I’m pleased announce the next release of the Ultima 2 Upgrade, version 2.1. You may find it in the download section. This release contains several new features, which I’ve blogged about over the past two weeks:
And two bugfixes concerning stat boosts:
- stat boost impact on shop prices
- 0-gold exploit for stat boosts
I’ve also decided on how to to handle upgrades from floppy releases: the patch will apply only to the Program Master. The patch will also add any missing data files from the Player Master or Galactic disks. I’ve therefore included the ability to apply the upgrade to the 1989 floppy release of the Ultima Trilogy 1-2-3. I unfortunately don’t have any of the earlier Sierra On-Line releases, so those will have to wait for now.
With that, I need to slow down the pace of updates for the next month while I prepare for some other things going on right now. I still have a lot more work planned for Ultima 2, and I hope to finish those out this year.
It’s been a while since you’ve poster here. Hope everything is ok on your end. Thanks for breathing new life into these classics.
Hi,
One thing that always made Exodus feel crusty (even compared to QotA) was how key presses were buffered (not sure if that’s the correct term). How arduous a task would it be to change it to be more like 4 and 5?
Thanks again showing these old games some love.
Rekindling my teen love – the uber adventure! Ultima
Thank you very much for your support and work. Now i can enjoy it on pc (and portable) vs my c64.
Im sure many others that love this series really appreciate your dedicated and hard work.
Thanks again,
Ed
Hi, I have a suggestion. The FM Towns versions of U1 and U2 actually had music. Could you make upgrades for the PC versions of these games that adds the FM Towns tracks?
Hello there! First, thank you for doing this.
I do have an issue. I am running gog version under 86box with dos 6.22. Works as expected.
When applying 2.0 or 2.1 patch (no matter the combination of video / theme / autosave / frame limiter), execution of ultima2.com ends with “Error Launching Ultima II”.
I found 1.2 patch, that applied with errors, but the game launched.
How can this be troubleshooted?
I have the same issue as makaisson when running v2.1 in AO486 on MiSTer FPGA and my Pentium 1 MMX computer: “Error Launching Ultima II”.
Works great in DOSBox of course though. Very nice work. Thank you!
Is it possible to backport the themes to 1.2 or fix 2.1 so it works on real hardware?
I have the same issue as the above two folks on 86Box emulator. I’m using MS-DOS 6.22. I think the issue is there’s a few folders with a . extension that take them to over the 8 character DOS naming limit.
On real hardware (DOS7/Win98), only version 1.1 is working, newer versions display the message “Wrong Disk” at the start of the game.
GOG updated U2 and seems the patch can’t work with it anymore there any plans to address this?
For anyone else who finds their way here with the “Error Launching Ultima II” message when running ULTIMA2.COM or “error in EXE file” when running ULTIMAII.EXE directly, here’s how to fix it:
So the Ultima 2 patch is bad. It breaks the MS-DOS header at the start of the file, specifically the “e_cblp” and “e_cp” fields, and also modifies “e_maxalloc” for some reason. The patch incorrectly changes the reported size of the file, but it only modifies bytes in the file, it doesn’t append anything, so changing the size simply stops the exe from being recognized as valid and DOS (correctly) refuses to load it, since the size doesn’t match. The filesize in bytes should be ((e_cp – 1) * 512) + e_cblp, anything else won’t launch.
To fix it, backup the original ULTIMAII.EXE file, apply the patch, then copy the first 16 bytes from your original (unpatched) file to the patched one, using your favourite hex editor (Hex Editor Neo is a good modern choice). Game is now fixed and will run properly.
This ONLY breaks things running under true DOS, not Windows or under DosBox, since they ignore the MS-DOS header, but if you try running the patched exe under a true dos 6.22 install for example, that’s when you’ll get the error. Presumably if you have the exact binary identical version of the release the patch was based on, it works fine, but it’s hard to do that since the author never tells us which release they used. I’m using the version off the Ultima 2 collection CD for example, and this requires fixing the MS-DOS header as described above.
I’ve posted info on how to fix the “Error Launching Ultima II” on real hardware, and how to get the 2025 GoG update version working with the patch, in a thread on vogons here:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=106573