Sunday, September 28, 2014

The Ultima Series

    The Ultima series. The beginning of rpg video games. A huge series of games stretching across many years, console generations, and computer types. I've recently become engrossed with collecting all the different games. At first I only collected the ones from the main series, 1-9, but split off and collected them all. I did my best to find all the versions for each game, for every console and dos release.
    I found all 19 games, Ultima I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII part 1, VII part 2, VIII, IX, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Worlds of Ultima 1 and 2, Runes of Virtue 1 and 2, Akalabeth, Escape from Mt. Drash, and Ultima online. I found all the versions I could; I found all the console and computer ports, like the NES, SMS, SNES, and for Exult, as well as the fanmade remakes of V and VI and two launcher versions of Ultima Online. There are tons I'm probably missing as well.
    I didn't stop there either. I collected all the Ultima novels, like the aptly named Ultima Saga, and the Technocrat War, Ultima manga (I'll come back to this later), and some manuals, maps, and clue books.
    After collecting all these items, I decided to put them all into a launcher, so I could easily find the game or book or whatever when I wanted to. I ended up using Microsoft Visual Basic to create the launcher, due to it's relatively easy to use interface. It took a few days of finagling, but I managed to get it working. It definitely wasn't complete, but it was good enough. I decided to very creatively name it the Ultima Launcher.
    After some debating with myself, I decided to release it to the world. But first, I needed to test it out. I put the file together (a bulky 10.2 GB) and put it on another PC. I put it in it's spot, started the launcher, and it worked! Kinda. 
    The games launched using dosbox worked fine, but almost all the other emulators had little problems. The fanmade remakes of V and VI are both mods of Dungeon Siege, and when I tried starting them up, tons of errors started popping up. Just clicking through them, saying that I'd fix them later, the game seemed to start up fine, and testing it seemed to work, but that is still iffy. And for the Rune of Virtue gameboy games to work, the computer will need to have Directx Runtime installed for them to run. Another problem is that for Ultima IX to work, you need to go into its options.ini file and manually change the resolution to your resolution, otherwise it will crash.
    It was just plauged with little problems like that that made me drop releasing to the public, at least for now. I will continue to work out these bugs and stuff for the launcher, but I've changed my focus. I've been looking at those, and have become obsessed with a smaller part of my obsession. Crazy, huh?
    It has been a journey finding anything about these; out of the four, I found three, out of the three, two are complete, out of the two, one is in English. The incomplete one is in English as well, however, so all is not lost. I have to thank the author of this website for combining these translations with scans of the pages for both the complete Ultima: Quest of the Avatar and the partial Ultima: The Fall of Magincia. That website is also the only place I have found scans of those two manga, english or not. 
    I have recently taken it upon myself to scanlate Ultima: The Terror of Exodus. This is made much easier by Pix's scan of the manga and, again, Capowski's translations. I'm only on the 20th page of 100-something manga, and alot of the early pages had no text. The actual changing of the bubble text isn't that hard, it's the darn sound effects that cover huge areas in buisy parts of the manga. It will take a long time to just do one symbol, as I also have to make it look natural with the background. It will be a while before I have anything real to release on that front.
    But I guess that is it for now. I'll report back with any progress later. Thanks for reading through my rambling post. I hope you come back next time!

P.S.
    If anyone can find anything about Ultima: Maze of the Schwarzschild, that would be awesome. I have nothing but a cover.

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