Ultima Underworld – Test Signatures

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The big news today (at least for me), is that my copy of Caverns of Callisto has arrived safe and sound. I was asked last week if there was any fiction in the documentation. The answer is yes but not very much. The manual is a single folded sheet of card not giving much scope for any lengthy stories but it does set the scene. I’ll scan it all in at some point but I’ll hold off for now. If I just put all the best stuff straight on here, I’d never get anyone to read through weeks of me playing demos.

While I’m working on the site, here is another random document from the collection. This one is probably only of any interest to serious Underworld fans but that certainly includes myself. It’s a series of sample signatures for Corby and Sir Cabirus for the i page of the Ultima Underworld manual. None of these were actually used but it’s easy to pick out aspects that were combined together into the final graphics. Some of the Cabirus’ are either mispelt or the name hadn’t been decided on.

Underworld Manual Test Signatures

Ultima Trilogy Press Release

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I’ve been tinkering with the site design and have gone for a simple red theme for now + a completely new menu. It still needs work but I think it’s improving. At the very least it’s a change. What I really need is a logo and/or a background image. I do have some ideas for that but I’ve spent long enough on this today as it is.

Since I’ve been linked from Ultima Aiera, I thought I ought to post something Ultima themed but I don’t have much time and this was the first thing that came to hand. It’s a single page press release for the Ultima Trilogy from 1989, or at least the front half of it. The back which should have shown the specifications is blank.

UltimaTrilogyPressRelease

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

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After half a day off the air, the site is back up and running again in a new home. I’ve got no details to offer but last night my old WordPress site was deactivated for breach of terms with no warning or even contact from WordPress. I have asked for specifics but haven’t received a reply as of yet.

Plenty, if not all, of the downloads on here skip over the edge of legality which I’m well aware of. My personal opinion is that no one involved will care and it certainly isn’t going to cost anyone money. The fact that so many of my scans have been used on GOG and in one case by EA themselves is something of a vindication of this. My assumption has been that if anyone did object I’d just have to remove the offending content at the time.

I prefer to be optimistic anyway. Unless I hear otherwise I’m taking it that this wasn’t done on the basis of any corporate complaint and was merely WordPress being overzealous. I am going to be extra careful about backing everything up from here on out just in case.

For the sake of an easy life, my little-updated scummVM hacks page has moved and will now be linked in on the menu on the right. The direct link is http://www.pix.oneuk.com/scummvm

Apart from a few pounds out of my wallet for the setup costs + sql server there is no harm done and I’ve restored the site in full. Thanks to the ignominious departure, I can’t put a forwarding address so any links to the old address are now permanently broken. We’ll see if anyone actually finds this new site in due course. I’m fully expecting the daily hits to drop to single figures for a while now.

Having just done a complete website backup, I’ll end with a few needless stats. This site now has 11.8 Gb of files, 13166 images (not necessarily all actually used) and 5 Mb of posts. All of that and I still haven’t changed the default theme. A new location might be the cue to finally get around to tarting the place up a little but I’ll wait to see if I survive the rest of the week first.

EDIT

WordPress have just emailed me and apparently “The system should not have done that” and they reinstated the original blog. Having set up my own site, I can’t see any point in going back now so I’ve cleared out my old blog and just put a link in to here.

This is extremely good news as it means I don’t have anything to worry about for now, although I’m more than slightly miffed at having gone to all the trouble and expense of moving for nothing. I’m genuinely surprised that having drawn the attention of WordPress, they would open the site again. I think this should be the cue to sort out the site into something a little more streamlined. I’ll start with that ludicrously long menu on the right hand side.

Crusader No Regret – Demo

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Unless there are more out there that I haven’t found yet, I think this in the penultimate demo that I’ve actually got the hardware to play at the moment. I got this one from Echo Sector.

It consists of the entire first level of the game, and as such I don’t have a huge amount to say about it since I’ve blogged through it once already. I’m not entirely convinced that this wasn’t made slightly easier as I got the best battery in the game early on making me very safe from most of the guards after that point. I can’t pretend to know the game well enough to know without checking though. In fact being dropped straight into it, I took a little while to get used to the controls again and I couldn’t even survive the first 5 seconds until I’d had 4 or 5 stabs at it.

After the teething troubles, I was soon blasting my way through the level blowing everything in sight up on the way (albeit saving every few steps). The levels in No Regret were truly massive, not to mention challenging giving this demo a huge slice of gameplay. I was having too much fun to be paying much attention to the clock but I probably took an hour+ to get through to the end.

There isn’t much reason to play this if you own the full game but if you aren’t convinced it’s worth your $6 on GOG, I’d fully recommend downloading this and playing through it. If you still aren’t convinced after that, then play it again.

As far as hardware goes, I bought myself a complete Pentium II system today for the grand sum of £10 off Ebay. It should be spot on for my joint Windows 98/DOS PC but I’ve got to go and pick it up which is a bit of drag as it’s further away than I would have liked. At least it’s a nice area so I can make a day trip out of it. It’s surprisingly difficult to find PC’s of that sort of age around here with only a handful to choose from. I much preferred to buy this one with it not being ex-office.

It was fun trying to find out what the specs were with a seller who in his own words “only did Apple Macs”. He was selling it on behalf of a friend and figuring out which type of AGP it had on the motherboard was especially challenging. My Voodoo 3 needs the original 3.3V slot to work correctly so it was crucial it wasn’t AGP2. Luckily I managed to track down the motherboard model from a serial number bareley visible on one of the photos he sent through. I still don’t know what speed of Pentium II it is but anything will do.

Once I’ve got the PC, the next question will be whether any of the cards I’m planning to slot into it will still work or not. I’m also wondering if I still have an MPEG2 decoder card kicking around in the parents loft somewhere. Even if I have finding it could be tricky. My parent’s loft is like some sort of Aladdin’s cave of junk. Every time I go in there looking for anything I completely fail to find it but discover something else instead.

Britannia Manor 1992 Spookhouse – VNR

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One of Richard Garriott’s better known eccentricities was holding a massive haunted house event every other year between 1988 and 1994. These were done around his home Britannia Manor and he spared no expense making each more elaborate than the one before.

I’ve always been curious about these but can’t say that I know too much about them. The website for the 1994 event is still up at http://www.britanniamanor.org and a DVD documentary called The Worlds Most Famous Haunted House – A Tribute To Britannia Manor was produced and sold some time back but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it.

Rather than being haunted houses in the traditional sense, the events were more along the lines of live fantasy role-playing. They were based around Ultima with characters like the Guardian making an appearance.

This tape is a VNR based on the 1992 event. Like all VNR’s, it purports to be a genuine news broadcast but must have been produced by Origin themselves to help drum up some publicity. The reporter Galen Svanas was actually product manager on System Shock and Wing Commander 3 among other things.