. No DOSBox2, and Windows XP, which came out in 2001, had ditched the capacity to reboot in DOS mode. Being a complete noob, and a kid, I wouldn’t dare to try to downgrade the computer to Windows 98 just to play games. The thought never even crossed my mind.3 So the only thing I could do was to fantasize about these worlds. Ultima Underworld, especially, was my obsession.
I remember reading about a fix to run Ultima Underworld on NT systems (like XP). I still have
the file, or what I think it the file, curiously. Here’s the readme file of uw2nt.exe.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
uw2wnt.exe version 1.1
patch makes ultima underworld I und II running with windows nt
according to the problem solution by Moscow Dragon
see following copy of news entry
--------------------- begin of news entry -------------------------------
From : Moscow Dragon (maxim__s@mtu-net.ru)
Subject : UW2 on NT: looks like solved!
Newsgroups : rec.games.computer.ultima.series
Date : 2001-12-23 15:06:51 PST
Patching :
- make a copy of the original UW2.EXE, for a case if something will go
wrong.
- open UW2.EXE in your favourite hex editor like HIEW (or use some UNIX
tool).
- go to offset 0x24719
- you will see the bytes of:
FA 52 BA 03 00 E4 64 A8 02
If you see some other bytes, do not proceed. Looks like you have some
other build of UW2 then me.
- patch the FA byte to C3
- save and exit
Technical details:
- UW2 has a function which sends "set LED indicators" command to the
keyboard ports, bypassing BIOS.
- this way of accessing ports is incompatible with NTVDM and hangs it.
NTVDM waits forever on some Win32 event as a result of the DOS app
reading the port.
- the patch switches the function away at all, C3 is RETN
- I do not know whether the function is vital for UW2. Probably not.
- for now, I also do not know whether the function called many times from
UW2 or only during the introduction.
Max
--------------------- end of news entry -----------------------------------
I found out that the offset is dependent on the Ultima Underworld version,
but Moscow Dragon's solution should work with all versions and even with
Ultima Underworld 1 too. Just search for the pattern and change the first
byte according to Moscow Dragon's description.
Many people don't own an hex editor or are not familiar with the operation
of this tool. For all this folks I've created this patch which will do the
necessary work automatically. BTW - should work means that I wasn't able
to test this with all Ultima Underworld versions and with all Windows NT
versions. My Ultima Underworld 2 version is different from Moscow Dragon's
(not the same offset) but this patch program works fine for both of my
Ultima Underworlds and with my Windows 2000 (SP2). Can't say anything about
Windows XP but Windows 2000 is actually Windows NT 5.0 and Windows XP is
Windows NT 5.1. So it should work, but who knows.
Put the patch program uw2wnt.exe into the Ultima Underworld directory and
start it. uw2wnt will look for UW.EXE and UW2.EXE and patch it so you can
use it with Windows NT (2000, XP). It will also create a backup of the
original file which is called UW.EXE.BAK or UW2.EXE.BAK. The patch program
will shelter the back up file from overwriting by setting the read only
attribute.
After patching you must modify the properties of UW.EXE respectively
UW2.EXE. Select the Memory tab (hope this is the correct term, I own
the German version and my tab is called 'Speicher' which means 'Memory').
Select the Expansion Memory (EMS) listbox and choose 8192. Then select
the Screen tab and activate the Fullscreen radio button (again I can only
guess the English terms, just secure that Ultima Underworld don't start
in a window).
Run Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 with VDMS for sound and music. Get VDMS for
free, visit http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound .
Now have fun with this patch and let me know if you like it ;-)
development : Sir Cabirus Dragon aka Frank Wolter
email : SirCabirus@gmx.net
homepage : http://www.SirCabirus.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can imagine, a lot of those terms went right over my head (Hex editor?). I found this tool
and ran it on my copy of UW, and even used VDMS, that tool to add sound and music, but I couldn’t
get it to work. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I thought I had a defective copy of the game.
I absolutely scoured the internet looking for a download of UW1, and even made some bids on ebay
for floppy versions4, but eventually, I found it, on page 20+ or something. Google, at that time,
was very different from now. And I was a persistent kid. The only thing I remember was that the
site was perhaps blue-ish? In any case, I downloaded it, probably with my trust NetAnts download
manager. I still have the file, dated to 2003/10/16 (YMD). Hopeful, I tried to run the game.
Nope, still couldn’t do it. All this was in vain.
I kinda gave up at this point. Nothing I did got me closer to playing these games. It was at this time that, for reasons I can’t remember, my father brought back our old computer (or was it a work computer?) and it ran Windows NT 4.0, which had the option to reboot to DOS. I immediately jumped at that opportunity. I installed UW1 successfully and got it to run. It was perfect to me. The only downside was that we had no speakers or sound cards, so the game was 100% on the internal PC speakers, with its limited beeps and boops when I swung my weapons. But I was elated. I even went all the way down the map let you, lvl 99, and told my father the game was really long. Actually, the game only had 8 levels5, but the automap wasn’t limited by that. Perhaps the extra space was there for player annotations? It was at this time I reached lvl3, which is when my father told me he never got further than this.
I think I managed to finish the game in this old computer, but I’m not sure. I do remember that it rained one day, and the monitor was right below a leak in the ceiling, and the monitor fried. Oh well.
In any case, I had fulfilled my first wish. Now I had to see what the other games in the series had in store. Without a computer that could run them, I was out of options. Besides, I didn’t have the other games in the series. Back into the bowels of internet I went.
It just so happens that around this time, ~2004, there was a website that had all the Ultima games, from I to VIII, to download, for free, in self-extracting zip executables. Downloading and running this kind of stuff is unthinkable nowadays, but I was a desperate kid. I even have managed to keep a hold of these files to this day. They’re all dated 2004/07/12 and 2004/07/15, during my Winter holidays.
The website was called the penalty, and it added a .nfo file to the game files. This is what it
contained:
This archive passed through:
http://free.techno-link.com/apenalty/
COME AND DOWNLOAD YOUR ULTIMA !!!
The wayback machine even has it preserved! The link is a bit different, but you can access
it here. I clearly remember
this red-on-black tone and weird font; gave me some bad vibes at the time. The Penalty, if you’re
out there, I thank you immensely. I downloaded a backup of this
website, just in case (see here how I did it).
I think it was around this time I discovered DOSBox, so I could really play a lot of these games. Or perhaps I played some “alternative” versions first? My memory is fuzzy. If I ever have the patience, I could try to look around the VOGONS forums, which I briefly was a member of, to pinpoint better a date. It was also around this time I found the Bootstrike website, which is still up. Some time later, in 2006, I even sent him a very poor walkthrough I made of Ultima VII, and it’s still up. It’s bad, but hey, I was 16.6
And it was here that my journey through the Ultima games truly began. I had the tools to run the games, and the games themselves. Unfortunately I don’t really remember which games I played, and in which order. In any case, I certainly played VI, VII, UW1, UW2, SE, MD, VII-P2, VIII. The earlier ones, I think I played only I and II. To this day, I haven’t played III and V (in the original, I played Lazarus), and only recently I played IV. So you see, even at that time, I couldn’t stomach a lot of old game design philosophy.
Some specific memories I have from this period:
And that was it. I finished Ultima VIII, returned to Britannia and saw the Guardian head. Since none of the websites I visited talked much about Ultima IX, I simply thought it didn’t exist. Or would be released in the future. This was perhaps around end of 2004, early 2005.
In actuality, it had already been released, but it came in 1 or 2 CDs. Downloading that much data was absolutely impossible in the era of unreliable Dial-Up connections. Still, I tried to find it, but no luck. I had to buy the CDs, but as a broke kid, I couldn’t afford an original, imported from the US. The game wasn’t for sale anywhere.
Well, it’s already established I pirated most of the Ultima games. In my defence, there wasn’t
really a viable way for me to obtain them legally. And the same was about to happen again. By
sheer luck, there was a dude that had a website that sold pirated CDs of games and software –
and he had Ultima IX! I bought it from him and received it in the mail some time later. As usual,
I still have some of the files from this era stored. If you’re reading this, owner of www.procd.hpg.com.br, I am deeply thankful to you.
So I installed and ran it without major hiccups that I can remember. Yes, there were crashes,
but I managed to play it from start to finish. Ultima IX is kind of a black sheep of the series.
Many people hate it and what it did with the story, especially Spoony. I never felt this
strongly about it. The line What's a paladin? never struck me as weird. It was clearly a way
of letting new players learn more about the world. But I do understand the implications of it,
after all, Dupre is a major companion since IV, and his sacrifice in VII-P2 was all the more
significant for it.
I liked the puzzles and the dungeons, but didn’t like the new world layout or the closed, hand-holdy nature of the story progression.7 I didn’t feel particularly satisfied with the “I’m your opposite, Avatar” plot-twist the Guardian throws at you, or the sacrificial ending, or the character assassination that was Blackthorn. But I still enjoyed the game, despite Hythloth, and felt some closure after defeating the Guardian once and for all.
So yeah, this is what I wanted to tell you at this time. Hope you enjoyed going through my memories with me.
I still have it, albeit with a replacement cover, and the pages are dirty and crinkled from use. ↩
DOSBox came out in 2002, yet I only found out about it many years after the fact. ↩
My first time installing an Operating System is a tale for another time. ↩
thankfully never outbid anyone - and never insisted a lot on this. It freaked me out. ↩
or 9, if you count the ethereal void ↩
I think I still have my handwritten notes stored somewhere. I should scan them, for posterity. ↩
I do recognize, now, that it’s much less linear after some time, or not linear at all if you creatively jump, or use bread. The game still expects you to follow the intended path anyway. ↩