Exult Forum

First of all All I would like to Thank everyone involved in Exult!! You guys are hero's to all the Ultima fans out there!! Anyway, I am experiencing a problem with the Beta on Windows XP Pro. When I run Exult all I get is a black screen and Exult's main menu music. My machine is an 850MHz Athalon with 256Megs Of Ram, a Geforce 2, and a SoundBlaster Live X-Gamer. I have the latest driver updates for all of my hardware. I have also downloaded every XP Pro Update. Thanks for your time and keep up the killer work!!


~ MorgulKing

Just wanted to say that it works fine for me. pII400@448, 192mb, TNT1, SB PCI64 and WinXP Pro. Did "Update install" over a month old snapshot.

Is there anything in the stderr.txt/stdout.txt files that should have been generated in your exult directory? Also, have you ever run any other SDL programs on your system (as far as you know)?

Finally, could you elaborate a bit on what exactly happens? Do you get a black screen (window or fullscreen?) + music, and then exult exits? Or does the black screen stay until you close it?
-Willem Jan

it may also be that your monitor somehow doesn't support the default resolution (but I doubt that). Edit the exult.cfg file as described in the Documentation to start Exult in windowed mode (setting fullscreen to no).

Sorry about not being more specific. I was in fullscreen when I ran it. All I get is the Blackscreen and Music. It doesn't crash to desktop. I have too exit with task manager. As far as the SDL, I have not run any other SDL programs on my system. I don't know if this matters or not but I do have a copy of Borland C++ Builder 3 Standard on my system!? Lastly, I didn't have anything in stderr.txt, but I do have the dump from stdout.txt

Stdout.txt =

Exult V0.96beta1.
Data path = data
Audio system assembled. Audio buffer at 16384
4 Midi Devices Detected
Listing midi devices:
-1: Microsoft MIDI Mapper
0: A: SB Live! MIDI Synth
1: B: SB Live! MIDI Synth
2: SB Live! MIDI UART
3: Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth
Using device -1: Microsoft MIDI Mapper
Internal Win32 Midiout Midi Player for Exult.
Created PCB 0
Created PCB 1
Created PCB 2
Created PCB 3
Created PCB 4
Created PCB 5
Audio initialisation OK
is_installed: c:\uc\serpent/static/endgame.dat
is_installed: c:\uc\serpent/static/sispeech.spc
Audio subsystem request: Custom Music track

Thanks again for the response!

~ Daniel

When I set Fullscreen to No in Exult.cfg it works. If I try to go to full screen I get the black screen and music.

Sends like a video driver problem, perhaps a bug in SDL. What colour depth is your display set to? If not 16, you might try that, as that's how I do all my testing.

also try a bit higher resolution via our ingame menu. Could be that going to 320x240 already solves your problem.

You are correct Dominus. When I changed the resolution through the ingame menu I could go to full screen. Althougth, it seemed somewhat choppy. Of course this is probably due to having AOL running with a download in progress and XP being a RAM Hog!!


I was using 32bit depth Doc! I tried 16 but alas it was of no avail!

By the way, Thanks for helping me guys!! You guys are truly Avatars.. LB should be proud..hehe

~ Daniel

Kudos to the Exult team. You are the only Ultima team that has a successful product . I love Exult. Thanks guys! You make me a real proud owner of the UA Dragon Edition. Now I can show off U7 to all my friends.

Daniel Howard: so now that it works on higher res, you can either try to find out what's the problem with your driver (I suspect the monitor inf is not up to date or your monitor really doesn't like 320*200, though that shouldn't be a problem if you have scalers enabled).
Choppy movement: some things to do, set up speed in the game options, enable fast mouse, choose one of the less demanding scalers (see the docs for that, with the quality the demand on the CPU rises) or disable scaling...

I found the problem! I only downloaded the XP Detonator Drivers And Didn't Download the latest XP drivers. I took them for the same. Forgive me for my oversite!! I will try not to bother you guys again!! Again thanks for helping!

~ Daniel