Gism Butter

Sat, 19 Mar 2005

Ultima VII

When I was in high school videogames were the most popular way to pass the boring downtime between weekdays. It was either that, or run off to the Christiana Mall to watch the highly flamable mall chicks burst into flames. Or to watch a herd of black kids throw chairs at each other in the food court.

I always had a Macintosh, which I still use as my primary computer type to this day. Of course, Mac's are somewhat lacking in the game department. I spent a great deael of my time at SAS staring over the shoulders of my classmates as they played the wonderful PC games of the day: Civilization, X-Wing, and a host of others.

One of those games I never got a chance to play was Ultima VII: the Black Gate, and its sequel, Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle. As you can see, the convention of naming computer related software with ridiculous numerics is nothing new. This game, was particularly beloved by Dave Meyers, a fellow in my class at school. Dave was one of the few guys who actually allowed me to sit in and watch him play: most everyone else had long ago banished me from their domains. Dave worked his way through these two and the eventual eighth Ultima game, and the whole time I drooled over the freedom of movement and action within this amazing world. Entire towns were populated with minute items, and all of them were obtainable. If you wanted, you could go around stealing every pair of boots in the city, or collecting horse shoes. It waas a phenominally open environment.

Well, as I have recently lost my Windows box to hardware failure, (Thanks nVidia for the crappy heat management of your GeForce 2) I've been forced to bootstrap my semi-functional Debian box into a viable desktop PC. I say semi-functional because when Leif finished setting it up, it was in a state of perfect server functionality, but completely unusable for mundane tasks. Leif did a terrific job of turning it into a server, and he's always been kind enough to walk my lame ass through fixes and troubles, particularly the recent rectification of Shorerwall's constant blathering to console. But Leif never offered to configure X Windows, and I never asked him to.

So this week has been XFree86config-4 week for me. I've been adding mouse support, changing screen resolutions, attempting (and failing) to install Gnome 2.x. I've finally arrived at a point where the Debian box is just about completely functional. So what better way to celebrate than by installing a whole fuck-load of useless programs?

While browsing through the stable packages listed on the Debian site, I discovered Exult, an open source engine for Ultima VII and Ultima VII 2. Of course, you need the art and resource files from the original game to use Exult, but I'm sure some of you clever folks out there will see that I've included some very helpful links for this endeavour.

Of course, I ended up playing on my Mac instead of the Linux box. C'est la vie.