[OT] Help with Ultima Ascension (Technical)

[Terraism]

Hey there - I'm going to come begging for help again. Normally technical aspects of a PC are in my court, but I'm at my wit's end with this one. For note, my system is as follows...

• AMD Athlon 1.4 gHz
• Soyo K7 Dragon motherboard
• 256 Megs DDRAM
• Maxtor 40.0 gB hard drive
• Matrox Graphics Millennium G200 AGP
• Windows XP Proffessional

Anyway, regardless of all this great stuff (no Windows jokes, please,) Ultima: Ascension refuses to run - according to the system test, everything's all right, but... when I start it the splash screen comes up, then dissapears, as it should. But then the screen goes black and the computer restarts. That's it. No error message, nothing. I've checked out the patches, and just about anything else I can find. This is the ONLY piece of software that I can't get to run - even things that haven't worked for years are running fine. Now, before you jump to claim it's XP, it doesn't work on the same system with ME or 98 SE installed either - I've tried both. Now - anyone who's even more of a geek than I care to take a shot?

 

[Psionicist]

It can be so many things my head hurts!

Can you play other "heavy" games, as baldur's gate?

Edit: Can you play other online / network games? It migh be an inproperly configured NIC or IRQ conflicts.

Edit2: If it restarts your system It's "serious". Are your computer otherwise very stable? Try Prime95 torture test from www.mersenne.org if you are unsure.
Have you tried different videodrivers?

It restarts your system. Think.

 

[Terraism]

Psionicist -

First off, yes, I can play other 'serious' games, like BG. I did mention that this is the ONLY game I have problems with.

Secondly - I've made the mistake too, but Ascension is NOT a multiplayer game... it's Ultima IX, the *real* stuff!

Anyway, I realize it's serious - but I've NEVER had a chance to play the game... I got it almost two years ago, played for like three weeks, and then got too busy to play anything for a couple of months. At the end of that time I had the cash to upgrade my system - since then, it hasn't ran. Sorry if this post sounds a bit abrasive (looks like it to me...) but I'm getting REALLY frustrated with this game. The small amount of time I played it it was great, and I'd love to get into it again... Thanks for the attempt, anyway.

 

[CWD]

Have you tried downgrading the game's options to the absolute minimum and seeing if it runs?

It really sounds like a video card incompatability. If you're a big enough geek, you should have an old spare graphics card lying around. Try and switch it out!

BTW, as an old-school Ultima fan, I thought the game was quite disappointing. The project was neglected in favor of Ultima Online, and it shows. I will admit the graphics rock - even better than many of the games out now.

 

[Valavien]

The best thing you can try is to get any form of 3dfx video card. Game performance is greatly depended on having a 3dfx not an nVidia or Matrox card. At least 8mb of memory on that card as well. They shouldn't be too much these days if you can find one. The cpu speed doesn't really mean that much compared to having really fast hard drives and a ton of ram! 256mb will be ok but 320 or above would be much better. This game uses the hddrive alot so faster the better. Your 40gb unit is fine, just find that video card and you will be happy. Make sure you also have a decent sound system because the game has beautiful music and sound effects. I am about 3/4 of the way through it and haven't played it for about 5 months because of hardware failure. With my gear finally back, this weekend I am finishing the install and then the first game that goes on will be Ultima 9...wish me luck!

 

[Welverin]

no I'm not a tech head but...

Valavien is spot on with the Voodoo comment, just make sure it's at least a Voodoo3 though. If you can find a PCI Voodoo3 or Voodoo5 go for that so you don't have to remove your newer card. Plus it's not a bad idea to have it around if you play your old games occasionally and some of them are Glide based like U9 and WC Prophecy.

I was able to get the game to run on an AMD K6 running at 200 or 233 Mhz (I forget which it was set at) with 64 mb of ram and a Voodoo3, albiet poorly (I was ok as long as I didn't run).

Check out Fans for Ultima for an unofficial performance patch, plus a few other patches to make it more Ultima like.

Like Valavien I started playing it but stopped for whatever reason and have yet to get back to it. Hopefully it will run significantly better once I get more ram.

 

[Valavien]

hmm, I didn't know about that patch, thanks Welverin!

 

[Welverin]

hmm, I didn't know about that patch, thanks Welverin!

Yep, just remember it's unofficial. I don't remember if I've palyed the game since getting it though, I think I have but...

 

[Welverin]

Terraism have you been able to get it working yet?

On a vaguely related note Gamespot has an article on the Geforce4.

 

[Zappo]

That game likes 3dfx cards a lot. Really, a lot. Even if you get it to work, don't expect it to run very smoothly on your computer, despite the fact that it's twice as powerful as what was top-class when the game was published.

I squeezed a decent framerate on my voodoo3 by massive manual editing of the configuration file, after having read all the readmes, faqs and whatnot.