Pix has updated his patching utility for Windows-based installations of the Ultima games thrice in the last month or so. With version 1.62 of the program — the first update to it in about three years — he made some changes to the patching for Ultima 3 and Ultima 4:

This was prompted by Time Machine Dragon contacting me about his improved Ultima 4 music patch (http://sacredbacon.com/ultima/). This swaps the music for modified versions of Minstrel Dragons MIDI files which were in turn based on the mockingboard Apple II soundtrack. These have more voices than the default music included with the VGA patch and can now be swapped in and out directly from the patcher. Note that this will only work correctly with MPU-401 as the sound device.

I’ve included the latest version of the Ultima 3 upgrade (http://exodus.voyd.net/projects/ultima3). This corrects the PC speaker sound effect speed.

Finally, I’ve added in the current directories that the games are installed to by default in the automatic search so you don’t always have to find the directory manually. GOG seem to insist on moving these directories around for reasons best known to them.

With the penultimate version 1.63 update, meanwhile, he has made a few needful bugfixes to the program:

This is a quick bugfix release – there was a problem with the Ultima 3 patch in 1.62 where it was installing an amalgam of the 3.1 and 3.2 patches resulting in the Exodus logo going missing (and probably other issues). This should fix it but I did have to reinstall Ultima 3 to get the new version of the patch to install correctly so you may need to do the same.

And literally a day before I posted news about version 1.63, Pix released version 1.64, which incorporates the newly-released Ultima 3 Upgrade update:

Voyager Dragon has been hard at work on another version of the Ultima 3 Upgrade. Aside from bug fixes and a start new game option, this latest version adds in an intriguing new Sosaria mod. This alters the map to match the one from Ultima 1 for consistency. Apparently Ultima 2 is to follow in due course. This was originally moved to Earth to give the time travel some context and never did exactly sit all that well in the Ultima canon.

Pix’s new patcher can be downloaded here, from his website, or via the project entry here at the Codex.