Some of you may be aware of the System Shock Portable emulator, probably the only place to actually find a reliable and playable version of the original System Shock game. The nifty thing about it is it has a built in Mouselook mod, where at the touch of a button you can move and look around with the traditional system we're all accustomed to in our modern PC gaming lives. A nice convenience for those without the patience to re-acclimatize to the cumbersome system it was designed with.

My question is, is there a similar mod out there for Ultima Underworld? One would think, right, considering System Shock was basically built on the same engine, but I haven't really been able to turn anything up in my searching.

Apologies of course if this has already been brought up and answered elsewhere.

Sadly the answer is no. :-(

There is none, but you can look around with the keyboard keys if you didn't know, I found that much more pleasant than using the mouse: use Q and E to rotate the camera, S to walk forward, W to run forward, A and D to strafe and X to walk backwards. Hold down Shift to speed things up. Look up the manual for "default mode", then you won't have to use the icons in the sidebar either, very handy and reduces the amount of mouse movement.

Personally I found the mouse movement very intuitive, since you can also have variable walking and running speed. With the keyboard you are restricted to either walk or run.
The only downside is that it's harder to move and fight at the same time.
I think you can play the entire game with mouse only and, except for game options and saving/loading, not even click on the icons.

According to the System Shock mouse look modder it would be difficult to adapt the mod for the Ultima Underworld games due to various technical differences.

Just to clarify the tips mentioned in the posts above, at least in Ultima Underworld 1 you can't rebind the keys so the movement keys are SXZC - just imagine that it's the familiar WSAD but one step lower on the keyboard. W is for running faster and A+D turn your character, while Z+C strafe. Q+E are useful when flying/levitating up/down and numbers 1-3 are used for looking up and down (2 centers the view).

Jumping using the mouse is very difficult but luckily shift+J jumps forwards. That's all the jumping controls you'll ever need.

I finished the game yesterday and it still is every bit as good as it was in 1992. Started it on Windows but completed on OS X - the save files are compatible between them. Makes sense as they both use DOS-emulation of course.

Key mappings can be changed using the DOSBox Mapper (Ctrl/Command+F1), but this feature isn't available in the Boxer frontend GOG uses for their Mac OS X DOSBox packages.

This works for all games using DOSBox. For Ultima Underworld you probably wouldn't want to swap the letters for WASD since it relies on typed commands but it could easily be set up on the arrow keys or whatever with the original keys still working as-is.

EDIT: corrected Boxer Mapper details (thanks HiPhish).

Maybe Command+K works for original DOSBox, but it doesn't work for neither Boxer nor Boxer Standalone (what the GoG Mac version is using). Here is what the author of Boxer had to say: It's a shame, because I'd like to bind some keyboard keys to joysticks keys in Wing Commander.

Ah, thanks for that. This worked in previous Boxer versions and is still in the documentation on their website so I didn't realise it had actually been removed.

Of course if you really wanted to you could install the normal DOSBox and move the game to that with a bit of fiddling. The Mapper is Command+F1 for non-Boxer DOSBox on Mac OS X since it uses the standard shortcuts instead of Boxer's custom ones.

Thanks for the tip, I didn't actually know that. I haven't fiddled around with DosBox settings that much, although I did set Ultima Underworld's sound preferences so that it used the nostalgic AdLib-music.

In Underworld's case it's quite easy to get used to the default key bindings but still good to know.