It’s been a while since I posted so I thought I’d share some more of the swag I bought from Rhea Shelley a couple of years back. These are a pair of proofs for full-page Ultima 8 adverts with their negatives:-

As you can see, they have suffered a bit of damage with the prints being stored face to face at some point in the last 20 years resulting in them sticking together.

This first one on the left took the brunt of the damage. It’s dated the 4th November 1993 with the other being from the 30th of the same month. Aside from swapping out some screenshots the sales pitch was reworded and reorganised in that month with the latter being a clear improvement in my opinion. I thought it was particularly odd that the earlier advert lists compatibility with EMS and XMS memory in its short list of selling points as this wouldn’t have been high on my list of reasons to buy a game. Playing with DOS config files was par for the course for PC gamers back then the way I remember it. I’m sure this has to be a nod to the difficulties people had with the Voodoo memory manager Origin had used for Ultima 7 which was especially particular and continued to make the game tricky to run for years afterward.

All being well the next post on here should be the final stages of Ultima 5 on the NES. I got a new graphics card last week which is why it has been dead around here recently with any time I’ve spent gaming being on relatively modern titles but I’ve decided that I’m not going to be beaten by Ultima 5 and will start a new playthrough as soon as I’m done with Max Payne 3. I’ll be using an emulator this time with the plan being to speed back to where I was as quickly as possible.