Ultima Online

[Greybeard]

I was in Ultima Online Trammel Shard from 1993 to 2000, where there was a large group of role-players, with strict rules about combat. There is an article I wrote together with another player published in Flagship a few years ago. That was a great sunset of gaming for me, but since I changed to a Mac it has got both expensive to play in UO and technically difficult to create a disk partition, buy and install the MS software, plus the anti-virus subscription. The UO player base has also shrunk drastically.

This is still a role-playing game that I have a high regard for, and considerable nostalgia. You can read this article in the Flagship collection.

First published in the gaming magazine Flagship Issue 116 November/
December 2005 pp. 40-41. This article was put on the old f4g
Councillor's Guild Forum with the agreement of the editor.

[Ramblurr]

UO still has an active and vibrant community. There are many free shards from versions of the game.

Pre-Trammel: http://tessascove.com/
Stygian Abyss expansion: http://www.pandorauo.com/
UO: T2A era (the best IMHO): http://www.uosecondage.com/

An AV is unencessary if all you are going to do in windows is play UO. Not to mention that Microsoft's free Security Essentials is regarded as one of the best AVs out right now.

[Greybeard]

Its not the AV program, but the technical side of installing windows on a mac - I am a techo-dinosaur...

I have looked at a number of free shards, but the UO trammel group have many good friends on it, so I'll keep looking. Thanks for the tips though.

[Greybeard]

I've been solo gaming for most of my life, so your recommendation of t2a uosecondage is worth trying. I've no problem with being pk-ed I would only have a poor character.

So how many gigabytes should I allocate to the microsoft part of the partition? I also see that Vista is being replaced by 7. Or perhaps it doesn't matter if I don't need AV for the windoze partition used only for UO?

[Ramblurr]

If you are tight on space are really only going to use the windows partition for UO, then I recommend windows XP. Otherwise go with windows 7.

WinXP: At least 15GB
Win 7: At least 20GB

[Greybeard]

Thanks for your help. I assume that using a partition I won't also need to buy and install parallels software, in addition to buying the windows software. Last time I abandoned the effort and ended up buying a pc and an AV package. The pc crashed irredeemably after just 18 months. In any case I need to think about this further.

[Ramblurr]

That's correct. Though there is a free alternative to Parallels called Virtual Box:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

I've never used it on a Mac, but I have on Linux, and it is pretty awesome. You should give it a try before creating a new partition.