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Ultima VII: Revisited

u7revisited.com

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Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#51

Post by jgoewert »

hinkley wrote: post #15

Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS. They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.

This and Strike Commander are why I used a really weird serial port mouse driver I found on a BBS but used like 1/10th as much memory as the default mouse driver that came with the mouse.

But it got over the last hurdle of not having enough space.

Formatting config.sys and autoexec.bat was an artform.

Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#52

Post by mathgeek »

Implicated wrote: post #31
hinkley wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode Still real mode, just a variant.

Thank you for this rabbit hole. I don't remember why, specifically, but I do remember there being a rather annoying sequence I needed to go through in order to "boot" to U7. Just to hopefully be greeted by that weirdo in red.

As a 10 year old at the time whose first exposure to memory management in general was the boot disc for Ultima VII, that game was the epitome of things that led me to love hacking things together.

Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#53

Post by kibwen »

ralfd wrote: post #44
kibwen wrote: post #19

And if anybody's looking for a new game with the Ultima vibe, I highly recommend Moonring, a free indie game from one of the creators of Fable: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/

How could it be free? Is there a story behind that?

As far as I can tell it's just one person's labor of love.

"Hi folks. I've loved RPGs since the early 1980s, and grew up playing games like Lord British's 'Ultima' series and early Roguelikes. This is my love-letter to a style of gaming that has largely fallen out of fashion: with its vivid, bright sprites overlaid on stark black backgrounds, true open-world gameplay, and lack of handholding. The days I spent playing these games were spent in joyful exploration and discovery, venturing into the dark unknown, a co-author of the experience, filling in the gaps left by the primitive art with my imagination. For those of you who did the same, I hope Moonring recaptures some of the spirit of those days for you. For those who did not, I hope that the more modern conveniences you find in this game allow you to catch a glimpse of what we did 40 years ago."

Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#54

Post by jghn »

wordofx wrote: post #40
chongli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a PK (as well as a thief/PK hybrid) in UO is some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. There's nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of being a fugitive and surviving, picking people off and scavenging what you can before the fuzz arrive. PKing had a deleterious effect on the community -- I'll admit -- but I had fun as both a PK and as a victim trying to escape or exact revenge. UO (pre-Renaissance)…

There isn’t an mmorpg game to date that has recreated the PK experience of UO.

I say this as someone who was very heavy into PvP in UO. There's a reason for this. Most PKs wanted to be wolves. Very few players want to play a game where they're sheep.

I spent most of my time tracking down the wolves and fighting them. So so so many of them would run away the second anything approaching a fair fight presented itself to them. On my shard, over time there was a group of us representing the spectrum of "good guys" and "bad guys" but who weren't just trying to be assholes who bonded & became friends. When playing in character we'd fight each other. And then when some band of asshat PKs would go around being jerks, we'd out of character join forces and go stomp their ass.

Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#56

Post by hinkley »

KageTora wrote: post #46
hinkley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pond surrounded by fallen leaves. Somewhere in the leaves is a key. The key opens a shed, the shed contains an enchanted garden hoe that apparently hits like a truck. I never did find that key.

Surrounding that particular river and pond system between Britain and Cove is a very polluted lake. "Lock Lake," they call it. Miranda in Castle Britain is attempting to sign a document to clean it up. On the outskirts of the lake are dead green trout. There are two variations of them. One is food, and the other acts as a container. The two are upside-down from each other. You can eat the food ones without any proble…

Well shit, I'm pretty sure I wasn't even looking in the right spot.

Did you even meet the unicorn?

Re: Ultima VII: Revisited

#57

Post by KageTora »

hinkley wrote: post #56
KageTora wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surrounding that particular river and pond system between Britain and Cove is a very polluted lake. "Lock Lake," they call it. Miranda in Castle Britain is attempting to sign a document to clean it up. On the outskirts of the lake are dead green trout. There are two variations of them. One is food, and the other acts as a container. The two are upside-down from each other. You can eat the food ones without any proble…

Well shit, I'm pretty sure I wasn't even looking in the right spot. Did you even meet the unicorn?

It's quite the creature. Did you ever visit the dungeons near Minoc? They're never really explained in-world, as far as I can tell. It's probably one of the biggest mysteries of the game, despite how inconsequential and boring they are. They're probably a callback to some other game's dungeon that had more content.
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