I was approached by “Death Strike” about adding a patch for Savage Empire to the Ultima Patcher. Apparently, the GOG version of the game contains a bug which disables the alternate ending but a later fixed version was released on the compilation CD with 7 Cities Of Gold (anyone who has ever spent time hunting for Ultimas on Ebay should be familiar with this particular CD). They created a patch to update the GOG version which I’ve added to the Ultima Patcher.
Other than that, I’ve added in the latest default installation directories which appear to have changed every time I look, updated some links and changed the Beautiful Britannia download URL. You can download the new version from here.
You’re just the best. Thank you for maintaining this package.
Hi,
First apologies for my complete lack of technical knowledge and thank you for making these patches.
~I have downloaded Ultima V from GOG and downloaded your patch which I hope allow the original music to play.
I have no idea how to make the patch work. Should I copy it into a certain file does it need to be unzipped or something?
An idiots guide would be very much appreciated.
Loved this game 25 years ago…
Unzip the UltimaPatcher.rar file. The files that it contains unpack all in its own folder called UltimaPatcher. Then, navigate to that folder you just extracted and run UltimaPatcher.exe.
Choose your game to patch, then the options you wish to add.
It should automatically find the installed directory of the game. If not, it will prompt you to manually select it using a standard path choosing window you’ve probably seen many times before.
Good luck and have fun!
Your .rar file now has a heuristic virus. Please fix.
This is a false alarm. Antivirus software loves spouting these. I just installed it without any issue. Thank you for maintaining these, Pix!
I am so grateful that SOMEONE is seeing to keeping up with these timeless games even in 2020!
Is there a succinct list of everything this patcher does, and the changes it makes?
Not really. It will tell you what is available for each game when you run it.
According to Norton 360 this .rar file now contains a heuristic virus. Watch out.
I’m seeing this on the Savage Empire patch in Sophos having just tried it which I assume is the same thing you are seeing. It doesn’t mean it’s definitely got a virus – it’s one of these AI suspected matches so most likely a false positive.
Having said that, this patch did come directly from someone I don’t know know rather than being hosted on the web elsewhere. They went to some extreme and strange lengths to spread this on a small site like mine if so. Wish there was a way I could know for sure.
I’m tempted to play it safe and remove that Savage Empire patch. All it does is overwrite a few of the game files so they match a later version of the game from a compilation CD. The author even gave me the technical details for which files if I recall correctly. I could easily look into creating my own version of this and replacing it. I’ll see if I can sort something out tonight.
Recently, I ran Ultima IV in CGA mode.
DOSBox-X also allowed me to run Composite CGA mode.
I tried to get the patch to work in these modes, but it didn’t work. The MIDI music I added only played in the title. The frame limiter does not seem to work at all. Does the patch support running in CGA mode? Please let me know.
I wouldn’t know without experimenting myself – I only packaged the patches into an installer and in this case can’t point you towards the original author. The original patch probably predates DosBOX. I do recall the music only patch always struggling in DosBOX without the cycles being right up which then meant the game was way too fast. It was never a great option and I mainly included it for completeness + a few people wanted to keep the EGA graphics. I do think it uses some 386 specific calls which would cause issues if the composite CGA mode tries to be helpful and changes the CPU type to something older? It could be worth a little experimenting with the DosBOX config at any rate. None of the U4 patches don’t include a frame limiter.
I know that EGA looks much better than CGA.
But for stupid geeky activities, I run it in CGA mode.
I think Alt+F is a frame limit toggle. (Confirmed on EGA and VGA).
By turning on this toggle, NPCs that vibrate at high speed will move at the correct speed.
In CGA mode this toggle doesn’t seem to be working.
I will experiment with the DOSBox config.
Thanks for the reply.