Produced by: Malignant Manor
Website: SI BG Merge @ the Exult Forums
Releases:
* SI BG Merge v6.8.7 (0 bytes)
* SI BG Merge Patch (0 bytes)

This interesting mod for Exult imports the shapes from The Black Gate into Serpent Isle, adding hundreds of new shapes, with a few being repeated for use with The Black Gate’s usecode.

It is still in development, and still buggy (some in-game functionality may be lost by use of the patch), but for users of Exult Studio this may well be an exciting development indeed, as it vastly expands the versatility of available shapes when modifying or creating maps.

Tags: Exult, Exult Studio, Serpent Isle, The Black Gate, Ultima 7

Produced by: Team Exult
Website: Exult at Sourceforge
Releases:
* Windows Binary (0 bytes)
* Mac OSX 10.3 (0 bytes)
* Sharp Zaurus (0 bytes)
* PocketPC (ARM) (0 bytes)
* PSP (0 bytes)
* Fedora - Game (0 bytes)
* Fedora - Tools (0 bytes)
* Fedora - Exult Studio (0 bytes)
* Source (RPM) (0 bytes)
* Source (.tar.gz) (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Program (0 bytes)

Additional Files
* Black Gate Sound Files (0 bytes)
* Black Gate Sound Files (Roland MT-32) (0 bytes)
* Black Gate OGG Music Files (1 of 2) (0 bytes)
* Black Gate OGG Music Files (2 of 2) (0 bytes)
* Serpent Isle Sound Files (0 bytes)
* Serpent Isle Sound Files (Roland MT-32) (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Data (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Music (mono, low quality) (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Music (stereo, higher quality) (0 bytes)

Exult 1.4 (unstable)
* Exult 1.4 (Windows) (0 bytes)
* Exult 1.4 (PocketPC - ARM4) (0 bytes)
* Exult 1.4 (PocketPC - ARM5) (0 bytes)
* Exult Studio (Windows) (0 bytes)
* Exult Tools (Windows) (0 bytes)
* Exult 1.4 Source (0 bytes)
* Photoshop Shape Plugin (0 bytes)
* GIMP Plugin (0 bytes)
* Gimp Plugin 2.0 (0 bytes)
* SDL 1.2 Libraries

An amazing remake, Exult is a cross-platform reworking of the Ultima 7/Serpent Isle engine that allows the game to be run on modern operating systems with expanded memory environments. This is not the same as a Voodoo memory-manager wrapper program, and it works on many systems apart from Windows.

Exult 1.2 is the latest “stable” release – Team Exult is making massive engine changes, and subsequent releases are expected to have instabilities as a result. It has Windows, Mac OS X, Sharp Zaurus, and Fedora builds available. Also avaliable is the source, so other systems can compile and build Exult.

Tags: Exult, Fedora, Mac, OS X, Serpent Isle, Sharp Zaurus, The Black Gate, Ultima 7, Voodoo, Windows

The bleeding-edge version of Exult — the Ultima 7 engine for more operating systems and platforms than one cares to list — has been updated as of October 9th. Exult Tools and Exult Studio have similarly been updated, and all can be downloaded from the project website.

Or from the project entry here at Aiera.

Tags: Aiera, Exult, Exult Studio, Exult Tools, Ultima 7

Pentagram, the remake that does for Ultima 8 what Exult did for Ultima 7, has posted news of their development progress for the first time since last December. The team, it seems, has been busy indeed!

In the last few months, interest in Pentagram seems to have picked up again. A number of bugs were fixed since the last update, including camera fixes, key handling, containers (backpack, barrels, etc.), and a fix for a problem in the German versions of the U8. The default key binding for stasis moved from ‘S’ to ‘F10′. The build should now properly support versions of autoconf greater than 2.60.

Mac OS X builds also received a lot of attention. They build system switched from XCode to a makefile-based system that builds Pentagram and dependencies using their traditional configure script and make methods. This allows us a greater amount of control over the builds and should help prevent changes to Pentagram for unix systems that break OS X builds and vice versa.

Just prior to this news update, I noticed that the Pentagram team had released updated snapshots of both their Windows and Mac builds of the game, and both of these updates have been added to the project entry. I’ve also updated the local copy of the Pentagram source code.

Tags: Exult, Mac, OS X, Pentagram, Ultima 7, Ultima 8, unix, Windows, XCode

Produced by: Pentagram Team
Website: Pentagram
Releases:
* Windows Binary (0 bytes)
* OS X Universal Binary (0 bytes)
* Mac libPNG Libraries (0 bytes)
* Source Code (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Program (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - libSDL (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - INI file (0 bytes)

Pentagram Map Viewer
* Pentagram Map Viewer (0 bytes)
* Source Code (0 bytes)

What initially began as a map viewer for Ultima 8 has evolved into a full-on cross-platform engine remake in the spirit of Exult. Although no official demo has yet been released, there are up-to-date releases of source code available, as well as Windows and Mac OS X Universal binaries.

The best aspect of this is that Pentagram runs very smoothly and without an intense CPU load, unlike when Ultima 8 is run under DOSBox.

Tags: DOSBox, Exult, Mac, Pentagram, Ultima 8, Windows

There’s still no new news posted on the project’s main website, but Exult — the engine that enables Ultima 7 (both parts: The Black Gate and Serpent Isle) to run on virtually every OS imaginable — has been updated. Exult 1.4, the “unstable, beta” build of the engine, was updated earlier this month, as were Exult Studio and Exult Tools.

Major changes in this release include correction of a few problems associated with creating a new game from within Exult Studio, a code change to prevent dead NPCs from taking additional damage, a tweak to the proximity-based wake-up feature of NPCs, and a few other code corrections.

I have added downloads for all three updated programs, plus an updated copy of the Exult source code, to the project entry.

Tags: Exult, Exult Studio, Exult Tools, Serpent Isle, The Black Gate, Ultima 7

I see that Dino’s Ultima Page has posted some news concerning a couple of new file releases from different projects. Notably, Ranman’s Ultima V for TI Calculators has released a beta version of that port for the TI-92 and V200 calculators. This download has already been added to the project entry here at Aiera.

Also, the full version of a patch translating Ultima 7 to Spanish has been released. Following up on this lead led me to translation patches for Serpent Isle, Ultima 9, and Ultima Underworld about which I had previously been unaware, and these have all been added to Aiera.

• Ultima 7 Spanish translation
• Serpent Isle Spanish translation
• Ultima Underworld Spanish translation
• Ultima 9 Spanish translation

Additionally, the Ultima 6 Project Development Tools Package has been released, which enables the user to edit and compile conversations, edit game objects, edit game logic, and provides a host of other functions as well. It can be downloaded from the Project Britannia website, or from the Ultima 6 Project entry here at Aiera.

Other Ultima-related news I found whilst wandering through the Internet today includes:

Aklabeth

The web home of this remake of Akalabeth seems to be offline. I hope it’s just a temporary thing.

Ultima Underworld for Pocket PC

Conversely, this port of Ultima Underworld to the PocketPC seems to be back online again. Nice to see. That means that I get to move this project out of the cemetery!

Exult

This port of The Black Gate and Serpent Isle to…well…pretty much every operating system one could dare to think of…doesn’t look as though it’s been updated, by its website. But I noticed that the Windows and PocketPC snapshots were updated earlier this month, as was the snapshot for Exult Studio. All of these can be downloaded through the project entry here. The chief modification seems to concern a bug with multiracial Avatars.

Ultima: Iris

This 3D frontend for Ultima Online has been updated recently, to build version 2365. Linux and Windows source, and the Windows installer, can all be downloaded via the project entry here, or at the project website.

Finally, I was contacted by Yannick “Alcibiade” Kirschhoffer regarding a new piece of Ultima-related material he has produced. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

I’ve been huge fan of the second Ultima trilogy. In 2003, I began work on writing guitar arrangements of most of this era’s music. I did the Ultima 6 score almost entirely, and some of U4 and U5 too. Then I compiled these in a songbook that I illustrated with artwork and quotes from the games.

It is available for download in PDF format at www.alcibiade.org

This is a handy little creation, beautifully arranged and attractively compiled into one volume. I’ve added a project entry for it under the category of “General Utility”, and it can be downloaded from there as well.

Well done, Yannick!

Tags: Aiera, Akalabeth, Aklabeth, Dino's Ultima Page, Dungeon Siege, Exult, Exult Studio, Linux, Pocket PC, PocketPC, Project Britannia, Serpent Isle, Texas Instruments, The Black Gate, translation, Ultima 4, Ultima 5, Ultima 6, Ultima 6 Project, Ultima 7, Ultima 9, Ultima Online, Ultima Underworld, Ultima: Iris, Windows