A day or two ago when discussing my return to Ultima Online, I mentioned running UO under VMWare Fusion (and Parallels Desktop should run just fine based on my experience with it and Fusion). Earlier today I upgraded my memory and downloaded CrossOver Games for Mac which is a much better way to run Ultima Online under Mac OS X, since it’s much better performance-wise.

I’ve run it with both the Enhanced Client and the Classic Client and both run well. The Enhanced Client runs at native PC/Windows speed from what I saw in comparison with a PC I had. I played around on LS today running CrossOver Games and the Enhanced Client – probably 5-6 hours, and never had a crash or a slowdown.

I’m going to be doing a full write-up with screenshots this weekend for running Ultima Online under both VMWare Fusion and CrossOver Games. CrossOver Games is much more affordable and doesn’t require an actual Windows license. It also seems much faster and more intuitive.

As I mentioned earlier, I was pondering returning to UO, and was doing so with a 14-day trial. The 14-day trial run lasted all of about 10 minutes, before curiosity got the better of me and I re-opened my main account.

It maybe worse than I thought – I lost a lot of stuff, but I expected that, but I won’t know the true damage until I check all of my characters as well as re-open my alts. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought, because I’ve probably forgotten a lot of what was in my houses, and I usually kept the most valuable/important stuff in my bank boxes on the chance that I would close my accounts. I just didn’t expect to completely walk away like I did so some cool stuff was lost.

So I log in with my main account and main character. I’m at the location of my former house in Skara Brae, just behind a small hut and right off the main road. Low and behold where I had a 2-story house, like a 12×10 or something, I can now place something a lot larger – there was nothing there and the house that had been next door was gone.

So I mark the spot on the map (waypoint) which is something I like with the new EC – I wish it went a lot further and allowed you to differentiate between points. I always thought they should hire the UO Auto-MapPlaying – hardware
If you’re curious, I’m playing the UO Enhanced Client through VMWare Fusion on a quad-core iMac (Mac OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard) and it runs fine. It’s bizarre as hell to be running UO in 1920×1080 and I could run it at a much higher resolution, but it seems I still don’t have much screen real estate Runs as well as the classic client. My problem is memory – I’ve only got 4GB on the machine in total and there were a few times where I noticed some lagging and I looked at the activity monitor and was down to a few hundred MB free thanks to me running several other things at once. I’ll have that fixed soon. This is a far cry from what I was using several years go at the peak of my playing. I think the last time I seriously played was on an AMD Athlon XP with a small bit of playing on a Pentium D (dual-core). Either way, this is much much faster, regardless of which client I use. I’m in the process of mucking around with CrossOver Games, which will remove the necessity of running a full-blown Windows environment through VMWare Fusion.

That brings me to this: I can’t handle the classic client anymore even though that’s the one I want to use. I need mapping, etc., and that appears to be broken, so that leaves me with the Enhanced Client. The EC, while it runs smooth, just feels really outdated at this point. I really liked the look of the classic client and I would still be using that if it had mapping etc. The EC….I’m almost afraid they are liable to turn it into a browser-based game like all of those ones you see the ads for on the MMORPG websites. More on that later.
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The French version of Ultima V: Lazarus for Windows has been released, according to the official notice on U5Lazarus.com:

The French version of Ultima V: Lazarus has been officially released for the Windows platform. Check out our DOWNLOADS page to start playing! The Macintosh version should be available soon. Many thanks to our beta testers who helped make this possible.

La version Française d’Ultima V : Lazarus est officiellement disponible pour Windows. Rendez-vous sur notre page de TELECHARGEMENTS pour commencer à jouer ! La version Macintosh devrait être bientôt disponible. Merci beaucoup à tous les beta testeurs qui nous ont aidé à rendre ça possible.

Ultima V: Lazarus is a free modification of the Dungeon Siege engine.