just a question about the olden days

[broken fusion]

Back in the day, what would have been the studliest system to run U7 part 1 and 2 on?
Like, say this were 10 years ago and U7 just came out, and you had tons of money to buy a top of the line PC to run it on. What would it have been?

Just curious to see.

[drcode]

The right system would have been a 486/66 with lots (say 8Mb) of RAM. You could buy something faster then, like a Pentium/100, but the game would probably run too fast on it.

[Dominus]

I first played it on a Pentium 100 and the fast moving NPCs were quite annoying...

[dag]

my 486dx2, 66mhz, 8mb vesa local bus was all right for si, but i guess it was
the fastest system to run bg on without running with light speed.

i remember watching playing a friend of mine playing bg on a 386, 20 mhz,
4mb, and it was like slow, slow motion. but he finished it with these specs.

the speed of bg/si was not independent of the configuration; hyperdisk iii
did the job very well those days...

[dag]

...and, as i found out, the graphics card was also quite important. a tseng
4000 or 6000 (vlb or even pci) was almost perfect. i tried it with a standard
16 bit vga (same hardware) and the game slowed down to maybe 10% or
less!

[Dupre]

I purchased U7 BG the same year I purchased my first PC in 1992, a 486/33 with 4 megs of ram and 1 meg video. The only real pain was setting up the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get this game running, otherwise, it played nicely, at just the right speed ( not too fast or slow ). And yes, I payed about 2 to 3 thousand for the system.

[Hydrian]

I think the weakest machine I was ever able to U7 to run on was a IBM PS/2 Model 60. That is technically a 286 machine. I was one of the few to have an AOX card that made it act like a 386 CPU and give it some extra CPU cycles, a raging 16Mhz. I think it had a 512KB video board. My only saving grace was the machine had 24MB of RAM which was insane for that time period.

[Gradilla Dragon]

24 MB of RAM?!?!?! o_O; That's insane, I agree!

I had a 486/66 MHz with 8 MB RAM and a 420 MB hard drive. I remember my father (rest in peace) complained that Ultima 7 was taking too much space in the hard drive (had both parts installed).

[Andy too]

Ah, my old navy days... My computer was an AMD 386 40Mhz which I first played Ultima 7 BG, and Wing Commander 2 on. It ran great... except that when I finally reached the end of the Black Gate, it crashed on the final sequence when the Guardian was trying to get through the Black Gate.... I then couldn't see the culmination of my labors for the next couple of months due to being deployed the day that the game crashed. I litterally had to walk from my computer, and onto my boat. Talk about a BIG steaming disappointment (coitus interuptus).

On Serpent Isle, I had recently upgraded to a 486 DX 50mhz. The game ran perfect with a Cardex VESA 1Mb video card and I believe 4mb of ram. Though, I did have a little difficulty strangling enough low ram to satisfy the more stringent requirements.

[Trevor_Clim (damn log in)]

i played BG first on a 486/100 Mhz with 16MB Ram and it runs perfectly smooth. Not to fast, no slowdowns nowhere.

i played it on a 486/33 Mhz 8MB Ram and on a 486/66Mhz 8 MB Ram, too, but in my opinion it runs best on a 486/100 Mhz with 16 MB or a Pentium 60 or 75 Mhz

[MV]

Wow, some of you guys had some high end stuff back then. Dupre's machine was the godly of godly.

I had a 386 sx33 with 4meg ram, 1meg isa trident vga and 2x 40meg hdd's when I first got ultima7. Then I added a 340meg hdd and a sbpro with a single spin caddy cdrom. That then lasted all the way through to about mid '94 when I upgraded to a 486 dx2 66. Yep, I played TBG+FOV, SI+SS AND ultima8 on that 386.

[Neutronium Dragon]

486 DX2/66 here... but I had an advantage! 32 megs of RAM, allowing me to run the games from a ramdisk. No more hard-drive grind slowing things down!

Neutronium Dragon

[Emperor]

Mine was 386 SX / 40 Mhz with 4 Mb RAM, 512 Kb Trident video. Played every Ultima, except for SNES hideous versions and of course Ascension on it.

[Annorax]

My friend gave me his copy of U7: BG many years ago (on 5.25'' floppies), and I installed it on my Packard Bell with 486/25mhz, 4ram, 200meg HD, Windows 3.1. It ran Ok, but a little slow. Then we got a "super fast" AST with Pentium 166, 16ram, 4 gig HD, it was amazing! U7 ran OK but a little fast on that one.

[suraimu]

I used my 486sx/25. With 2 megs of RAM.

That was quite a slow game.

[Tim]

I had a 386 25 MHz machine for both games. I beleive I had 4 MB of RAM. I thought the game ran just fine.

When I played it on my Pentium 90 MHz, it went soooooooo fast. I MoSlo'ed BG to about 30% speed and SI to 50%.

[dag]

you don't have to slow down si, because it has a built-in frame limiter.
to activate/deactivate it you have to press alt-8. or was it alt-f?

[Daemongar]

I played U7 initially on a 486 50MHz DX - not a DX2 like most 66 MHz systems, VLB 1 MB (!), and 8 MB of RAM on a 212 MB HD. I remember taking the system to college for a presentation and everyone gathered around to check it out. I had U7 playing on the projector 5 feet high! The computer was purchased in 91 for $2500.

Sound didn't work on the system until I finally got an actual SB sound card - but I could get ad-lib working with my Thunderboard.

I still have the system in my basement with Windows 95 loaded on it and 32 MB of RAM which someone gave me. One of these days I'm gonna bust it out, but I probably won't work...

[Coder Dragon]

I played U& BG and SI on a 386SX 25MHz system - WITH NO SOUND CARD!!!

Thanks to Exult I am hearding the music and sounds of U7 for the first time!

[MV]

I played U7 initially on a 486 50MHz DX - not a DX2 like most 66 MHz systems, VLB 1 MB (!), and 8 MB of RAM on a 212 MB HD. I remember taking the system to college for a presentation and everyone gathered around to check it out. I had U7 playing on the projector 5 feet high! The computer was purchased in 91 for $2500.

Sound didn't work on the system until I finally got an actual SB sound card - but I could get ad-lib working with my Thunderboard.

I still have the system in my basement with Windows 95 loaded on it and 32 MB of RAM which someone gave me. One of these days I'm gonna bust it out, but I probably won't work...

If it's been sitting there inactive for a few years, there's a good chance it won't work at all due to a leaked battery.

Go check it now. And anyone else that has a bunch of old stuff they'll "use again one day", before you can't use it at all.

[Daemongar]

Thanks for the heads up - I'll take a peek this weekend!

[broken fusion]

Wow, that's cool so many replies.
Maybe I'll check out the buy and sell, and make a "Ultima 7 Power Machine" devoted to palying ultima 7, and some of my other old games I can't get to work. (I had this game called "dominus" that was quite fun, and "lords of midnight" or something. they're still in a closet somewhere around here.)

[sslaxx]

Mmm... played them first time round on 386SXs the school had. My, those were the days! The games were slow (SI was a bitch to get running), but ah...

[jenay]

are there any games stilled played from back in the day

[Michele]

Many of them remain playable with tools like DosBox or VMWare, some even play under XP itself.

Main prob on modern equipment was the cheap shortcut of using a "timing loops" back then rather than real timers, which DosBox can address.

Ultima 6, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams still work, as does Pagan.

Ultima 7 Parts I & II work under DosBox, but the original uses U7NBuf.dat rather than NPC.dat to store NPCs.
There is a slight offset difference in location of the NPCs between these 2 files. Thus part of the incompatibility between the 2 savegame formats.

I think many are still played.

DosBox is at: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net