Hello GOGers,

I am a newbie in the Ultima series and I've been very interested in playing them, and bought all games from IV to VII during the Ultima discount.

I've since read a lot of things on the series, its history, its evolution... but that isn't the problem.

I've been told to play Ultima IV first, for it is in some people's opinion the first "real" Ultima, the first who settled the unique world of Britannia so I've been listening to them and tried to play it.

The actual problem I have with it is that whatever I do, I still get a lot of issues with the sound and especially the music.

I am reading this forum since like 3 days, looking for my case all around the Internet but I am not able to find someone who's the same "bugs" as I do so let me explain.

First of all, i have installed the actual GOG.com release, it works fine but as most of you must know, it doesn't have it's proper music, because of (if i'm not mistaken) the DOS release who didn't have one either, GOG's Ultima being the exact port of the aforemontionned DOS' U4.

Then I've been told to look for the Ultima IV Upgrade Patch (http://www.moongates.com/u4/upgrade/Upgrade.htm) but it doesn't seem to work with 64 bits OS (i have Win 7 64), that's another option down.

Then I tried XU4 (http://xu4.sourceforge.net/) and it worked for some time, and was the only release in which I could play normally, with my AZERTY keyboard and with actual music ! But and for some really odd reason it suddenly stopped working (I mean the sound) so I looked for this again and found this post : http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/xu4/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=24 and did what he said, and more oddly, it worked again for some time (like 30 minutes) !

After this it wouldn't run correctly, I've tried to uninstall/reinstall, and everything this guy mentioned but I can't get the music.

It is extremely frustrating knowing that I've played the game a bit and found it absolutely amazing. I just can't play it without the music, it feels like loosing half of its charm...

So please guys, I may be doing something wrong but what ?

Also, while I'm on it, if I had to go back on GOG's U4 instead of XU4, is there any way to play in AZERTY ?

Thank you for reading :)

The U4 Upgrade patch WILL run on Win 7 64 bit so long as you run it through DosBox, which all GOG.com Ultima releases do (except U9). It's more easily applied with Pix's Ultima Patcher (found here http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/category/ultima-patcher/), which includes upgrade patches for all the Ultima games and is compatible with the GOG releases.

As for XU4, make sure you run it as administrator. That may fix your issue.

Hope that helps!

Ho hi, sorry for the late answer, I was a bit busy.

Pix's Ultima Patcher solved it, so I could patch U4 effectively :) thank you guys for replying.

(XU4 won't work but it doesn't matter because now I can run U4 in AZERTY)

note for french users :

Si vous avez comme moi du mal à configurer vos touches, essayez tout bêtement ce que j'ai fait, à savoir :

1) ouvrez le répertoire d'U4 (quelque chose comme C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Ultima 4)

2) cherchez le fichier dosboxULTIMA4.conf et ouvrez-le avec le bloc-notes

3) tout en bas, dans la partie dos, modifiez la ligne

> keyboardlayout=none < (par défaut)

en

> keyboardlayout=auto <

4) C'est aussi simple que ça... après le truc c'est que j'ai fait des tas de modifications avant d'arriver à cette solution, je ne saurai pas dire si ça a ou pas influé (je pense pas)

This thread was great! Thanks for the information and suggestions. The PIX updater is fantastic. I am having a problem though. I want the music but I also want to keep the original graphics. If I just install the music with the EGA graphics option the NPCs in the game are waving their arms and other animations so quickly they are a blur.

Is there a way for me to have the music play with the original graphics? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

EDIT: I have tried to play with the cycles settings but either the music is too slow to even listen to or the graphics are soooo fast it drives me nuts!

Alot of games on GOG don't work,still issues for years,why they haven't fixed these while charging money for them,I don't know.

They should be all patched.