I guess it's nice to have these mods available. But then it just means the GOG releases are no better than the versions I already have on my hard drive. It's alright, though, mostly I was just curious. I'm glad U4 got a highlighted release this week - hope it does well.

The problem is, that the upgrades are fan made patches, so GOG can't just stick them in on the games. But if EA were to make some kind of arrangements, which would make the fan patches official, then there wouldn't be any problems releasing them through GOG I reckon.

Great post, very informative, have a free (+) for your trouble. :)

Since this is a question thread, you should mark DeathStrike's reply as "solution" so he enjoy free rep for his arduous work. ;)

The Ultima II patch does more than just upgrade the audiovisuals -- it actually makes the game winnable. Let me explain:

When Ultima II was originally released for the PC platform in 1982, hard drives were a luxury item few could afford. (But then, so were the original IBM PCs... but I digress.) Thus, the game was designed to be run off two 5.25" floppy disks, with all the necessary files stored in the root directory of each disk. This was all well and good, but there was a problem with this arrangement: Some necessary map files for visiting other planets were inadvertently given identical filenames. As long as they were on separate floppies this wasn't a major issue, but once EA and Origin began repackaging the game for anthology collections beginning in the early '90s, they forgot about the duplicate filenames and installed all the Ultima II files to the same directory, where the game expected to find them. Unfortunately, this caused some necessary maps to be overwritten with incorrect data, causing the game to crash or otherwise wonk out once the player tried to access those areas of the game.

So far as I am aware, this bug has gone uncorrected in every modern rerelease of the Ultima canon by EA, up to and including the 1998 Collection. The fan patch restores the missing map files to the game in addition to its other enhancements, and is the only way the whole of Ultima II can be explored and played.

Those who've taken to grousing about GOG's slipping quality can give them a Mulligan this time. This one's not on them, it's on EA -- both for letting this bug slip past them all these years and for evidently not allowing GOG to distribute fan-created material with the game.

Ultima 4 Upgrade doesn't work with Windows 7 64-bit, unfortunately.

Works fine for me. Yeah. I'm aware of all that. I just didn't want to overcomplicate things in my post.

There seem to be a few people struggling to install the various patches for these games so I've put together a Windows tool to set them up for Ultima 1-4. Hopefully, it will help out anyone who doesn't know their way around DOS/DOSBox.

It's not exact robust or good looking but should work provided it doesn't come across anything too unexpected. I'll tidy it up and add in the rest of the Ultima's as they are released if anyone finds it useful.

You can download it from http://www.pix.oneuk.com/UltimaPatcher.rar

Instructions on installing the Ultima 4 Upgrade. (I just tested this out with the GOG install on my Windows 7 64-bit machine)
1. Install Ultima 4
2. Extract u4upgrad.zip to wherever you installed Ultima 4
3. Run avpatch.exe directly from windows. This creates the file avatar.old, which is nearly identical to avatar.exe, but changes a few of the shrine visions. The original has several identical visions, this makes it so they are all unique. Don't worry, you still get the correct info from the visions.
4. Run switch.bat directly from windows. This turns on and off the patch. If run once, or an odd number of times, then it will be turned on. If you run it twice, or an even number of times, then it will be turned off.
5. Play game as normal. (The default music settings should work, unless you are running a non-standard setup for DOSBox, if the music doesn't work, but you do have the improved graphics, then you will need to manually load DOSBox, mount the Ultima 4 directory, and from that mounted directory, run setm.exe)

I also recommend checking out the readme.txt file from the upgrade, as there is extra functionality added.

And it also appears that if you press certain keys at the title screen with the upgrade active, the keyboard will stop responding in DOSBox. (Arrow keys, certain Alt+ keys like Alt+Q, F1-F10, all did it for me, and there are probably other key combos as well) It doesn't seem to be a problem in game, but I haven't overly tested it.

There's another way as well, but for Ultima IV only.

Try ux4: Ultima IV Recreated. You can get it from this site on SourceForge (completely free, of course):

http://xu4.sourceforge.net/

To use it, just click the "Download" link at the top of that page. Then, on the "ux4 Download" page, do NOT get any of the files under "ux4 Releases", unless you want an older version for some reason. Instead, for Windows, get the one marked as such under "ux4 Daily Snapshot Builds". It's the top-most download link very near the top-left of the page. If you're using Mac OS X, then just get the one just under the Windows version marked as for use with Mac OS X.

It's an installer .EXE. But do NOT install it to its default installation directory. Instead install it to the game folder whereever the Ultima IV game has been installed on your computer. In my case, I had to install it to:

'C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Ultima 4\ '

Now you can discard the installer and just run the 'ux4.exe' to play the game enhanced. Configure it how you'd like in the in-game menu. There's the missing music, and like five different graphical modes, several filtering modes, and other extra features hehehe

That's all! Enjoy the game! hehehe

Sadly, Ultima IV without Music is much like Star Wars without it's musical score.
I was very happy to be able to replay that game after 25 years. But this Dos version is just not the real version for me. C-64 for the win.

I've tried installing the Ultima II upgrade patch but once I get to the dngpatch.exe file. It tells the the file is incompatible with 64 bit windows 7. So um, how do I make my game winnable without it? I was looking for a 64 bit version of the patch but I can't find it.

You need to run rengal.bat, dngpatch.exe and u2cfg.exe through DOSBox itself. After that you need to use ultima2.com to load the game instead of ultimaii.exe.