Classic Ultima - All hail Lord British!

Some of my earliest memories of Computer RPGs are from the classic Ultima series of games. This series practically defined how CRPGs should be. The fond memories of moving my avatar around the world that Lord British created, while not as graphically impressive as the Baldur's Gate series of games, is really something you won't forget.

Due to improvement in hardware, most, if not all, of the Ultima games won't run on your modern box. It is also rather hard to buy a copy of the games unless you can find the Ultima Collection.

A search on the web, however, will reveal some interesting sites and help files to enable you to run these old games on your PC. There are also numerous projects of people trying to update some of these old games. The link featured here is a FAQ of sort to help you to find and get them up and running. Recently, I've also found some ROMs of the Ultima series on the NES system. Since there's an emulator that will run NES games on the GBA, I'll soon be playing these classics port on my portable console.

To round off, I quote the Nelson's Weblog where I got the link and inspiration of this piece from...

A lot of the first 20 years of movies are lost forever because no one preserved them. I fear the same thing is going to happen with games.

Let's hope these grassroots efforts will help preserve the Ultima games.