It's time to save Britannia! Again! I think we can get through #DOS #Ultima VII today and be done before the schedule goes all wonky for April. (Also #AprilApples is coming and I wann do some Apple stuff for that!) 12:00 PM EDT for all the fun!
Ultima VI Remake:
https://www.ultima6.realmofultima.com/
It's an Exult mod:
https://exult.info/
Needs Ultima VII which can be bought on gog:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
I think I have found a programming language that hurts my brain more than Perl.
https://codeberg.org/random-wizard/dnd1/raw/branch/main/applesoft_basic/dnd1.basic
I took Richard Garriott's BASIC code from 1977 and did as little to it as I could to get it to work with Applesoft BASIC. You can copy the above code and paste into the Applesoft BASIC in Javascript emulator.
https://inexorabletash.github.io/jsbasic/
Do not ask for instructions!
And you have to name your character
SHAVS
Speaking of BASIC. Someone should write a code linter for BASIC. It could check for errant GOTOs and the like.
TIL: stacking a baby and using it as a staircase tread is a valid wall climbing strategy in Ultima VII
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ultima/comments/1j6y65c/the_great_serpent_hold_heist_taking_their_cannons/
Avui es compleixen 25 anys que arribava "Ultima IX: Ascension" per "Windows" 
. #UltimaIxAscension #Ultima #Windows #Puzle #JocDeRol #Aventura #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames #RetroGaming #ClassicGaming #RetroGames #VideojocsAntics
The UnderworldGodot project brings the classic Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 games to the open-source Godot engine. It is currently in pre-alpha and looks very promising. >> https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot
thanks to the videogame history foundation, we now have audio extracted from a DAT tape that was recorded during the production of Ultima VII: The Black Gate.
voiced by Bill Johnson, the tape contains one hour of The Guardian taunting the avatar. the first minute is the exact monologue used in the intro to the game.
source: https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/f08cd613-0509-488e-a5e7-160bcbe15117
i'm a month late to this news - but, unbelievably, dominus found the Ultima VIII Pagan: Lost Vale expansion usecode on a diskette!
it's not playable without the missing art/statics sadly, but that sure answers a lot of questions many of us have had about the source for the past 30 years.
https://ultimacodex.com/2025/02/a-look-at-the-usecode-for-ultima-8-the-lost-vale/
Alright, done a by-hand compile of Nuvie from the GitHub version, because it's easier to use the modern style open world map view in this one.
However, the instructions on GitHub don't seem to be right, so here you go. This is on Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS running on aarch64 hardware, but the same should work on any standard Linux install. You'll might need to install cmake and whatever your distro's build-essentials package is.
You'll need SDL2 and its libraries installed for this.
git clone https://github.com/nuvie/nuvie.git
cd nuvie
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
You can optionally make install after this, but I just ran it from the build path.
your .nuvierc config file is made at the root of your home directory
To make it live in large window on a 1920x1080 display (alt+enter for fullscreen), and force it into New mode, which replaces the parchment viewports with an Ultima 7 style map and interface windows, I changed the following settings:
<scale_factor>4</scale_factor> <game_style>new</game_style>
Other game style options are original and original+ (which removes some but not all parchment borders to expand the map).
Setting use new dolls to yes improves paperdoll handling in new mode
<use_new_dolls>yes</use_new_dolls>
I also downloaded extracted and copied the GOG version of Ultima VI to the path where I built nuvie, updating the config file with the following hard paths:
<datadir>/home/kg/Software/nuvie/data</datadir>
\ /home/kg/Software/nuvie/ultima6
Downloaded the offline installer from
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_456
As discussed earlier, once you've grabbed U6, stick it in a directory called ultima6:
sudo apt install innoextract
innoextract setup_ultima_vi_-the_false_prophet_1.0_cs(28045).exe
After character creation, I'm looking at .nuvierc's built in preferred gender and character portrait settings, although this might only work for new games that skip the intro (and thus, potentially, character creation).
<gender>1</gender>
If you'd rather try hex editing the nuvie save format, savegames by default live in the hidden .nuvie directory of your home directory. Hard path looks like this for me:
/home/kg/.nuvie/savegames
Don't forget to click Introduction on the main menu and watch that before you do character creation. And make sure to put all of your party members into Command mode for true turn-based combat.
@eniko this is your damn fault by the way - your urge to make an Ultima-like has definited stirred a need in me.
a few years ago i bought a box of old PC games locally.
one of the games was Ultima V.
today i finally had a chance to go through its contents, and inside i found a thick coil notebook, full of notes, written by its owner "Brent" about 30 years earlier.
he judiciously took notes on every location, npc, spell, reagent and quest in the game.
here's to you brent 
i absolutely love these very personal ephemera i sometimes find in old games.
if you're into the history of Ultima, Origin Systems and ebooks, andrea contato has released his Through the Moongate Part 1 (200 pages) for free for the next few days
i'll spare you a book review - but yes, it's worth reading. it got a poor quality translation from italian, but the stories are still enjoyable.
https://www.amazon.com/Through-Moongate-Richard-Garriott-Systems-ebook/dp/B07SKKTSNQ
Ultima IV Remastered for the #appleII, now with support for the Apple II ECHO Sound card. #retrocomputing #ultima #8bit
https://www.callapple.org/software/ultima-iv-remastered-for-the-apple-ii-updated/
new tomo devlog post: how do you deal with shitty people behaviour?
excerpt:
after posting that "Eris-Free Net" wikipedia article the other day, it made me think about how to deal with misbehaving shards on tomoNet, and how governance works on decentralized networks.
when i started thinking about creating something like tomo years ago, i often thought about Ultima Online as - not so much a model for - but an example of a network of online communities that was always interesting and sometimes frustrating to deal with
in-game, for several years, UO really was the "wild west" of online communities - so much was left up to players to figure out. for a long time, there were no game mechanics that enabled players to enact governance of their own (e.g. creating towns, villages, provinces and local laws). the outcome of this was that most often a kind of hillbilly/frontier justice, or outright dog-eat-dog existence, became the norm.
this was great for player-killers and people who loved strife. it added some intensity to the game that no other game had, or in my view has ever had since. (WoW/EQ/etc all elected to bolt everything down and render the world in nerf).
...
BBSes also had governance-by-sysop/god, FidoNet with network coordinators, and USENET with its backbone cabal.
tomoNet - a network of tomo shards that agree to all swap groups/posts with one another - is going to have to deal with the question of (self-) governance sooner or later. at the moment, tomoBBS has no specific controls for managing defederation and it does *not* use the ActivityPub protocol. it needs some, and i need help thinking through what the options are, for a network based on NNTP.
...
if you've got thoughts on how your online social community was governed (or failed to be governed) by its users, i'd love to hear about it. it's a wide open topic for debate, and there are no wrong answers at the moment.
Random Retro Game:
Title: Ultima: Runes of Virtue
Released: 1991-12-14
Platforms: Game Boy
#Ultima:RunesofVirtue #GameBoy #Retrogames
A minor revision of #XU4 - Ultima IV Recreated is now available.
Changes since last year's release are:
- An update of the license to GPLv3+.
- Using #GLFW 3 on Windows (saving some memory).
- Karma adjustments from buying reagents match DOS version.
- Fixes for a few other issues.
Version 1.4.1 archives and #Fedora packages can be downloaded from https://xu4.sourceforge.net/
This is my favorite clip from tonight's stream. Thanks to Keyglyph for capturing this!
#Ultima 4 #retrogaming #DOSember
https://www.twitch.tv/capsulejay/clip/SleepyAmazonianCormorantPicoMause-17vHLYH-C2ycV1Cg
Tonight, we were blessed with a vision of Compassion... and also raids from @cursedblessing and @jewelry_jelly ! Thanks to everyone who joined us for #Ultima 4!
#DOSember #retrogaming
