Category Archives: Off Topic

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

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After half a day off the air, the site is back up and running again in a new home. I’ve got no details to offer but last night my old WordPress site was deactivated for breach of terms with no warning or even contact from WordPress. I have asked for specifics but haven’t received a reply as of yet.

Plenty, if not all, of the downloads on here skip over the edge of legality which I’m well aware of. My personal opinion is that no one involved will care and it certainly isn’t going to cost anyone money. The fact that so many of my scans have been used on GOG and in one case by EA themselves is something of a vindication of this. My assumption has been that if anyone did object I’d just have to remove the offending content at the time.

I prefer to be optimistic anyway. Unless I hear otherwise I’m taking it that this wasn’t done on the basis of any corporate complaint and was merely WordPress being overzealous. I am going to be extra careful about backing everything up from here on out just in case.

For the sake of an easy life, my little-updated scummVM hacks page has moved and will now be linked in on the menu on the right. The direct link is http://www.pix.oneuk.com/scummvm

Apart from a few pounds out of my wallet for the setup costs + sql server there is no harm done and I’ve restored the site in full. Thanks to the ignominious departure, I can’t put a forwarding address so any links to the old address are now permanently broken. We’ll see if anyone actually finds this new site in due course. I’m fully expecting the daily hits to drop to single figures for a while now.

Having just done a complete website backup, I’ll end with a few needless stats. This site now has 11.8 Gb of files, 13166 images (not necessarily all actually used) and 5 Mb of posts. All of that and I still haven’t changed the default theme. A new location might be the cue to finally get around to tarting the place up a little but I’ll wait to see if I survive the rest of the week first.

EDIT

WordPress have just emailed me and apparently “The system should not have done that” and they reinstated the original blog. Having set up my own site, I can’t see any point in going back now so I’ve cleared out my old blog and just put a link in to here.

This is extremely good news as it means I don’t have anything to worry about for now, although I’m more than slightly miffed at having gone to all the trouble and expense of moving for nothing. I’m genuinely surprised that having drawn the attention of WordPress, they would open the site again. I think this should be the cue to sort out the site into something a little more streamlined. I’ll start with that ludicrously long menu on the right hand side.

Ultima 1-3 on GOG + some Ultima 1 scans

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The first 3 games in the Ultima series were released yesterday on GOG.com for their bottom end pricepoint of $5.99. There are quite a few grumblings on GOG about this price for such ancient games, although there were just as many people happy to see them. I can see where the complaints are coming from but it’s not exactly a big expense provided that GOG are adding some value to the deal. I did have concerns that the earlier games in the series might have been skipped altogether so it’s good to see them arrive at all. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that all of the main Ultima series will be appearing on GOG in due course. Fingers crossed for the Worlds of Ultima games.

While I don’t have a problem with the asking price, I definitely have complaints with the added value aspect here. For a start, the Akalabeth remake from the Ultima Collection should have been included. Ignoring that, GOG’s extra’s are a bit of a joke. They appear to consist of some pdf’s lifted from replacementdocs.com including my own scans of the Ultima 3 cluebook, and cloth map/galaxy map from Ultima 2. They have removed the replacementdocs logo however which seems highly unreasonable to me. Surely they ought to acknowledge the source rather than hiding it. They didn’t even manage to grab everything correctly and missed one of the spellbooks + the Ultima 3 map is upside down. My scans of the Ultima 2 map were my usual rubbish patchwork job with something too large to scan in one go. There must be better scans available within a minutes googling which they could have used instead. I’d have done them some decent ones myself, if asked.

It did bring to my attention that the maps from the Ultima 1 remake are missing from replacementdocs and hence not available as GOG “extras” either. I’m sure they are available elsewhere but I’ve done some scans anyway and added them into the downloads here, as well as uploading them to replacementdocs. I thought I might as well do the coins too while I had the scanner going.

Apart from the dubious extras, there do seem to have been issues with several of these EA games as they have been released. Some of these I can sympathise with but others are just basic errors. It was poor to release Underworld with the sound defaulting to MT-32, but to then make the same mistake with Wing Commander is ridiculous. It gives the impression that GOG just shovel the games into Dosbox and don’t bother testing them. This is born out again as by all appearances Ultima 2 still has the bug with all the planet maps not being included, due to the filenames being duplicated on disk 3. I’ve not actually playtested this, but there is no sign of the missing files so it’s a safe bet. There is a fan patch for this but I thought the whole point about GOG was that it was supposed to be easy for people to run these games. This bug has been in every Ultima compilation since the early 90’s for crying out loud.

I am glad to see these games being made available again anyway and it’s the first time any of the main Ultima series has been on sale for around a decade. I’m sure GOG will remedy most if not all of the issues eventually, but they aren’t doing their reputation any favours in the meanwhile as far as I’m concerned.

Ultima The Second Trilogy Scans

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I’ve uploaded scans of the second Ultima Trilogy documentation. Obviously most of this will be familiar from the original manuals but it was repackaged for this game and may be of interest to a select few. Rather than including 3 maps like the fist trilogy, it just includes the one map of Britannia which is paper rather than fabric in this case. The manuals and reference cards are combined into one booklet each with some original artwork. There was a foreign language version of the reference card included with French, German, etc… but I didn’t scan that one.

I’ve also added a section at the bottom of the downloads page with some other scans I’ve done for replacementdocs recently. They aren’t relevant to the blog but I figure I’ll host them here while they are awaiting approval. Since I’ve got the book scanner, I was planning on contributing anything I own that is missing. For now, I’ve just added scans of the documentation for Timegate (a relatively little known follow-up to the Alone In The Dark series by the same team) and the Monkey Island 2 hint book.

The snag with the MI2 book is that you need something red and transparent to look through to be able to read the clues. I had thought that drawing a rectangle with the right opacity in Acrobat would have worked but it doesn’t implement the opacity in any way that relates to the real world. Instead of washing out the red text, it just makes it darker.

Unless it’s something to do with Origin, I probably won’t post on here as I add manuals. I just want them to be available somewhere if I’ve going to go to the trouble of scanning them in.

Another batch of manuals

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I’ve added a large batch of manuals to the downloads. Apart from a couple of requests after the last post, I’ve also gone through replacmentdocs adding in anything I’ve played on here that I noticed was missing or poor quality. This includes Cybermage, Noctopolis, Netstorm, Ultima Trilogy, Runes Of Virtue 2 (SNES), Super Wing Commander (3DO), Origin FX, Privateer Speech Pack, Privateer Righteous Fire, Longbow Flashpoint Korea, Ultima 1 Remake & finally the Ultima 9 spellbook. Some of these have more going for them than others, with the highlights probably being the two comics from Cybermage and Noctropolis. I think that fills the gaps for every game which is on the blog but if there is anything else the offer to scan it in still stands.

Manuals

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You may have noticed a few manuals appearing on the downloads page in the last couple of days. I got a request last week for the Strike Commander, Pacific Strike and Wings Of Glory manuals, all of which are now done. I wasn’t originally going to host any manuals on here but I’d rather not have to wait for the replacementdocs approval process, so I’ll host them at least for now. I’m glad to say that I’ve also finished scanning in the last of Origin’s books which I’ll be reading for the blog, but you will have to wait for that one until I’ve read it myself.

I thought I’d already scanned in the missing Origin manuals 5 years back for replacementdocs but I clearly skipped a few. If anyone has a request for anything else that is missing/needs redoing, let me know and I’ll get that done as well (provided that I have the original, of course). I can’t say that I’m anxious to do any more scanning but after 500 page epics like the RPG Companion, the manuals are positively lightweight. If nothing else, I’ve caught up on a few films I wanted to see while I was making all these pdf’s.