The gog.com edition is modified from the last official release from Origin Systems and uses a widely accepted but "unofficial" 1.19 patch to address some last minute bugs and Direct3D performance issues.
Though the game's D3D support targets DirectX 7, the gog.com edition uses the game's Glide rendering mode and wraps that using nGlide to target DirectX 9. This results in more stable gameplay (the game was originally written for Glide) but performance takes a hit. The game does run in D3D mode under Wine with some configuration tweaks.
Application Details:
| Version: | GOG |
| License: | Retail |
| URL: | |
| Votes: | 0 |
| Latest Rating: | Gold |
| Latest Wine Version Tested: | 9.1 |
Maintainers: About Maintainership
What works
The installer, the game itself (with workable exceptions).
What does not
Movie playback (simply move or delete the Movies folder and Ultima IX will skip them). There is also an important mouse cursor missing when interacting with 2D elements.
Workarounds
What was not tested
The entire game was not tested. I played the first few hours. The game doesn't vary much in terms of the technical engine so I don't imagine any additional problems showing up in later stages of the game.
Hardware tested
Graphics:
Additional Comments
| Operating system | Test date | Wine version | Installs? | Runs? | Used Workaround? | Rating | Submitter | ||
| Show | Fedora 39 x86_64 | Feb 10 2024 | 9.1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Gold | Christopher Thielen | |
| Show | Fedora 32 x86_64 | Jul 19 2020 | 5.12 | N/A | Yes | No | Platinum | Christopher Thielen | |
| Show | Fedora 27 x86_64 | Nov 26 2018 | 3.18 | N/A | Yes | Yes | Silver | Christopher Thielen | |
| Show | Fedora 23 x86_64 | Feb 07 2016 | 1.9.3 | Yes | Yes | No | Gold | Christopher Thielen | |
| Show | Fedora 22 x86_64 | Oct 07 2015 | 1.7.52 | Yes | Yes | No | Bronze | Christopher Thielen |
Ultima IX gog.com edition runs under Wine but with some caveats:
1) The game opens with a lengthy movie. This movie is just a MPEG-1 .avi file renamed to ".dat" in the movies directory. Wine will complain it cannot decode MPEG-1 and will instead show a black screen with no audio for the duration of the movie. This may appear to be the game not running. Simply move your movies directory (e.g. rename it to "moves.backup") and Ultima IX will skip movie playback. It should be noted there are a small number of moments in the game explained by videos so you may be a little lost when one of these movies skips. (It may also be possible to copy a native version of the quartz.dll into Ultima IX's directory in order to avoid this but that has not been tested.)
2) The gog.com edition ships with the Glide renderer configured as well as the third-party nGlide wrapper (not part of the original distribution) to translate Glide calls to D3D 9. I believe this was done because the Glide renderer is/was less buggy. The D3D renderer in GOG's version (1.19) seems pretty good however, and is much, much faster than the nGlide-wrapped version. If you wish to use the D3D renderer, edit the Options.ini file in Ultima IX's directory and set the "Game Rasterizer" line to 2 instead of 3. If after doing so Ultima IX displays all black text and other 2D elements, edit Options.ini again and change the line "MultiPassChromaKey" to be equal to 0 instead of the default 2.
