After leaking a couple days early, the UltimaForever.com website has gone livem offering a little bit of Ultima history and a free download of Ultima 4.

http://www.ultimaforever.com/

http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/ultimaforever-com-launches-for-real-this-time/

The latest screenshot from Beautiful Britannia shows off the work of the team's new texture artist, Viriathus, and teases a beautiful new wall texture. Ultima 9has never looked so good!

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One of the original endgame cutscenes for the "Bob White Plot" version of Ultima 9, possibly for a "bad ending" to the game, has been found. Parts of it were later re-used in the release version of Ultima 9.

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Basjian is described by its creator as "a not-so-MMO game". Written in JavaScript and Node, it sports a distinctly old-school, Ultima-esque look.

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Team Return are looking for someone who can craft some very familiar-looking, Ultima-esque interface elements for use when opening chests and searching bodies in the game.

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Ultima creator and private astronaut Richard Garriott shares his vision for the future and expansion of space travel, and comments on what a life-changing experience it is to see the world from high in the sky.

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Eriadainbegan as a module for BioWare'sNeverwinter Nightsthat was to be based on the original storyline ofUltima 9: Ascension. This original storyline, also known as the Bob White Plot, was a much larger, more detailed plot that remained much more true to the Ultima tradition and the history of the series.

Moa Dragon built a sizeable portion of the necessary map for this project, including much of the overworld and all of the dungeons. He also implemented many of the necessary scripts, although many of these were untested at the time that work stopped on the project. Dialogues were incomplete at that point, and were marked with placeholder conversations for the most part. The released module above should not be considered a demo for these reasons.

Sadly, Moa Dragon stopped working onEriadainsome time ago, and the project languished in the Orphanage for several years. But then a rather incredible thing happened:part of the actual Bob White Plot documentationwas found and released online. This inspired Moa Dragon to begin shopping around the idea of anEriadainreboot here and in other fora, and in March 2011 he rebooted the project...this time using theNeverwinter Nights 2engine and working in (informal) collaboration with the team developingReturn to the Serpent Isle.

You can find the new project websitehere, and the revised and updated project entryhere.

Allow me to introduce iPhone Explorer.

Using iPhone Explorer, we are going to install Ultima 6 on an iPhone 3GS (but this should work for any iPhone version capable of running iDOS well). To do this, however, we need to make sure a particular setting is turned off inside the program.

Note: If, like me, you were lucky enough to snag a copy of the original version of iDOS, and if you installed any Ultima games therein, you probably won't need to perform these steps; I noticed on my iPhone 3GS that the Documents folder (discussed below) for the app was preserved during the upgrade, meaning that everything I installed in the original iDOS was available to me in the upgraded version.

From the Edit menu, select Preferences, and make sure the Allow access to "real-root" if iPhone is jailbroken. box is unchecked.

Once that's done, click on the + sign to expand the Apps listing in the program's left-hand sidebar:

Scroll down the list (it shouldn't be that long if you're an average app user; if you're like me, it will be pretty crazy-long indeed) until you find an entry with the following name: .net.litchie.idos.

This is the iDOS app.

In the right-hand pane of iPhone Explorer, double-click the Documents folder; this folder serves as the C: drive for iDOS.

Now, as you can see, I already have Ultima 6 installed, and a custom batch file readied for it as well. iPhone Explorer supports drag-and-drop, so here's what you need to do to get Ultima 6 installed from this point:

1. Install Ultima 6 to your computer's hard drive. Anywhere will do.
2. Open up a window and navigate through your hard drive until you are looking at the Ultima 6 folder.
3. Drag the Ultima 6 folder into the right-hand pane of iPhone Explorer (which should still be displaying the Documents folder of the iDOS app)
4. Be patient; iPhone Explorer's copying isn't particularly quick, and the progress window sometimes stays hidden. Don't attempt to re-copy the app; find the progress window and bring it to the foreground. It'll go away shortly.

At this point, you should be able to fire up the iDOS app on your iPhone, select the C: icon at the bottom of its "game shelf" interface, bring up the keyboard, navigate to Ultima 6′s directory, and launch the game:

And yes, this method should work for any of the other DOS-based Ultima titles…although I wouldn't expect Ultima 7 (either part) or Ultima 8 to perform all that well.

Oh, yeah: If you want to set up a batch file but don't remember how, go here.

It's that time of year again, and has been for a few weeks now. The Church names this season Advent, and intends it as a season of comtemplative preparation for the coming of Christ, the newborn King. We've taken that idea and run it in a bit of a different direction, of course; such is human concupiscence.

Read the rest at Examiner.com...

Forget arsenic-munching bacteria. There has been a discovery which has the potential to be substantially more significant.

It is easy to view space as an endless expanse of harshness and lifelessness...it's interesting to think that in God's original plan, the truth of the matter may have been much, much different.