Everything I've read indicates that Exult is a better way to play these games. At least Ultima VII anyway.

I don't remember it being so jerky on the SNES...

Now that I have purchased this through GOG... and have DOSBOX, how do I go about playing it on Exult.

I've been to Exult's website and see the DOWNLOAD option, but no info on what to do with a current DOSBOX install. Other than the more basic stuff, I'm "computer clueless", and I don't want to just download Exult and create a problem with the game and the DOSBOX, rendering everything unplayable and blowing up my Falcon to boot. I guess they assume most folks know what they're doing re computers...they forgot about me.

Just so you know, I'm no computer genius ... if you think you can help, please don't assume I know what you're talking about if you refer to changing /editing files and other very confusing things.

If it's fairly simple to switch to Exult, with your help I may be able to get it right. So, any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

Has Exult fixed the "disappearing" problem?

Those of you who have used both, and can give a first hand comparison, does Exult improve the gameplay that much.?

Thanks

Normally your GOG installation consists of 2 parts:
1. DOSBOX
2. the real game files (e.g. Ultima VII)

If you take alook at the shotzcut to th game, you'll see that you don't really start the original game, but that you start dosbox with a configfile that contains all information how to set dosbox up and run the game in it automatically.

So normally you can take all the game files frim U7 and use them with Exult.
Due to the fact that I don't use Exult, this is just a clue!!!

But beware of the "disappearing item bug" which is still present in the newest Exelt version!!!

Exult adds some nice features...I really liked the music using Exult, because I set it up to emulate the old Roland MIDI sound, which is so much better than the Soundblaster I had back in those days. Other helpful things were added, like the keyring from Serpent Isle became available in Ultima 7. Overall it would be very good, if it didn't introduce some bugs. I was willing to take my chances with the disappearing item bug, but then I got to Britannia. People in the Inn were sitting in mid air, for example.

It's a cool alternative, worth a try, but I reinstalled recently and I'm just playing it with Dosbox for the original experience I remember so well.

I don't remember that issue with the 1.2 release I played a few years ago (didn't have the disappearing bug either IIRC).

Hi... why did you go back to the DOS install. Was Exult that bad....

No, as I mentioned, it's overall really good. There's just a few minor issues and one rare, randomly occuring, game breaking bug (the disappearing item bug). The game is 100% playable for most people.

I didn't exactly go back to DOSBox. I wiped my system, and when I reinstalled it was with the GOG version, rather than the Exult setup I used with my Ultima Collection CD. So the answer is partially laziness, partially because DOSBox works fine (and doesn't add any new bugs).

Strange bugs I've never seen, and I've the newest snapshot installed. The only bug they've really got is the random disappearing items. Exult's home page details it. Otherwise it works just fine for me.

And I haven't seen it stated here, so here goes. Exult is a game conversion, taking the resources from the installed games and placing them into a new, modern PC friendly platform (no more Voodoo). And there are some mods and patches for both VII and VII part 2.

To the OP:
If it's looking jerky, that's because of the fact that the exult programmers had a hard time figuring out how the original devs did the character movements. The avatar only seemed to use 2 different sprites for movement, while all the other characters had 3. They had to basically settle for something in between. Also, the game engine moves the background one tile at a time, as opposed to a pixel at a time. This, added with the much larger screen res that exult allows, really can make the screen appear to be "jerky".

However, on the newest version, there is an option to activate "smooth scrolling". This allows the game to move the background a pixel at a time, rather than a tile at a time, which makes things appear to move much smoother. It does kind of make the avatar appear as though he's "floating" on the ground, however you get used to it pretty quickly. It sure beats the somewhat headache-inducing jerkiness that you'll get by playing the game at a large resolution with the "normal" rendering.

Well I played U7 at its release but alas never finished it because I was still fascinated by Ultima Underworld and events of life made me sold my PC and not buy another before many years.

U7 was sill a great gameplay experience and memory even if I was far to have finished it.

Now each time I try play it the jerkiness and awful fight system made me give up. It has really awful controls with either a too high speed either sticky controls.

I was tempting by current U7 EA sale at Gog but lack of support for Exult and French version make me give up. Gog installer will install stuff I don't care ie U7 English Dosbox version, and I'll have anyway to install all by myself, all the hassle to add the French and Exult.

From Exult site:
"Disappearing objects fixed but still no new version.

Dr. Code has fixed the disappearing objects and the resulting crashes quite some time ago (August 2012) and at the time it seemed we could fast forward to a new release. Unfortunately some other crashes were uncovered and Marzo went on a bug squishing rampage last year. After that very productive outburst our development almost completely stopped apart from some bug fixes.

On the plus side this means that the current snapshots are much more stable than the last rc1 release, not to mention the ancient 1.2 version that should never be used again. For that reason we no longer link to our old releases on our download page.
However there is still no new release and thus the ancient Exult 1.2 version is unfortunately still widely regarded as the stable version, especially in Linux repositories."

I never played Ultima 7 before but thought about trying it for years. Some days ago the free giveaway of Fallout brought me to GOG. The first game I installed was U7. I tried to play it in Dosbox but had a lot of trouble (really bad lagging) so I looked for an alternative and found Exult. I installed and tried it and I’m really happy. The game seems to run a lot smoother than in Dosbox. If somebody is interested in trying it: I´m using the Exult 1.5.x Snapshot that was just released yesterday (2013-12-18).

Hay :-)

I really want to moev to exult coz u7 is so jerky etc but i cant get it to work with the gog u7 :-(

Ive looked on thr exult site etc and it says stuff about usin the macs terminall.app and typong in a load of lines, i do that via copy paste but it says that the files cant be found :-s

if you could help out it would be great! :-D

Ok, the prob was that gog changed one of the folder names which caused exult not to work.
Benn over there n they have now fixed it so exult now works with the latest gog u7 :-D

Thank you Dominus! :-D

dose anyome actually adress the first question on this pace? im am just like the guy that started this i dont really know how to get exault to work and would really like a simple walkthrough pleas. thank you

Download the latest Exult snapshot.

For Windows, run the installer. One of the steps is to Select Game Folders. Click Browse and go to the folder where the files are.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate is in C:\GOG Games\Ultima VII - Complete\ULTIMA7
Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle is in C:\GOG Games\Ultima VII - Complete\SERPENT

Once you've set both folders run Exult from the Start screen/Start menu and you'll see the two games to choose from.

If you're on Mac OS X things are a bit different. I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure what steps are involved.