U5 Upgrade Installation – v1.0

1. Unpack the U5 Upgrade zip file into your Ultima 5 directory on your hard drive. This will not affect your current saved games.
2. Run “setm.exe” from the Ultima 5 directory to configure your sound card, if you will be playing music.
3. Run “u5cfg.exe” to configure the game options.
4. Run “u5data.exe” to patch DATA.OVL.
5. Run “ultima5.com” from the Ultima 5 directory to start the game.

U5 Upgrade Media

Coming Soon!

U5 Upgrade Release Log

Release 1.0 – 2001-08-21

This is the first full release of the U5 MIDI Upgrade. This is all the stuff that I added:

• The game plays “Ultima Theme” to the main menu.
• I added various songs from U5 to the Introduction and Endgame sequences. I tried to choose songs that best fit the sequences.
• The Character Creation sequence plays the Amiga music.
• The game plays the Apple II / Commodore 128 arrangement of songs in their appropriate places in the game. I received most of this information from playing parts of these versions on an emulator and from other Dragons on news:rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons.
• I made sure that Death and the Blackthorn capture sequence were both handled properly: no music should be playing during these sequences.
• Some people are not aware that you can Exit to DOS using “CTL-E” during the game. Unfortunately, you cannot use it all the time, for example, during combat or dungeon rooms which is a big disadvantage. While I hope to add that capability in a future release, and perhaps even a restore feature, I did add the ability to exit in three key places of the game: the main menu, the last scene of the endgame sequence, and the “bad” ending. (the one if you tell LB “no”)
• Since the Tandy video driver is no longer in use, I used that as a good place to store the name of the midi driver, MID.DRV. This is included in DATA.OVL, where all the game data is stored, and this is the only update that needs to be made to that file. To conserve zip file size and reduce the amount of original game files that I am including in this package, I’ve decided to write a separate patch, “U5DATA.EXE” which will make this update for you. Please execute this before you begin the game or the MIDI will not work.
• The MIDI files have been enhanced and suited to the game setting for their appropriate scenes. I have also improved most of the MIDI files such that they loop more smoothly.

Known Issues:

Beware, this gets technical.

If you let the game sit at the demonstration sequence on the main menu screen (where the introduction is pretty much acted out in tile graphics), and the “Ultima Theme” music ends, it will not loop back to the beginning. The reason for this is that I refresh the music during each int 16h call (which essentially checks for another key press). In the demonstration, the int 16h call is made in the EGA driver, which is the only part of the game that checks for keypresses in the driver. Thus, it is the only part of the game affected. The reason why this is a problem is because the ega driver is in a different code segment from the rest of the game, so it cannot make function calls back the functions that I wrote in ULTIMA.EXE. There are, as usual, other ways around this, but I am looking for the least messy. 😉

U5 Upgrade Credits

• Thanks to the Ultima Dragons for just being the outspoken group that they are.
• And thanks especially to Richard Garriot for leaving the early PC Ultima games without music, thus inspiring me to learn assembly. 😉