Another quality-of-life fix coming in the next Ultima 2 Upgrade is a change to the Hotel California clerk. Players eventually learn they should go to the clerk and offer gold. In exchange the clerk will raise a random stat by 4 points per 100 gold offered. However, players may notice that the clerk will sometimes not raise their stats but take your money anyway. The common workaround is to begrudgingly reload the game so as to not lose hard-earned gold. Players will then simply retry-and-reload as needed until a stat is raised. In v2.0 I’ve ensured the clerk will always simply raise a random stat and never just pocket your gold.
Tag: u2up
U2 Time Gate Bug
Besides having a reputation as the black sheep of the series, Ultima 2 has several bugs that have persisted over the years. One of them occurs somewhat infrequently when entering a time gate. When it happens, the time gate will teleport you to the wrong location for its position. But the more noticeable side effect is when it also changes the terrain type underneath it. Two common ways I’ve seen it manifest is as a forest tile in B.C. Canada, or a grass tile in A.D. Argentina.
U2 Upgrade – CGA, EGA and more
Over the past month I’ve been developing the upcoming release of the Ultima 2 Upgrade, v2.0. The primary intent of this next release was to extract the EGA video code (and also the original CGA code) into a driver architecture, similar to what I had done for Ultima 3. In fact, I’m proud to report that I completely finished up that work about a week ago. However, while this sets me up to do some cooler things later on, primarily other video modes, it doesn’t really add much in the way of noticeable changes. So I’m now taking some additional time to address a few other issues with the game. This will hopefully make a v2.0 a bit more substantial and compelling. More information to come soon in subsequent posts, so stay tuned…