First of all, I need to say that the first platform I played Ultima Underworld on was Pocket PC/Windows Mobile. It was a direct PC port which, despite not having any platform-specific improvements, made really good use of a touch screen - everything, from managing items to moving (which felt like moving with an analog stick on consoles), was intuitive and pretty awesome.

Recently, I tried the original version... and couldn't even comfortably make my way to the very first room with the rat - controls, while being the same, became very sloppy to me, in spite of having a full-fledged keyboard now. What was I doing wrong, and is there any configurations or mods that can help me? I really loved this game on my PDA back in the day and I want to beat it in a proper manner, but now I am not even sure if I want to buy it.

Thanks, I have definitely heard about editing configuration file somewhere! But do you really insist on ignoring the keyboard, even for hotkeys and camera tilting?

While running DOSBox, CTRL-F1 opens the Key Mapper, which allows you to customize the control scheme. Maybe that's helpful for you.

IIRC I used the keyboard only for looking up and down, flying, and when loading/saving. That worked very well for me, but others prefer a more conventional FPS style of mouse + keyboard.

UW1 used one of the first proper 2.5D engines (if not THE first) and so it's implementation of keyboard controls is slightly different to what most people expect these days. Most games use the S key to move backwards, but on UW1 it's the X key that does this.

Also, if using the mouse and keyboard at the same time there are some control glitches that happen. For example if you are picking up an item but then start moving using the keyboard while holding the item on the cursor, the game can sometimes act as though you have let go of the mouse button and throws the item.

As Petrus recommended, mouse-only is a perfectly good way of controlling the game and I'd recommend that too.

I remember that glitch on Pocket PC when walked with hardware buttons while holding an item in between play field and an invertory! Thought it was platform-specific one.

Well, thank you for answers, definitely picking these games up as soon as I can! Gotta go back to the Abyss :)