A Curious Ultima 9 Issue
A gent who goes by the handle keropi is having a bit of an issue getting Ultima 9 running on his “vintage Windows games” rig:
after building my winME p4 machine I decided to finally play UltimaIX … I did a full install, installed 1.18f patch and then the 1.19 unofficial one.
I made a yt vid to show you: http://youtu.be/N9Y_wn2VCFoas you can see the framerate is really good but the character’s movement is broken , the journal animation is dead slow and it makes no difference of the details setting…. it’s like an internal timer or something just goes crazy
I have tried the game completely unpatched, with 1.18f patch and with the 1.19 one…. all 3 behave the same.
I have tried running in Glide or D3D mode, still the same (so there is nothing wrong with the gf4 drivers I think, the v2 ones are the last stock 3dfx ones)
I even tried downclocking the cpu to 1.2ghz, still the same!the pc is running winME, a p4@2.4 with HT disabled, voodoo2 sli, gf4200ti, sblive, dx8.2 … I am all out of ideas and found nothing on google… (I did not even find an alive Ultima series forum)
I am getting pissed at this because when I bought U9 it was running like a snail on my p3 and now that I have built a machine that has a nice framerate it just crapped out
Anyone here has any suggestions? because I am all out of ideas…
He also put together a video demonstrating the various issues:
Ultima 9 issues.
Now, it seems to me that at some point in the…recentish past…a possible solution to the laggy journal loading was discussed. I can’t quite remember who I was talking with, though, or where, although it was probably someone who frequents the site. If any of you happen to know how he might go about solving one or more of these issues, please feel free to shout out in the comments.
I know more about the dark side of the moon than Ultima IX, but did some searching on system requirements and found this:
Windows 95/98
Pentium II 400MHz
128Mb RAM
16Mb 3D Accelerator video card, using the Voodoo3 chipset
1Gb HDD space, plus space for saved games
Windows Me is a stinking shit pile, so there’s some chance it could be contributing to these very strange issues with the game. I’d give Windows 95 or 98 a try. I have ISOs of each if you need them (queue DMCA takedown). You’ll have to dig up all the drivers for your hardware. I suspect the graphics card’s drivers would need to be paid the most attention and possibly be provided by the card manufacturer rather than the chipset manufacturer.
Good observation about an internal timer, BTW. From a programming standpoint it does look something like that, and I have seen games freak out when presented with too fast a CPU. Let’s say a game performs a test to determine machine speed by incrementing a counter over a period of one second to see how high the counter gets. The counter could overflow easily on a faster machine if it used a small datatype like a short or integer rather than a long or float and either crash the game or fuck up the framerate of various subsequent calculations.
Anyway, good luck. If all else fails, run it under VirtualBox with acceleration enabled on a modern system.
Not necessary; you can get it running natively under Windows 7, and then without a lot of settings tweaking and goat sacrificing.
The journal is hilarious.
Hi Sanctimonia !
I will give win98SE a chance, no need for it since I still have my original cds. (I mess around with old hardware, even have a dos-only pc with a LAPC-I to hear those extra sounds in UW1)
I don’t really think it’s the video drivers causing this, because on the same p4 machine I also have a voodoo2/sli setup with the stock 3DFX drivers: even in native glide mode the same thing happens…
I will report back after trying 98SE
meh, forgot to mention that I also tried the game on my i7/560ti/win7x64 pc… it actually runs almost fine but there is a 4-5secs delay each time I open the journal. the game will freeze, sound will loop and get back to normal when the journal opens….
SUCCESS!!!
I followed Sanctimonia’s advice and installed win98SE. Same hardware as before, same drivers. I also installed the unofficial SP2 for 98SE.
The game run OK! the movement animations were fine at last!
But when you opened a book the game would freeze, sound would loop and it would continue after 4-5secs (same as on my i7)
So I grabbed Ultima 9 Extended Setup from this site , loaded the “geforce user” profile and the book problem disappeared!
It all seems fine now!
Thanks for anyone posting here and a MEGA thanks to the site’s admin for being so helpful!
And in conclusion, Windows ME strikes again!
yep, and I am puzzled why ME behaved like that… OK ppl have reported instabilities (I have not experienced any) but this is a compatibility issue of some sorts… which is strange because in the same system I am running several older games and some glide-only ones… anyways, no point investigating it further I think since 98SE seem more fitting for the job…
thanks again for all the help!!!
Windows ME is the Windows Vista of yesteryear.
Except worse: Whereas Vista was released after a lengthy development, ME was sort of shoved out the door a bit early, as a kind of “lite” alternative — to Windows 2000 — for non-business users. (Or at least that’s my understanding.)
But all it wound up doing was cross-breeding everything that was wrong with Windows 2000 and everything that was wrong with Windows 98 (which, in sharp contrast with 98SE, was pretty much crap as well). 98SE is in almost every respect the superior OS, especially if you’ve installed that third-party-developed “service pack”.
I think the most bizarre thing about ME is that while it features the same basic shell as the NT-based Windows 2000, it is actually based on the Windows 9x codebase…which in theory is MS-DOS based as well. But ME actually disabled the “real DOS” mode & support of 9x, which ostensibly made for faster boot times.
To be fair, that change shouldn’t have affected Ultima 9, it being a Windows-based rather than DOS-based application, and also given the fact that it runs just fine on most NT-based Windows versions (which also do not have “real DOS” support).
I wonder, though, if that change isn’t somehow related, though. I couldn’t begin to speculate as to why it would be, but…I have a suspicion it may be relevant.
I have to say, over the years I’ve tried to get U9 running on many many different systems and never had any luck getting it to even load. Then when I got a new machine running Windows 7 64bit, I thought I’d give it one last go and it worked perfectly. I honestly don’t get why, considering Win7 should really be incompatible, shouldn’t it?
Even though the original issue has been solved, the comments in this youtube video might have been helpful as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0MwaSifbPg
(just adding this for completeness)
Hawkwind I assume you are talking about this comment here:
” Just use a GLIDE wrapper or if you prefer D3D, which is recommended nowadays, I found a perfect and working solution.
First, select a 16 bit colour depth resolution in options – this resolves the ~4 seconds lag.
Furthermore, edit the options.ini file found in Ultima IX parent directory and search for this line:
; The # of milliseconds to load from CD per? frame
StreamDuration=1000
Replace the value with 3000 – this solves the sound stutter problem. (:
KrVoLoK 5 years ago ”
I pasted it here for future reference, thanks!
Changing the StreamDuration to 3000 definitely speeds up the GUMP opening. Increasing it further appears to have no effect, but the lag is effectively halved when opening books or the retrieval of plot critical items.
RE: the original issue: Really bizarre issue, definitely looks like an issue with the timer. Wait did you say you have the original unpatched release version of Ultima IX?
@Iceblade: yes I *thought* my game was unpatched (like 99% of games that I own) but this one is 1.18F straight from the disc… the only upgrade I can make is go to 1.19 …
Dang, I was hoping to get my hands on the unpatched executable.
@Keropi “But when you opened a book the game would freeze, sound would loop and it would continue after 4-5secs (same as on my i7)
So I grabbed Ultima 9 Extended Setup from this site , loaded the “geforce user” profile and the book problem disappeared!”
Oh thank goodness there’s a fix for this. I can’t wait to go home and try it. I have a fairly shiny modern gaming PC and that was the one bug I wasn’t able to fix.
RusticDragon also have a look at the comment by KrVoLoK I pasted above, it has some more info that might help too 😀
I’m happy to say that I’ve killed the book issue. However, I’ve discovered an interesting new issue. I recently acquired a monitor with a native resolution of 2560×1600 but U9 won’t have it.
I can run U9 at every resolution from 640×480 up to 2048×1536, but the 2560×1600 just crashed on game load. U9.icd always stops working. Has anyone had any luck with this?
Then again, I may be the only person in the world trying to run U9 at this resolution.
Have you applied the 1.19F patch?
2560×1600… that must be an awesome gaming experience… I tried u9 on my 1920X1200 monitor and it’s just awesome, I can’t even imagine how it looks at a higher res!
I did install the 1.19F patch, to no avail.
Actually, in my opinion, higher resolutions with U9 aren’t that exciting. I’ll explain…
In modern games, such as Age of Conan or Skryim when I bump up the resolution, the UI tends to shrink and become less obtrusive for a much more immersive gaming experience. Unfortunately with U9, the UI at the bottom continues to take up the same percentage of screen space. And, since 20% of the screen at 1920×1200 is a lot more pixels than 20% of the screen at 1024×768, it tends to look really bad. I wonder if there is a way to shrink the UI graphics back to 1:1 instead of stretching them.
I’ll look into this soon. I know a lot of games with .ini files have a UIscale entry or something like it.
No dice. If there’s a way to shrink the UI, I can’t find it.
hmm… maybe there’s no way to change it…
I did something funny: I am running Beautiful Britannia on my 2.4ghz/4200ti win98SE machine… using the original “foggy” U9.exe and a vast clipping amounts it runs at 30-60fps 😀 VERY playable! My 4200ti has only 64MB of VRAM and I suspect there is some texture swapping, I am looking to upgrade that to 128 or better 6600-256MB 😀
Derp. I need to get BB installed. How could I have forgotten this?
Yeah, much of the game is unfortunately hardcoded since so little is located in exterior files: World Maps, Scripting, Models, Textures, Basic Object data information, and status information for NPCs. The GUMP images themselves might be located in the exterior files, but that would just be the image not the functionality like position of icons.
Iceblade, I have an original initial prepatch U9 release CD. What do you need?
Just these four files:
U9.exe
U9.icd
Default.kmp
Options.ini
The differences could prove interesting.
Send to them the email account listed on our website.
ok, uploaded the files to dropbox and sent an email at that yahoo address.
I also found the U9 demo and uploaded the files as well.
Huh, so apparently I’m not the only one with this problem… except this happened rather suddenly and spontaneously on my Windows 7 system. Worked fine the past couple days, then *splat* Exactly this problem. Still trying to figure out a workaround…