Review: Ultima: Warriors of Destiny (NES)
In this review, we track down Lord British in the NES game Ultima: Warriors of Destiny. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 1993 and is the fifth game of this main series.
We have a fair bit of experience with this series at this point. First is Ul
https://www.freezenet.ca/review-ultima-warriors-of-destiny-nes/
Ultima Offline eXperiment 3 - the original open source Ultima Online server emulator - v0.99.6
https://www.europesays.com/2131700/ piattaforme e cultura per colmare il gap #colmare #Cultura #educazione #finanziaria #Italia #italy #notizie #piattaforme #ultima
more buried treasure: origin's UO booth at the E3 in may 1996
iirc, the E3 public demo was held concurrently with the pre-alpha test. the pre-alpha was the most excitement i had ever had in my life - playing a graphical massively multiplayer game in 1996 was a life changing event.
one of my little hobbies is digging for buried treasure on WBM before bed.
today's find: the ultima online beta test application form has been rediscovered 28 years later
i remember filling this cgi-bin form out when i was a teenager. i had a 486 SX-33 with 4 megs of ram and 14.4k dialup modem at the time, and this put me well below the minimum requirements. i lied on the beta application because i was convinced i'd never get in without higher system specs. 
back in 1997 i was graduating high school and completely unsure about what to do with my life. as much as i hated my local school culture, it had given me a solid structure to live in for over a decade.
that spring/summer/fall coincided with the public beta tests and launch of Ultima Online. it became my second home while i was figuring out how to leave my family home and dip my toes into adulthood and living alone. by september of 97 i was going to university full-time and struggling through that transition. UO began to overwhelm my life, and i was spending 12-16 hours a day mining for ore, sewing fancy shirts and skullcaps, and fishing off the docks in south Britain.
the soundtrack became an everpresent part of my life, and i ended upgraded my soundcard to a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, just so i could hear the soundtrack that was specifically re-orchestrated for the card (with a 4 meg patch library!).
this morning I stumbled upon Loot Goblin's re-interpretation of the UO soundtrack. it has been crafted in the most unusual way - into downtempo, forlorn, and intimate melodies. this has instantly become my background music for coding. if you played the game, you'll immediately recognize the tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Tb4RlcUtE
sadly, no bandcamp:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/ultima-online-but-its-lofi/1738795678
https://www.europesays.com/2055122/ Causas y última hora de la red eléctrica #Apagón #CorteLuzElectricidad #directo #España #hora #noticias #spain #ultima
Review: Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (NES)
In this review, we seek the runes in the NES game Ultima: Quest of the Avatar. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 1990 and is the fourth game of this series.
We first played Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. We ended up finding that game to be a flop. A
https://www.freezenet.ca/review-ultima-quest-of-the-avatar-nes/
https://www.europesays.com/2043931/ Apagón eléctrico en España, hoy en directo: Causas y última hora de la red eléctrica – El Periódico #Apagón #CorteLuzElectricidad #directo #España #hora #noticias #spain #ultima
https://www.europesays.com/2041960/ Causas del corte y última hora de la red eléctrica #Apagón #CorteLuzElectricidad #directo #España #hora #noticias #spain #ultima
i can't really believe this research was never done or published over the years. it's funny how basic knowledge like this disappears: the original typeface that graced the cover of every Ultima game.
"Victorian" was created by english typeface designers Freda Sack and Colin Brignall in 1976, and was included in the ITC typeface library.
top: Victorian Standard Regular typeface.
bottom: Worlds of Ultima - Martian Dreams box cover, with a slightly modified version of the Victorian font. You'll notice that the M has a very pretty descender added by an artist at Origin Systems. i *suspect* this was painted or airbrushed by Denis Loubet (does anyone know denis here?), but there are no credits given in any of the manuals.
both use an exactly 64 point font.
TIL that there were two Ultima games for the Gameboy: Runes of Virtue 1 & 2. They are not really Ultima games, but more roguelike.
#retrogaming #nintendo #gameboy #ultima
i am blown away by this german rpg (with full english translation) that has been around for decades, and i somehow never heard of it until now
Teudogar and the Alliance with Rome (2003) is as close to an Ultima VII followup as we'll ever see in my opinion.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/40423/teudogar-and-the-alliance-with-rome/
i was initially crushed when i saw that the developer closed their site, and did not allow any registrations/purchases of the game - and the demo was the only thing left available.
mercifully, some digging revealed that the developer *very* kindly provided a free download of the full version of the game in a secret area of their site:
http://www.teudogar.com/private/index.html
important: the zip password is Password
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
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.