Hey!

So, looking for nostalgia, I wanted to play some Ultima. GOG, while awesome, only supports Ultima on Windows and Mac, and I don't have one of those right now. Since under the hood GOG uses dosbox, I knew it was at least possible, and of course it is. I thought I'd outline the steps I took, as they aren't necessarily straightforward. I'm using Fedora and GNOME 3, but the steps are probably similar for other Linux.

The process is essentially the same for each game.

# Short version

Install the games with wine, run them with dosbox.

# Long version

## Requirements

You'll need dosbox and wine. In fedora, you can install them from the commandline:

$ sudo dnf install dosbox wine

## Downloading and manuals

1) Download the windows installers for the games from GOG.
2) Download the manuals from GOG as well - GOG packages the manuals for all three games in one set of zip files.

3) Make a set of directories for your games to live. I made it look like this:

ultima
├── ultima4
├── ultima5
└── ultima6

4) Unzip the various manuals and lorebooks. I wanted each manual in the same directory as the game, so I moved them into the directories above. Or you can leave them all in one directory. Up to you.

## Installing

1) I used wine to install each game:

$ wine ~/Downloads/ultima/setup_ultima4_2.1.0.20.exe

Accept the eula, run through the steps. I got several errors. I just ignored them, and nothing bad has happened yet.

2) Copy the game files to a easier-to-find place.

Wine installs the games in ~/.wine/drive_c/... - I moved them to the directories I set up before:

$ mv ~/.wine/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Ultima\ 4/ ~/ultima/ultima4/game

(I'm moving the entire directory, and renaming it "game" because I don't like capital letters or spaces in directory names)

So now each "ultimaX" directory has a "game" directory in it with the actual game, as well as the pdfs for the manuals.

## Running

I made a .sh file to make it easier to run each game.

$ cd ~/ultima/ultima4
$ cat <<EOF > u4.sh
#!/bin/bash

cd ~/ultima/ultima4
dosbox -c "mount c game" -c "c:" -c "title" -c "avatar"
EOF

...and make it executable:

$ chmod u+x u4.sh

Now running ultima 4 should work:

$ cd ~/utlima/ultima4
$ ./u4.sh

Now, create scripts for ultima 5 and 6, which look similar:

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/ultima/ultima5
dosbox -c "mount c game" -c "c:" -c "ultima"


## Icons and desktop files

GOG ships icons for each game, called "goggame-<id>.ico". I copied each one to my "top" directory for that game, and created a desktop file for each:

$ cd ~/ultima/ultima4
$ cp game/goggame-1207662433.ico u4.ico
$ cat <<EOF > u4.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Ultima 4
Comment=Ultima 4
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=/home/rnorwood/ultima/ultima4/u4.sh
Icon=/home/rnorwood/ultima/ultima4/u4.ico
Terminal=false
EOF

$ cp u4.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

You'll need to change the home directory path. Unfortunately, .desktop files don't support "~" expansion. :/

So now, you should be able to run ultima 4/5/6 from the Activities menu, like any other application.

GNOME is picky about .desktop files, so if it isn't exactly right, it will silently ignore the file and the game won't show up. Annoying. In particular, the Exec and Icon lines need to point to absolute paths, and I believe the u4.sh script must be executable.

## dosbox.conf

You should find a .conf file in ~/.dosbox/ - based on my personal preferences, I changed the following settings and left everything else as-is. Experiment to find what you like.

In [sdl]:
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=true
fullresolution=1920x1080
output=ddraw

In [render]:
aspect=true
scaler=normal3x

This runs full screen (Alt-Enter to get out of FS), scaled up, but still in all it's pixelated glory. fullresolution should be your monitor's current resolution.

## Cleanup

The GOG versions ship with a "dosbox" directory for each game. I removed them because I'm using the system dosbox.

## Archive

I made a tarball of the entire directory after all these changes, so I could restore the games to the original state if I ever want to.

## Wine desktop files

The wine installer installs desktop files for you under ~/.local/share/applications/wine - I removed them to avoid duplication.

It goes without saying that none of the above is likely to be supported by GOG.

Now...where was the skull of Mondain, again??

I believe it's near Lord Blackthorne's castle, but only when Mandrake blooms.

Back to the main topic, I believe you can use innoextract instead of wine to extract the game.

I tried innoextract, and got a bunch of stuff that looks like files for the installer, but I don't see anything that seems to be the game files. I assume it's in there somewhere, unless the gog installer downloads the game on demand.

If someone has a way to not use wine, I'll update my original message, as wine pulls in several dependencies, but otherwise, that method works for now.

The game files are always (in my experience) in the app folder. However, in a few cases innoextract places some of the files in the __support subfolder, for example in case of Ultima 2 and Ultima 3. The files from this subfolder need to be copied back to the game data. This is very uncommon though.