Húrin has found a way to make the installers for Ultima V: Lazarus and the Ultima 6 Project play nice with the Steam version of Dungeon Siege. For those of you who’ve never tried to install either mod on Steam’s version of Dungeon Siege, here’s the issue that crops up:

The problem: The Steam edition of Dungeon Siege isn’t supported by the setup.exe provided by U6P. The setup.exe installer checks the Windows registry to find the location of your Dungeon Siege install. And because Steam doesn’t create such an entry, U6P refuses to install.

The solution, then, is pretty obvious…if not entirely straightforward:

So, first, we locate our Steam edition of Dungeon Siege…Perhaps the easiest way for you to locate your own Dungeon Siege installation is to go into steam, locate Dungeon Siege in your Library, right-click it, and choose “Properties” (at bottom), then click the “Local Files” tab, and then finally click “Browse Local Files…”

You should then be able to click to the right of the path shown which will then give you a selectable and copy/paste-able path.

At which point, it becomes necessary to fire up regedit:

1. Start “Regedit”
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft
3. Add a key for “Microsoft Games” under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\ (no quotes)
4. Add a key for “DungeonSiege” under the now existent “Microsoft Games” key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\)
5. Add a key for “1.0” under the now existent “DungeonSiege” key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\DungeonSiege)
6. In the now existent HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\DungeonSiege\1.0 key, right-click on the right-hand pane and choose “New –> String Value” and name it “EXE Path” (no quotes)
7. Double-click the “EXE Path” string entry and change its Value data to the path you determined before we began editing the registry. In my case, I change it to: E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Dungeon Siege 1
8. Click OK.
9. Close Regedit.

Note that the above instructions assume a 64-bit OS environment. If for some reason you’re still running a 32-bit version of Windows, the following should be taken into account:

On a 64-bit version of Windows, the installer checks: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\DungeonSiege\1.0\ for a string value: “EXE Path”

…

…32-bit versions of Windows don’t use the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\ registry key but instead use just plain ol’ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ key

Oh, and if you were at all curious about how to run UVL or U6P in higher-resolution graphics modes, again in the Steam version of Dungeon Siege, Húrin has you covered there as well:

You can force higher resolutions in the game by editing the “Target” field of the desktop shortcut provided by the installer like so (obviously, change the path to Dungeon Siege appropriately):

"E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Dungeon Siege 1\DungeonSiege.exe" map_paths=!"C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1\RESOUR~1" res_paths="C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1\RESOUR~1" user_path="C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1" height=1200 width=1920 bltonly=true maxfps=100

1920×1200 definitely works. But 3440×1440 crashes. As with U5 Lazarus, you’ll get a warning each time you “Journey Onward”, but there otherwise seem to be no ill effects.

Now, as to the matter of getting Dungeon Siege to actually run on newer versions of Windows…that may be a bit of an additional challenge. Or it may just work. Different users have reported different outcomes.