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Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar cover
Developers
Origin Systems
DOS James Van Artsdalen
Publishers
Electronic Arts
Release dates
DOS September 16, 1985
Windows (DOSBox) September 1, 2011[1]
macOS (OS X) (DOSBox) October 18, 2012[2]
Taxonomy
Monetization Freeware
Modes Singleplayer
Genres RPG
Themes Fantasy
Series Ultima
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on HowLongToBeat
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on IGDB
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar guide on StrategyWiki
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on MobyGames
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on Wikipedia
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress 1982
Ultima III: Exodus 1983
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar 1985
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness 1987
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny 1988
Ultima VI: The False Prophet 1990
Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire 1990
Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams 1991
Ultima VII: The Black Gate 1992
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss 1992
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds 1993
Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle 1993
Ultima VIII: Pagan 1994
Ultima Online 1997
Akalabeth: World of Doom 1998
Ultima IX: Ascension 1999

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is a singleplayer RPG game in the Ultima series.

While the original Apple II version had music through sound card support and most other versions played music using their native sound hardware, the unpatched DOS version does not have any music.

The unpatched game has issues on faster systems; use the upgrade patch to fix this.

General information

Can be run under ScummVM.[3]
Ultima Codex - A huge wiki for the series
GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
GOG.com Support Page

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM details are not known
DOS
GOG.com
DRM-free
Free download. Pre-packaged with DOSBox.[4]
Windows
macOS (OS X)
Origin
Origin
Windows

Essential improvements

Patches

Ultima IV Upgrade Patch fixes the game's speed issues and adds the missing music to the game. Requires DOS or DOSBox to play however the patcher itself is a Windows console app. For Mac or Linux, use the DOS avpatch.exe.

Source ports

xu4 is a reverse engineered "source port" of the game for modern systems.

Game data

Save game data location

System Location
DOS <path-to-game>\*.SAV
Windows <path-to-game> (mounted in DOSBox)[Note 1]
macOS (OS X) <path-to-game> (mounted in DOSBox)[Note 1]
PARTY.SAV contains the current party.
MONSTERS.SAV contains the monsters table (data about NPCs and objects in the game world).[5]
OUTMONST.SAV contains a backup of the monsters table.
DNGMAP.SAV contains dungeon map data.[5]
xu4 stores config and save data in %APPDATA%\xu4 on Windows and $HOME/.config/xu4/xu4rc on Linux.

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Origin
ScummVM 2.1+ supports cloud saves on third-party cloud storage services. See the ScummVM documentation for details.

Video

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
Default key bindings can be found in the included readme, on page 24
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
No mouse support.
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
For DOSBox use the DOSBox Mapper (see the glossary page for other workarounds).
Controller types

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Volume ON/OFF with V.
Surround sound
Subtitles
All speech is text-based.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
For DOSBox change the priority background value in the DOSBox configuration file.
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
DOS video modes CGA, CGA Composite, PCjr, Tandy, EGA, VGA Use the Upgrade Patch for native VGA support.

System requirements

DOS
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 2.0
Processor (CPU) 8088 / 8086
System memory (RAM) 256 KB
Hard disk drive (HDD)
Video card (GPU) CGA
Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) XP, Vista
Processor (CPU) 1.8 GHz
System memory (RAM) 512 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 27 MB
Video card (GPU) DirectX 7 compatible
macOS (OS X)
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 10.6.8
Processor (CPU) Intel Core Duo 2 GHz+
System memory (RAM) 1 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 2 GB
Video card (GPU) 64 MB of VRAM


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 File/folder structure within the installation folder reflects the path(s) listed for DOS game data. For the GOG.com release, file changes in DOSBox are redirected to <path-to-game>/cloud_saves/ even if GOG Galaxy is not used (this folder contains all redirected files, so some files in the cloud_saves folder might be temporary files or other files that do not contain saves or settings).

References