Good Old Games: Save Game Imports for Ultimas 4, 5, and 6 Do Not Work
I’ve been informed by Good Old Games — and you can read it here, in their news posting about the release — that the save-game import/character transfer features of Ultima 5 and Ultima 6 do not (at present) work in the versions of the games that GOG has for sale.
The specific issue, as Good Old Games has described it to me, is as follows:
…there are no exact character save files in those Ultima games, but it’s like the “whole game” (like the full folder) is the save game. Can that be true? They told me the problem is that DOSBox is not able to recognize the previous part of the game as a save file (i.e. while playing U5 it doesn’t see U4 as a save).
Sergorn Dragon points out that importing should work as long as you move the character file from a previous game into the folder of the game you wish to import it into, but I have not yet had a chance to test this. Unless there is no specific character file? But that shouldn’t be the case, unless their version of the game is somehow not generating the file.
It would, in fairness, make sense that each game can’t see the others as they have set it up; DOSboxed games tend to exist in their own little virtual worlds, ignorant of most of the rest of the computer surrounding them.
So: I know there are some quite brilliant, technically gifted Ultima fans out there who are quite familiar with the guts of Ultima 4, 5 and 6. If any or all of you would be so kind, please do test whether character importing works on normal DOSboxed versions of the games, and (if so) whether or not those same import methods work on Good Old Games’ versions as well. And if, in fact, the system is broken on GOG’s versions, please do invest some time in thinking about what the issue might be.
After all…we want people to get the full Age of Enlightenment trilogy experience, right? Moreover, we wouldn’t want people to think that it was BioWare who first came up with the idea of moving a character between successive entries in a series…would we?
I looked at my U4-5-6 files.
The U4 save is a file called “PARTY.SAV”
The U5 save is a couple of files called “SAVE.GAM” and “SAVE.OOL”
Just copying them in the U5 or U6 folder should work.
Just in case:
U4 also has a file called MONSTERS.SAV
U5 also has files called BRIT.OOL and UNDER.OOL which are modified while playing
So perhaps they are part of the save, but I don’t think so. If just importing PARTY.SAV and SAVE.* doesn’t work, this should with – this is how I did last while playing U4-6 under DOSBOX
(Well as a matter of fact I actually imported my XU4 save then, since it’s made in a compatible format)
Bioware? What about SSI and their goldbox games?
(Pool of Radience, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades)
There was an old “import fixer” utility for U5. Or was it U6?
I do seem to remember having to put your save files somewhere weird. Possibly in the root directory of a drive.
Re: Who did importing first, Sierra’s Quest for Glory did it too.
Well the Golden Box games were made after Ultima IV&V so Ultima did it before SSI. Though I wonder if the early Wizardry didnt allow character transfers and Might and Magic too.
This was actually quite common in the 80s but all but vanished in the 90s
I’ve just been working on a new verison of the patcher and included an option to mount the previous games folder as your A drive for Ultima 5 and 6 character transfer. This worked ok for me at least.
The only snag with this is that DOSBox doesn’t store the save files for Ultima 4 in the same folder as the game (at least in Win7) so you need to know where to look. They are in :-
C:UsersRichardAppDataLocalVirtualStoreProgram Files (x86)GOG.comUltima 4
or a close equivalent instead.
The new patcher is at http://www.pix.oneuk.com/UltimaPatcher.rar again by the way. I’ve added in Ultima 5 & 6 + the Underworlds. I’ve should mention I’ve not tested it quite as much as I’d like yet and will try to finish it up over the weekend.
Here it is: fixparty.zip
I remember using this when I tried to play through U4-6 with a single character once. (didn’t finish, didn’t feel like playing U6)
Though, I’m not sure whether it was really necessary.
I’m not sure what it’s supposed to fix, but I can tell you I didn’t need to use it last year.
Which versions of Ultima IV and V were you playing with?
Ultima Collection ones I think
DOSBox setups tend to map the game directory as the root directory of the DOSBox session. This means that the rest of the computer simply doesn’t exist to DOSBox.
Copying old save game files into the the new game directory would work.
But the best solution would be to move all your DOS games to a DOSGAMES directory, and change the DOSBox startup file or shortcut to always mount “DOSGAMES” as the root directory. This puts all DOS games and DOSBox sessions in the same virtual universe.
I don’t usually mess with conf files, I handle it in the properties of the shortcut itself, such as:
“C:Program Files (x86)DOSBox-0.73dosbox.exe” -c aspect=true -c scaler=advmame2x -c cycles=6000 -c “mount c c:DOSGAMES” -c “c:” -c “cd ultima3” -c “u3.bat”
What exactly is the difference between the GOG games and, say, the Ultima Collection versions? I assume GOG didn’t get the source code so other than DOSBox configuration scrits, what else could be different?
Ram Dragon
Ram:
Little if any; we’d be talking minor version differences, such as existed between the CGW release of Ultima 4 and the Ultima Collection CD release of same.
Dont forget in Bard’s Tale II you could also transfer characters from either Bards Tale I or Ultima III.
Pretty sure BT III allowed you to as well but obviously this one came out after Ultima V.
Actually Wizardy is a good example.
Wizardy II does not have a way to make characters. You have to import Wizardy I characters.
From my own experience, fixparty.exe fixes party.sav from Ultima 4 so that Ultima 5 will recognize it. It’s the only way to transfer save games from U4 to U5 as far as I know. U5 to U6 should not be any problem. I have used the same character transferred from U4-U5-U6 and, with fixparty.exe, it worked perfectly.
Well, I just spent 10 minutes looking at this with a clean GOG.com install, and it wasn’t hard to make it work. I posted instructions on the GOG.com message board.
Smashing!
I’ve informed the GOG folks to take a look at your solution. Here’s hoping the can incorporate it into their download package.
There are probably simpler ways to do it, but I wanted something that GOG could just use if the choose to, and ran inside DOSBox, to (hopefully) avoid the fact that Vista/Win7 are actually accessing the files from some other location.
I had hoped to have it auto-run FIXPARTY.EXE when starting U5, but unfortunately DOSBox doesn’t implement pipes, so I can’t force drive selection like you would in actual Dos. Since my (very early in the game) save imported just fine anyhow, I just left it out.
Does anyone know what FIXPARTY.EXE does, or why? I ran on my file that already imported to U5 just fine and it changed the values of two bytes. Both of those bytes were in the players name field, but after the NULL that terminates the string.
Alternatively, does anyone have a U4 PARTY.SAV that won’t import to U5? I’d be interesting it comparing the file after running it through FIXPARTY.
A little bit late but under linux : U4 transfer to U5 can be done by either :
1) Mounting the U4 directory to a: , U5 can be any letter as far as I can tell
2) Copying U4 PARTY.SAV file into the U5 directory
Jc