Nuvie updated…Now With FM-Towns Support!

I hope I’m reporting that correctly.

Dominus brought it to my attention that Nuvie‘s snapshots (for both Mac and Windows) had been updated in the last week, and mentioned (if memory serves) that developer Eric Fry had managed to incorporate support for audio from the FM-Towns version of Ultima 6.

Which means yet another reason to listen to the voice acting talents of various Origin employees, including Richard Garriott himself!

I’ve posted the updated snapshots to the project entry; you can also grab them directly from the Nuvie website.

34 Responses

  1. There was an Ultima VI release with voice acting? Just did a little reading on the odd FM Towns PC. Damn it never ceases to amaze me how little I know about…everything.

    In any case, a cross platform (hopefully works on Linux) Ultima VI/MD/SE engine is completely badass. Better than Exult IMHO.

  2. Thepal says:

    WTF!!! (and no, I don’t mean you)

    There’s a voiced version of Ultima 6? Why didn’t I know this?!

    *runs off to find a copy so he can hear the companions*

  3. Thepal says:

    Good to know I’m not the only one, Kevin 😛

  4. Thepal says:

    That was… weird.

    The voices are definately not… umm… professional quality. But it is still cool :p Strangely, Lord British sounded the least weird (probably because at this point I’m used to his British voice-overs). They all had to talk really, really fast in order to keep the file size small :p I kinda like the Japanese voices better though. Don’t understand a word they are saying, but that means I can’t tell if they’re speaking weirdly :p

  5. Dominus says:

    @kevin: better than Exult? BURN!!!!!

    @all: don’t just focus on the horrible voice acting. Also notice the nice sfx, no more strange sounds out of the PC speaker but real sounds 😉
    Eric also made it possible to make your own sound pack. The changelog probably tells you more about this.
    Apart from making it less painfull to play u6, nuvie is also the chance to partly get rid of the horrible gui. Imagine the small play window on the whole screen. And whenever you speak with someone the conversation window gets overlayed. Same with the inventory stuff once you start inventoring.
    Eric seems to be open to do some enhancements once he has more of the stuff scripted. I suggested he should initiate some kind of discussion/poll here once he’s ready 😉

  6. Zygon Dragon says:

    Here’s a link to a Lets Play FM towns version 🙂

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WPbtA1ugkQ

  7. Origin Museum says:

    I think it’s awesome that folks are re-discovering old Ultimas even today. 🙂 Being a collector, one of my big quests back in the day (2001-2002) was to acquire an FM Towns Ultima 6. Once that was done, I actually bought an FM Towns system to play it on–the expense was exhorbitant, and I found the monitor was proprietary (try finding the pinouts of a computer system hardly ever heard of in the US!) I managed it, had some fun, and then found an emulator for PC(–Typical)!
    My article has been up since about 2003–you can see the old girl here:
    http://69.89.27.241/~originm1/stories/story2.htm
    I contacted Eric Fry in 2004, just as NuVIe was getting really rolling. After spending years looking for a way to extract the voices, I begged him to help me in my quest. Eric was a great guy, and was already working on this exact thing. He actually wrote me a little program that let me extract all the voices from the FM Towns CD directly, in a PC compatible format–and it was incredible! True, the voice-acting is not great, but it was like opening a time capsule into Origin’s hey-day. I sent a few of the voices back to the original folks, and they really appreciated the ‘walk down memory lane’.
    I’m sometimes saddened that I never took the time to post many of my discoveries and adventures at the time they happened. This was one of dozens of fun little things that I never thought people would be interested in.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I’m intrigued that some people haven’t heard about the FM-Towns version of the game. And I quite agree with Origin Museum: the last entry in the series was released 12 years ago, and there’s still stuff about it (the series) that people have yet to discover. Very cool.

      Speaking of which…Joe, if you’ve kept notes of any of these explorations and efforts of yours, it might not be too late to publish them. Just sayin’…

  8. Zygon Dragon says:

    BTW: Origin Museum. You going to fix your domain name? 🙂 I have hosting if you need it.?

  9. Origin Museum says:

    WTF-I have simple notes of course, but the trouble is finding the time to put all of this stuff together–being a husband, father, and employee takes up most of my time–I’m always impressed that others (like you) are able to find the time to post to your sites! My solution is to just give all of my discoveries away to good folks like you. 🙂 The WCNews guys also have gotten a lot of my stuff over the years–it’s actually more fun for me to find something in the archives and give a quick synopsis of it, and let everyone else tell *ME* more about it–amazing how wrong I am on the origin of some of my own items! 🙂 Like I said, for a long time I was just collecting things, and never took the time to do writeups on them–but thanks to people like you, I’ve been able to share, and I think I’ve contributed a lot to the Ultima and Wing Commander communities.
    Zygon-Thanks a bunch, but I’ve got hosting–the problem is the domain name–I buy them, and then forget about them. When renewal time comes up, I forget, or I’m busy, some company always buys them up the day after they expire. Technically, the site has been up constantly for the last few years, but noone can ever find it. 🙂 Just for the record, the site is hosted by my ISP, so it’s not going anywhere–but I sure would like to get originmuseum.co back (or originmuseum.net, or originmuseum.org–I had them all!)
    BTW, congrats on finishing your collection, Zygorn–and the Serpent Isle beer bottle is incredibly cool! (WTF-post this!) I always wanted to make a ‘Serpentwyne’ myself, but never found the time.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Collection, what now? Zygon…I’ll be checking your site out tonight, it seems!

      For the record: I’m sometimes impressed how much I can post at times, though a lot of it comes down to scheduling (most posts are written in advance and set to auto-post a few hours later). I have a few little systems and techniques I use to streamline the writing process as well, though nothing incredible.

      If I didn’t have an iPhone, though, it’d be near-impossible to keep Aiera updated as much as I do. I fill ever spare minute I can — outside of work, friends & family…and Ultima Return of course — with Aiera-related stuff thanks to my tiny sidekick.

  10. Sanctimonia says:

    DOMINUS: “@kevin: better than Exult? BURN!!!!!”

    @DOMINUS: Hahaha. Exult is awesome, but the idea that the tiny little window in Ultima VI could be full screen is too awesome for me to comprehend. I recently tried playing VI again and was struck by how claustrophobic it felt…no sense of the scale of the world.

    On a different subject, is anyone here technically proficient enough to take a peek into WTF is going on with my mail server? The last email I received was Monday, so something’s seriously wrong. I can wait a few days for an NDR from my Gmail account, but by then a ton of other people would have received them, and that’s not good.

    My A record is eightvirtues.com, MX record is mail.eightvirtues.com, and my email is kevinfishburne AT eightvirtues DOT com. I’m running dovecot and postfix on Ubuntu 10.10 ia64, and the server underwent no upgrades or configuration changes prior to the problem. I have a Comcast business account with a static IP (173.15.223.130).

    Any help would be result in me owing the good Samaritan a favor.

  11. Hehe… I still have some mp3 I donwloaded (several years ago) from The Origin Museum. Quite interesting.

    I remember Chuckles’ voice acting was irritatingly bad… but exotic, to say the best. On the other side, Ultima IX voice acting was bad, tedious and dull. The best line of the Avatar in the whole game was:

    “This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.”

  12. Dominus says:

    Yes, I’d really like to play U6 with a much better view… I still haven’t played the World of Ultimas… I’m waiting for years now that nuvie has them playable…

    • WtF Dragon says:

      While I don’t dislike the U6 interface, the more open concept option does intrigue me.

      Would I be incorrect to think that it will offer something akin to the U6 Online interface, at least in terms of how much map is shown.

  13. Sanctimonia says:

    How crazy is this? Turns out I forgot to pay my bill. Interestingly instead of Comcast just shutting of my Internet service they blocked incoming port 25 so I couldn’t receive email. Oh well, at least I learned a bit about postfix and dovecot. :/

  14. Sanctimonia says:

    All I need is smooth scrolling and arbitrary screen resolutions and I’ll be playing Ultima VI like I’d just come home from Babbage’s. Which reminds me how much game stores suck these days…

    @WtF:
    Yeah, that’s seriously crazy that an ISP would simply block port 25 when you fail to pay your bill. I guess they knew how much of a nerd I was and figured they’d punish me extra hard by tricking me into wasting hours with diagnostics. Damn them.

  15. Dominus says:

    @wtf: eric hasn’t planned anything yet, at least he didn’t say so yet. It’s just that we talked on irc (aehm, hint hint) about it and I made some proposals. Ultimately he will probably ask for ideas on how to make the interface better.

  16. Dominus says:

    #nuvie @ freenode.net the little conversation about this can be read at http://log.usecode.org/nuvielog.php?log=1Dec2010
    (wjp of the Exult team has his trusty exultbot log the conversations in several project chats http://log.usecode.org/

  17. Sergorn says:

    As far as U6 improvement goes personally I’d love a Fullscreen mode. This would look gorgeous.

    And yeah the voice acting in the FM Towns Ultima VI is terrible, it was actually all done by OSI employees as I recall with people voicing their own character when applicable (Richard Garriott voiced Lord British and Shamino, David Watson watched Iolo and so on…)

  18. zimThuet says:

    I was wondering where I could get a FM towns version of u6 so I could play this game. I’m totally new to anything Ultima related, since I heard there was a voice speech version of the game I wanted to try it out. But I can’t seem to find an FM Towns Version of the game + Nuvie hasn’t been released yet, or am I wrong?

  19. Dominus says:

    You need to scout ebay and/or other auction sites. And sadly the price of it has gone through the roof. I’m glad I got my copy before the price exploded.
    Nuvie hasn’t been released yet and I don’t think it will be released soon. But there are snapshot releases of nuvie for Windows and OS X, so go play it 😉

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Usual disclaimer: Nuvie isn’t going to enable to you play Ultima 6 by itself; you still need a copy of the game (PC or FM-Towns version) in order to provide Nuvie with the data files it needs to run.

  20. Sergorn says:

    Note that you can easily play the FM-Towns version of Ultima VI through an FM-Towns emulator though. It looks and play exactly like the PC version… except it has godawful speech 😛

  21. Dominus says:

    And fm towns has better sfx than the original pc version 😉

  22. Dominus says:

    Yes, I thought about this disclaimer as well 😉
    I don’t even know if the fm towns files are enough to play nuvie, I think you need the PC version to play and the Fm towns version for real sfx and voice acting…

  23. Zygon Dragon says:

    Dominus,
    I saw a post on another forum regarding FM Towns and UNZ. You seem to have it running? Just wondering if you managed to get UNZ working under OSX?

    I’ve got it running under Wine on OSX but I can’t get it to read my FM Towns ISOs mounted in finder. Could this be due to copy protection? Under Windows XP and Daemons tools it runs perfectly.

    Any ideas?
    Thanks,

  24. Dominus says:

    Oi, the last time I tried unz I was still using Windows. Haven’t tried on OS X.

  25. Zygon Dragon says:

    Doh! I’m not sure what is different between daemons tools mounting an image and toast or hdiutil under MAC. Something is because UNZ does not boot my image 🙁

  26. Dominus says:

    I think newer unz allows using isos directly.

  27. Zygon Dragon says:

    Got a link for this version?