Exult Forum

Is there any possibility to port this incredible piece of software named Exult to the Nintendo DS? How much difficult could it be?
Sorry, i´m not a programmer, but i´d die for playing Ultima VII again on my NDS with the touch screen!

Exult forever! Ultima forever!

nope, no possibility

I have been reading the "Exult for PSP" thread and I think that this is the same case
When will companies understand that what consumers want is in a big part what scene does?

Anyway, excelent job with Exult as it is now.

All the best

Indeed. Both the PSP and DS would be neat little conversion projects, but the laws and legal stances of the companies behind these products doesn't allow the Exult team to (legally) port Exult to those platforms.

A shame, really. As I said, it'd be a neat little conversion project.

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Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

There is a big technical problem though with Exult. It's memory usage patterns are not ideal for those machines. It uses far too much memory.

Is this still the case. The legal issues I mean.

A lot of "memory card" exists that enables you easy to transfer U7 onto the Nintendo DS. Playing U7 on NDS would be really sweet.

I don't by into memory issues, when they have successfully ported Quake to NDS.

I don't by into memory issues, when they have successfully ported Quake to NDS.

Then go ahead and do it, you probably need to look how the PSP port is doing it and then it should be easy.

Considering Quake on DOS required a bare minimum of 8 megs, it's not a huge stretch to assume with a little bit of work, you could get that down into the 4 megs of ram the NDS has, with a variety of methods.

The NDS doesn't have enough memory for Exult, as is, however.

could work. anyone doing it?

I think it is possible. The memory issue has solutions. There are memory expansion paks that go in the GBA slot. In fact, that is how I'm writing this post now: I'm using the DS browser that cannot function on 4mb alone, but uses a 8mb mem pak, giving me 12mb total.

Can we do it on 12mb? I think so, but how playable would it be? The PSP already has a port, and the DS would have one clear advantage over PSP: the touch screen.

Now I hear that the mem pak is actually 10mb, giving the unit 14 megs total. Either way, more is better.

For a system running off of a 'ROM' cart, you should be able to modify exult to work with memory mapped files, rather than loading loading them into memory from the ROM. It would reduce the memory requirements, a lot. Things would be quite different to the way the PSP version works. Not sure if it'd be enough though.

Using something like the M3DS Simply, you have access to a microSD card, which means most people will have at lest 256mb or much more space. We could create a swap file, though I am unsure how much that would slow it down.

If it isn't reasonable to play (in terms of speed and load times), then it isn't worth doing of course. I think it is possible with borderline load times.

I don't by into memory issues, when they have successfully ported Quake to NDS.

There's big difference with porting a game you have source code of and reverse engineering and recreating a game engine. I'm pretty sure that if U7BG/SI would have been made open source it could be ported almost any system in existence (and would have been already).

So I take it no one is working on it, huh?

yup, at least no one here, the PSP port came almost out of the blue as well, so you never know...

Hmm, now that I actually own a NDS Lite and one of the devices to run Homebrew on it I'd love to see a port, too

Yesterday, I played OpenTyrian (http://www.vespenegas.com/tyrian.html) on it and tomorrow I'll look for my Quake 2 CD and will try that one out on the NDS

Too bad, that ScummVM for the NDS does not support my one Scumm game, The Dig (memory issues which kind of bodes ill for an Exult port). At the moement I'm looking for the other Scumm Games, like Simon to play on the NDS. Looking forward to that one, too

Yep, I'm quite enthusiastic about the machine

I think the memory argument doesn't hold anymore. Using hardware like Supercard (latest one even supports SDHC cards) it should be possible to use the card as RAM (through swap file implementation i guess). I've read somewhere there is even a lib for that (don't remember its name).

look at the ScummVM forum and see the various reasons why it is not that easy (look for the Dig threads). But maybe they made progress there but last time (even though the supercard/RAM thing was already possible back then) I looked there was still no way.
The biggest hurdle though is that someone needs to code all that. You volunteering?