There is subtitles if there is no soundcard available for speech. You may disable soundblaster emulation from dosbox.conf to see subtitles.

I think what he said is right.

This is (I think, don't kill me if I'm wrong) how to do it:

If you installed Ultima Underworld in the standard way, then it would be in C:\Program Files\GOG\Ultima Underworld 1+2

So, go there. Then there should be a file called dosboxULTIMA1.conf. You need to open this with notepad. If it's not notepad by default, right click and go "open with" and then notepad.

Then when you're in the notepad file, press Control + F for find. Type this exactly: "sbtype" without the quote marks.

It should find the "sbtybe" line in the file.
It should say "sbtype=sbpro1".

All you have to do is change it to "none".

So it should look like:

sbtype=none
instead of
sbtype=sbpro1


I hope that's not too confusing.
Also don't kick me if I explained it too simply, I just tried to do it so that anyone without any knowledge of configuration files could be able to do it.

If you cannot get that working, you may watch the Intro from youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFu3n2briYY

I uploaded new version with subtitles and without speech for you.

Yeah, that might be better.

Awesome of you to do that, GoingDown.

I haven't played much so far, but I don't think there are that many cutscenes in the game... maybe one more at the end, I dunno.

I get subtitles but no speech :(

Yeah I think with this game you have to choose one or the other. It displays subtitles if there's no sound device selected for digital speech. if you do have a sound device selected for digital speech, then you get the speech but no subtitles.

Does that effect the sound in any other parts of the game?

Because if it's just the intro then it's not really a big deal.

I don't know. You can switch the sound settings back after watching the intro though.

Thank you, guys. Gibush and GoingDown, you guys rock!

Actually, there are two sound setup tools. One is contained in the UINSTALL.EXE, which managed harddisk installation and where you can select different devices for sound/music and speech. The other is UWSOUND.EXE, which is for configuring DMA, IRQ etc.

And yes, sound effects are indeed handled via midi. Only the speech is digitized. That's why there's a tech problem posting in this forum about hearing piano sounds when walking. *g

I'm using a proper Dosbox installation where I place all my Dos games. Recently I managed to install Munt, the MT-32-Emulator. So I tried it out with Ultima Underworld. At game start I noticed how the emu daemon spat out a lot of debug messages, notifying me of the game uploading samples to the midi "hardware". Those samples were the sound effects.
Sounds good that way. :)