Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is the 4th instalment of the Ultima series by Richard Garriott originally released in 1985, and later ported to many platforms (including Amiga).

XU4 is an engine that can run the original datafiles, and also supports some enhancements.

NOTE: The game needs freely available additional data files to work. See readme.morphos for installation instructions!

The MorphOS port can be found here: xu4-1.0beta3
You can read the original documentation online here: Ultima IV Documentation

Further reading: wikipedia article, beginner's guide

I haven't played it too much, please tell me if you have any problems.

(Not that I wouldn't like the game - I started it on C64 quite a while ago, and intend to finish it there!)

Source archive coming after a while, currently I need to prepare for the last Stream Party this weekend...

[ Edited by Jupp3 14.05.2014 - 03:12 ]

I always liked Ultima IV. A real classic RPG. This is a great way to play a near original version. I also like the remixed NES version that combines UltimaIV with DragonQuest/FinalFantasy style gameplay and presentation. The Sega Master System version is closer to this one but simplified a little bit for play on consoles. Nice to have this and the ogg music is really excellent. Works good for me so far.

Thanks for the feedback.

The biggest issue, as I see it, dungeon graphics are worse than in some versions (Amiga?), basically single colored walls etc. instead of something that actually looks like walls made of bricks.

The sources do come with improved graphics, but they seem to be both incomplete and somewhat incorrect, so only some walls would show in better quality. That's why I decided to use worse but consistent instead of better but inconsistent. I might look into that later on.

OK. I have found an issue. It's impossible to talk to the seer in the castle. I found this info about the problem:

http://sourceforge.net/p/xu4/bugs/631/

Switched to the latest sources. They also compiled quite a bit more easily.

That was the good news.

The bad news is, it doesn't seem very stable... I'll see if I can find & fix the issues. If not, at least I should be able to get the higher quality dungeon graphics working on the current release.

In response to the other tread...

...indeed indeed, when you get this more polished off, I'd love to have the sources just to see if I can get them to do anything under AROS, and if not, then I'm sure I can twist someone's arm to do it for me. Ultima is by far one of the best RPG's series EVER!!!!!

And on that note, I'll be giving your port a go on my Efika once I get done with the stuff I'm doing with AROS and have more time again.

It would be quite nice if one would provide a proper installer for those games like bigfoot did for RTCW.

Quite nice and handy to install. Without it looks like something unfinished got delivered.

We have 20+ of these games and AFAIR only one of them contains a proper install tool. This is 2014 people.

Geit

All that would require really is for people within the community who have the know how to create and offer install scripts to the author(s) of these ports.

I'm sure it's time consuming, just like the porting itself, though I do feel ya, I am rather fond of installers also, though I also like to know how to install things by hand should something go wrong.

As for installer for xu4, all the data files are free, so it should be even better than "please insert your original CD now".

On the other hand, there are few shooters on grunch which try to download data files, but fail... But as long as file url's stay the same, I guess it should be ok.

In any case, I'll first try to get the new version working somehow. Actually it does work, but has some graphical glitches, crashes in dungeons and hits on exit...

[ Edited by Jupp3 25.05.2014 - 16:09 ]

Creating an installer is not that hard. A simple DOS script and a matching icon can handle this.

Usually it is just a drawer copy from CD to game dir. All it needs is just some If and Copy magic.

Geit