Ultima Patcher 1.3

I’ve uploaded a new Ultima Patcher. This doesn’t add Ultima 9 patching but does add easy MT-32 emulation for the remainder of the relevant games (Ultima 6, 7, Serpent Isle and Underworld 2). You will still need to bring your own MT-32 ROM’s however.

There are a couple of bug fixes as the previous build didn’t always allow users to change the sound settings in UW1 & 2. Also patching UW1 to use MT-32 would break UW2 since they shared a copy of DOSBox.

One thing to note, because of these shared copies of DOSBox if you add MT-32 support for any game that was installed with another title in the same package you will also add it to that other title. i.e. installing MT-32 support for UW1 installs it for UW2 and so on. I’ve attempted to allow for all possible combinations of patches in these situations and apply restrictions/fixes as appropriate. Please email or post on here with any bugs or if I’ve missed anything.

Unless there is a clear demand, I’ll probably skip Ultima 9. It’s a Windows game so it should be easier for people to patch and I’m not convinced anything further is needed with the work other people are already putting in. Also mods like Beautiful Britannia are fairly big and I don’t want to force people to download anything that size to patch all the older games.

Ultima Patcher 1.22

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s update, I’ve added in support for Martian Dreams and Savage Empire to the Ultima Patcher. If there are any fan patches for either game, I wasn’t able to find them so this just adds the option to use MT-32 emulation in both games (if you have the ROM’s). This was a rush job to get it done today for the GOG release but I’m relatively sure it works. If anyone actually uses this, I’ll look at adding MT-32 emulation support to the rest of the games.

The new version can be downloaded from here.

Ultima Patcher 1.21

I’ve been tinkering with my Ultima Patcher today for the first time in months. I always wanted to add support for MT-32 emulation but held off because I didn’t want to supply the ROM’s. I’ve had a change of heart and thought I’d give it a go anyway. I’m still not supplying the ROM’s although finding them on the web should prove far from difficult. The patcher expects them to be named either CM32L_PCM.ROM & CM32L_CONTROL.ROM or MT32_PCM.ROM & MT32_CONTROL.ROM. The CM32 ROM’s are the ones to go for as a rule since they have some extra sounds not included on the original MT32.

Without the ROM’s, I’m not so sure if this is something anyone wants or would use so I’ve only implemented it for Underworld 1 as a test for now. I noticed that I needed to run the game as an administrator after patching in order for it to start up. Also the CPU cycles may need tweaking depending on setup/preferences. GOG originally set it for maximum cycles but this is a bit much with the MT32 emulation running at the same time so I’ve altered it to 30,000.

The new version can be downloaded from here.

Ultima Patcher 1.2

ultima_002

Voyager Dragon has just released the Ultima 3 Upgrade Patch 3.0. This adds VGA & Composite CGA modes to the previous version and I’ve incorporated this into a new version of the patcher. It’s not recommended to install this over the old patch although it worked ok for me. The new version is available here.