Compatibility With Modern Systems and Fan Projects
Both parts of Ultima VII used a non-standard DOS memory management extension called Voodoo Memory Manager. This was not a typical DOS extender; therefore, Windows 95 and later are completely incompatible with the game in its original form, unless rebooted into DOS mode. The game can be run with fan-made patches in modern operating systems. The game is also playable in x86 DOS emulators such as DOSBox.
Exult is a cross-platform recreation of the Ultima VII engine, which allows the game to be played on modern machines and across different operating systems. Exult's array of tools have enabled fans to take the game apart and modify it. It has enabled several fan translation projects. Exult contributors have also expanded the game by enabling Serpent Isle paper doll graphics in Black Gate, and fixed some of the bugs and design flaws found in Serpent Isle, which were originally left in due to the rushed release. There are some features of the original game still to be implemented (for example, the way NPCs interact with the game world is not fully recreated) and some extra features added by the Exult team.
There have been a few projects to make Ultima VII fan remakes in other game engines, but so far the majority of these projects have not been successful.
Read more about this topic: Ultima VII: The Black Gate
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“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”
—Nancy Banks-Smith, British columnist. Guardian (London, February 20, 1979)
“We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)