Since the end of July, Dino the Dark Dragon has made a number of updates to his venerable Ultima website, Dino’s Ultima Page. On July 28th, for example, he made an update to his Ultima Underworld page:

Check out the updated Ultima Underworld I info page. I’ve cleaned up dead links and expanded the information in the page.

And on August 1st, he added a map viewer for Ultima 1’s Sosaria:

I’ve added an online Ultima 1 Map Viewer to my Complete Guide to Ultima 1: The First Age of Darkness. This allows you to roam around the Ultima 1 world map in your browser. Enjoy!

By August 2nd, he had made additional updates to a number of pages on the site:

I’ve continued cleaning up the dead links in the various info pages of Dino’s Ultima Page. The ones restored this weekend include: Ultima 4, Ultima 5, Ultima Underworld 2, Ultima 8 Maps and Places, and Ultima 9. I have also restored my old (2003) Exult Review among other minor improvements to the Ultima 7: The Black Gate section.

While doing this cleanup, I realised how much Ultima information and how many resources have been lost over the years as sites continued to disappear. For instance, most mirrors of the latest Ultima 5: Lazarus release are down, and no mirrors survive that used to host their first two demos. The policy at Dino’s Ultima Page has always been to host original content (or content by other people where permission is given), and link to information on other websites (rather than copying it, as many websites did at the time). Today, this policy changes. In order to preserve Ultima resources as much as possible, I will begin hosting maps, walkthroughs, etc from third-party websites where it makes sense to do so. I have already begun doing this in the Ultima 5 info page, where a lot of resources still survive only thanks to the Internet Archive.

A few days later, his Ultima 6 information received some attention:

I’ve cleaned up and updated links in the Ultima 6 Info section, particularly in the Main and Fun pages. As part of this exercise I’ve also added some long-lost resources from other websites, including a couple of walkthroughs and several maps.

This concludes cleanup for the smaller info sections in Dino’s Ultima Page. The next step is to cover the U7BG, SE and U8 Guides. I’m not planning to clean up the more recent (and dead) game info sections (Ultima X and Lord of Ultima) as those remain purely for historical purposes.

And most recently, he made good on the pledge to update the Ultima 8 guide:

I’ve been working heavily on bringing the Ultima 8 Guide out of its legacy state and into the modern world. As such, here are the improvements I’ve implemented over the past week or so:

• Migrated the U8 Guide to HTML5.
• Set up a dual navigation system, so stuff like Walkthrough and Magic sections can be accessed directly from any page in the Guide. For this reason, main Walkthrough and Magic pages no longer exist.
• Improved style of headings and navigation.
• Cleaned up dead links in various pages (work in progress).
• The Lost Vale screenshots has been converted to a proper gallery with full-size images, rather than the tiny thumbnails there used to be.
• I am now hosting copies of The Lost Vale screenshots, the official patch, and Mad Hatter’s U8 Graphics Viewer (which had otherwise disappeared from the web).
• Removed “This Guide” and “Disclaimer” sections from U8 Main page. Also added a “Magic” section that contains links that used to be in the old Magic page.
• World map in U8 Maps and Places page now highlights clickable areas when you hover over them.
• Added an entry in U8 Bugs and Mistakes for “Serpent Artifacts for Sale“, a silly story I wrote many years ago to explain why the Avatar starts the game without his serpent artifacts. This story has been online for ages, but it seems I hadn’t added a link to it in the Guide. Oops.

Since the 9th of August, Dino has evidently been busy with other tasks, but presumably he’ll get back to his work on his site in the near future.