This is another bugfix release to solve an issue when installing the Forgotten World patch for Ultima 9. All the previous versions would potentially set the movie file location in options.ini incorrectly and stop the movies playing. If this affects you and you don’t want to poke around in options.ini, then uninstalling and reinstalling Forgotten World (or vice versa) with this new version will fix it.

The new patcher can be downloaded from here.

There is a new version of the Ultima Patcher incorporating Voyager Dragon’s latest Ultima 3 Upgrade. This latest release includes the option to play with tweaks to monster generation and food use in response to some common gameplay issues seen on the GOG forums. If you already have the previous patch (3.0) installed then you should be able to uninstall and reinstall from the patcher to update to 3.1.

The patch is in the downloads or available directly from here.

This version fixes a couple of bugs with the Ultima 9 patches which I recently became aware of:-

• Should cure “Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Shell32.Shell'” errors on certain versions of Windows. I’ve not been able to confirm that this is fixed as I can’t recreate it myself and the person who reported it hasn’t got back to me yet. It occurred when renaming your avatar or clicking the links to Forgotten World/Beautiful Britannia. If anyone still gets these errors let me know and I will try again but I’m 99% sure it will work now.
• Fixes download link for Beautiful Britannia + Forgotten World links to point to current location.

The new version is available from here.

I’ve just uploaded a slightly tweaked version of the Ultima Patcher (a little utility for applying all/most of the various fan patches to GOG’s releases of the Ultima series). The changes are :-

• Fixes patching Ultima 4 standalone version
• Updates Dosbox/MUNT build used for MT-32 support

To go into more detail, it looks as though GOG have done a version 2 installer for Ultima 4 since version 1.52 which broke some of the patches by splitting the DOSBox config into two files. The version in the Ultima 4, 5 + 6 trilogy was unaffected since that was already using a version 2 installer at the time. It should now work correctly with both current versions.

I had a request for updated MT-32 support. This uses Taewoong Yoo‘s SVN DOSBox build which has MUNT compiled into it among other things. I’ve updated this to his latest build which is still a few months old but considerably more recent than the version I was using.

My PC is up and running again and none the worse for it’s brief experimentation with smoking so as promised I’ve done a new version of the GOG Ultima Patcher. There are no new features and this merely adds compatibility for the new complete Ultima 7 installer that was recently released by GOG. This will probably break patching on the previous version so make sure you have the version 2 GOG installers. Version 1.42 is still available for anyone wanting to patch the version 1 releases.