I am enjoying this game but if I play for more than an hour or so it freezes up. controls locked out everything. has happened everytime I play for more than an hour. I'd like to immerse myself in this game withoput having to cntrl-F9 to clear. I have installed the ultima patcher 1.66 fixes for earthquake and fishing patch. still freezes after an hour, same exact thing! but I think it is the core game. I am playing the GOG version, not Exult. have played it using ultima patcher and without.

Dell OptiPlex 780
Windows 7 Pro 32 bit

4 GB ram
Geforce 210 342.01(latest for THAT card)
Sb Omni Surround(in headphone 2.1 mode) SBOM_MAC_L13_1_04_19

Unless it's recently changed, the GOG version of Ultima VII is still using DosBox right? In which case, you might want to try Exult instead to run the game. Not sure why DosBox would end up freezing on you.

yes Dosbox 0.74 latest version(far as I know)
only thing I can think of is maybe I had too many companions and it overloaded the speed. I am going to try today without the Pix/Ultima Dragons fix 1.66 or downlaod an older pix fix. and if that doesn't work I may try exult.

I finally found out what is going on. The slowdown feature was overloading my processor(Dell Optiplex 780 ) but I left the speed where it was and changed the DOSBOX graphics mode to D3D and utilized my video card's power instead of the CPU also set it to run at "prefer maximum power" for the game profile. Even with modern computers this game can overload when slowdowns are put in place.(and you need them running at maximum speed ruins the game and causes odd things to happen concerning the day/night cycles). If you have a powerful CPU no problem running slowdowns with the default but I put D3D and use my nVidia card seems to run fine now, even with 7 party members and I played for two hours starit tonught to be sure.