Is there any way to add music back into this game without messing up the graphics? I find it annoying and ridiculous that the U4 Upgrade makes it mandatory to replace the graphics.

There doesn't seem to be any pure music patch for the game. However, I recommend using xu4 which is an Ultima IV engine recreation that plays just like the original. You can enable the music and choose between the two tile sets using it so you can get the desired result. Also, the midi files that comes with xu4 are far better quality than those that come with the Ultima IV upgrade patch.

The only major downside is that Ultima 4 is not completable with XU4, AFAIK. Wrong will crash every time you go to the eighth level, preventing you from obtaining a certain item necessary for completion. However, you can switch your save files to DOSBox and vice versa and they work fine in my experience, so I'd go for DeathStrike's suggestion.

What do you mean Ultima 4 isn't compatible with xu4? xu4 is a remake of Ultima 4 and requires the game files to play.

There is a music only patch included in the Ultima Patcher at http://www.pix.oneuk.com/UltimaPatcher.rar

It doesn't work as well as it's VGA equivalent as it suffers slowdown if Dosbox isn't running at a high number of cycles but it may be what you are looking for if that doesn't bother you.

Not completable, not incompatible. Which technically isn't true. You can finish the game with XU4. But there's a specific area of the game that you need to access that will always crash in my and others experience, so you'll need to move your save files back to DOSBox temporarily in order to play through the area.

Ok thanks, I'll try that. Btw, what's a "high" number of cycles? GOG sets the game to 500 cycles.

The patcher changes the config to use max cycles, although you should be able to get away with less depending on your system. It's some sort of timing issue as it can't need all those cycles. It's a fairly ancient patch so I expect it ran a lot better on a real DOS machine.

The music patch works great, but music plays waaay too slowly, even with high cycles. Furthermore, if I increase the amount of cycles, all the animations are way too fast.

To allow for Ultima IV to load with music, the patch creates a U4.BAT file that you have to load in place of ULTIMA.COM. I balanced out the speeds of the music and animations by editing U4.BAT to make use the MOSLO.COM program included in the patch.

So in U4.BAT, the line

"ult4.com"

was replaced by

"moslo.com /20 ult4.com"

to load the game at 20% speed.

I also had to set the number of cycles to 650. For the GOG installation, the cycles can be set in the dosboxULTIMA4F.conf file. Also, the second last line in the .conf file ("ultima.com") has to be replaced with "u4".

So the game is even more awesome than before! It loads a bit slowly and the animations are slightly faster, but it's still close to the original.

So if I try to contact the company they wont do anything about no music for Ultima 4?? Its totally nuts and unprofessional to put this out without the music. Hopefully I can do what you guys wrote.....

The original company that created this game does not exist anymore.

The original game that is installed using the GOG Galaxy has music. But if you add the fan-made upgrade patches, some things may break. That's why it's recommended to use Pix's Ultima Patcher to patch the game and make sure you don't make any mistakes when patching.