Ultima VII

Hello fellow DOS fans!

A while back we ran a Twitter poll to see what people thought a good RPG would be for us to check out. And although Dark Sun, Darklands and Albion all good respectable scores, there was one clear winner: Ultima VII, released in 1992 by Origin Systems. So that became our December game.

As neither our hosts Martijn ("Tijn") and Florian ("rnlf") played the game before, we were very happy that two knowledgable experts were willing to join the show and help us explain the contents and context of this game and the Ultima series as a whole. First of all it's long time DGC member and podcast regular Richard ("Pix"), and last but not least there's Michael ("Moa2020") who is completely new to the club.

Enoy!

[ download mp3 ] (115 mins, 92 MB)

RELEVANT LINKS:

* As ever, Pix scanned in some old magazines with reviews for us. Thanks!

* Exult is an open source reimplementation of Ultima 7 for modern platforms, using the original data files.

29 Mar 2020

5 Replies to “Ultima VII”

julianguarin1978 says:
March 29, 2020 at 2:35 am

It was not only hardware, they had to overcome the memory management provided by DOS by the time, writing their own memory manager called vodoo or something like that… on the game credits it’s specified.

rasz_pl says:
April 1, 2020 at 8:02 pm

Games already used standard memory management middleware like dos4gw in 1992, for example Mortal Kombat.

taxalot says:
April 2, 2020 at 1:54 pm

Yes, but this one was particularly finicky. iirc it required a fairly high amount of conventional memory, and refused to launch if EMM386 was loaded.

rasz_pl says:
April 7, 2020 at 5:24 am

My point was they didnt have to reinvent the wheel. dos4gw already existed and was battle tested. This is severe NIH syndrome from a company not exactly known for quality coding practices.

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