Ultima 7 (Including Serpent Isle) Released on Good Old Games
That’s right, Dragons and Dragonettes: The Age of Armageddon’s beginning, Ultima 7, Serpent Isle (and their expansions) are now officially available at Good Old Games, for $5.99.
As was the case for the recent release of Ultimas 1 through 3, I’ll be posting a few bits of celebratory content to the site during the course of the day.
Also: If you haven’t yet registered an account at Good Old Games, please consider doing so through one of the GOG.com-related banners on the site; Ultima Aiera is now a Good Old Games affiliate, and you will support the site and its operation by your purchases of these and other timeless classics.
Outstanding! I’m glad they didn’t find a way to rip out the expansions. 😉
Tell me: Do they rip out the manual-based copy protection from these old games? Or does that not count as “DRM”?
Call me quaint (or maybe naive) but I always enjoyed the Ultima “DRM” To me, it seemed more an encouragement to immerse oneself in the literature than to prevent copying.
The copy-protection questions weren’t taken out of Ultima VI, so it’s probably safe to assume they haven’t been removed here either. On the other hand, GOG is also providing you with PDFs of the manuals which contain all the pertinent information, so it’s really more of an annoyance than anything show-stopping.
the games have a pdf called answers.pdf with all the necessary answers. *ripping* the copy protection wouldn’t be very easy without having the original source code and the necessary compilers.
At least not with the original game. One could easily do it with Exult 🙂
I’m not sure that’s true. Wouldn’t it just be a matter of editing the usecode?
Oh, wait, you’re the Dominus from Exult? I suppose you would know that better than anybody.
In any case, I remember there being crack programs back in the 90’s that could, if not rip it out entirely, make any answer to the copy protection’s questions correct. They did that without any source code.
*Just* editing the usecode?
It’s a series of flags that need to be set if done so that no question is asked.
I suppose you could alter the usecode to start the answer with the correct amount.
I’d be interested in that crack program just to learn which file it altered.
oh, and just because I’m from the Exult team doesn’t mean I’m always correct when it comes to U7. I’m open to learning new things and was wrong more than once 🙂
I’m a bit disappointed in the extras of the GOG release. The SI cluebook (Balancing the scales) is missing and there is no color scan of the SI map (I think this answers which cloth map #ThatBarnettBlok was missing :))
I haven’t checked out the package yet, so I’m surprised to hear that. It’s not like those things aren’t available.
Still, I think I may be able to come up with a solution. Pix probably has a cluebook scan, and we can probably get a map from HRUMP. BanditLOAF from the Wing Commander CIC has the ability to upload content to GOG, I gather…he might be able to pass such things along to them.
Ultima VII, still one of my favourite games of all time. I have the complete U7 box sitting on my shelf right now.
Can’t quite believe they’re only selling it for $5.99, I thought it would be at the higher price point!
yes, a solution for this would be nice. It’s not as if I don’t have the real cloth map and the clue book but it should be out there! It seems rather sloppy that these weren’t there.
Dominus:
There’s a crack at the Bootstrike site.
http://bootstrike.com/Ultima7bg/cool2.php
Thanks. Just looking at the nfo it seems that it does only patch the savegame, or rather the files in the gamedat folder (kind of a quicksave). So I guess that it only sets the appropiate flag (see the U7 flags docs that got posted here some ages ago). This can be done via the in game cheat menu as well (I think). I guess this was done by brute force (comparing the contents of the gamedat folder before and after answering the questions).
BUT it doesn’t help you with the questions Batlin asks you (again some flags need to be set)
Yes, of course the pirates never got that far.
It was a weird place to put copy protection though, since you could just land the carpet inside the Fellowship Retreat anyway… (was that a plot bug?)
I think the carpet was a mistake to put into the game. I guess it was added more “just because we can”. If at all it should have been tied to a quest and not be available right from the start (if you knew where to look). I like to use it but I also don’t like it, especially the seats on the carpet. Think of how cool it would have been to have the carpet roll up similar to the bedroll and the party just (seemingly) loosely stand on it 🙂
Agreed, the carpet is in many ways a game breaker, which ruins the game’s sense of exploration.
Honestly, most forms of vehicular travel in Ultima 7 annoyed the pants off of me.
Horse carts? Forget it!
Navigating a ship? It is to laugh!
Magic carpet? Sure, it can fly over mountains…but buildings with multiple floors would stop it dead.
I’m with the guys at the CIC: that Kilrathi fighter should have been a useable means of transport.
Who’s that in the window?
Yeah, saw that one; was going to report on it in a bit here, actually.
Possibly my most favourite Easter egg ever, now.
The carpet I believe was more than likely a nod to Ultima V. The seats were due to the engine’s way of dealing with seats & sitting in a 3d environment (that is why thrones are more than one “piece”.
I think horses were left out because of how combat was handled. It would be easy to include a horse merchant in Exult that would, upon purchase, change the sprites for characters to be characters on horses. However, weapon offsets are set up to always be at a particular spot to match up with npc hands. Plus, one would have to figure out how to have two-handed weapons act like one-handed weapons, ala Mount & Blade.
The need for seats was more a lack of imagination, a year later with Serpent Isle they figured that out themselves and transportation without sitting was made possible (Turtle and the freely moveable ice raft).
The Serpent Isle team were nothing short of wizards, and figured out many interesting things about that engine.
I do regard it as a pity that they never had time to build the world the way they wanted to (e.g. multiple two-story buildings in Moonshade, with elevated walkways and suchlike). Alas, time and the limited power of computers in that day and age prohibited such things.
I think the magic carpet in UVII was cool none the less… the biggest issue for me is that it ruined any point of buying a boat – why getting a boat when a carpet can do everything and better?
Dominus – Ah..the ice raft slipped my mind, which is silly because Savage Empire has a raft & so does the remake (preliminary one drawn a while back, needs updated with the latest bamboo sprites.)
WTF – I too get bummed out about the cut content of S.I. I know that people have toyed around with the idea of trying to implement it in Exult.
Sergorn – I do believe that there are a couple of small islands that require a ship to land on. Plus buying & sailing ships are just part of the experience I suppose, hehe! My issue was the size of the world was a tad small due to memory/space limitations.
So, Marzo and AgentOrangeGuy wer discussing how to make alternative transportation working (for the u6 remake) and I mentioned that a real carpet would be great. So marzo whipped this up as a code example
Discussion and the link to the mod http://exult.sourceforge.net/forum/read.php?f=1&i=372622&t=372622
Screenshots:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/713/carpet1.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/651/carpet2.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/254/carpet3.png/
(hey why are my comments awaiting moderation?)
oh because of the links
Yeah… Four links will annoy the spam filter. I’ve cleared it; should be posted now.
Also…that is just awesome.
awesome were my words as well 🙂
We also learned that in Exult the carpet lands on water (the normal carpet as well). Always has been the case 🙂