WRT the press release in this story:
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/122330/free-ultima-iv-released

and the following quote specifically: Can anyone elaborate on the "remastered" comment?

For the moment I'm assuming that the author doesn't know what they're talking about, and that these are the original games being run via DOSBox, just like the majority of the older GOG titles; but if that's somehow not the case, I'd love to know about it.

Definitely the original games as far as I can say!
Think remastered means preconfigured for DosBox, install and play...

And they also say "Ultima", not just the Underworlds... hmm...

No, seriously though. I doubt they know what GOG has in store. I've never even heard of this site.

I think this is correct. They are trying to inform customers that they won't have to do lots of fiddling to get it to work, because GOG already configured the games for DOSBox.

Bluesnews is one of the oldest gaming news sites on the Web. Came out some time before the original Quake as a rumours site, I believe.

Yeah, it's old and a great site but Blue just posts tips and press he is sent, he is not a journalist. Also the community there is intensely negative about new games almost to the level of RPGCodex, which is a shame.

They are certainly old and reasonably respected but the article just seems poorly wrote. I don't believe they were implying that the whole Ultima series was coming to gog or that the game itself had anything changed other than making it run on modern OS, they just worded things terribly and ended up with an incorrect message.

Okay! Okay!

We all agree his Hudson the Wonder Dog posts are terrific though.

Haven't been there for a while.... Hudson is still alive, right?

Hudson's still around AFAIK (and still getting stinky with the skunks :)

The Wonder Dog has also had a side-kick the past few years.

Yeah, I was thinking recently about how long I've been going there...almost every day since about '96-97! Until Facebook, Bluesnews was always my browser's homepage. Only times I don't go there daily is when I don't have a computer (vacation, etc.) with internet access. I enjoy Blues because he focuses specifically on PC gaming but he does post stuff on console gaming, mobile gaming and other tech stuff. I use that and 1up for all my gaming news (1up for console stuff).

Yes, you're right, I sometimes read the comments and they're almost always so negative to the point where I'm like "why are you guys even gaming when you don't seem to like anything that comes out" there is so much negativity there that its pretty sad actually.

Agreed, however using the term "Remastered" deems its use as a loose term. I suspect rather than the notion of it being rewritten in any fashionable way, that it has been given more graphical options that at least compared to the original only supported lower resolution monitors, hence the use of a modified version of DOSbox to obtain the additional options for monitors of modern systems of today.

To clarify, GOG does not use a modified version of DOSBox; the "graphic mode setup" edits the configuration file for you but DOSBox itself is unaltered.