Reviews
Game
Ultima VII was a huge game for its day (two parts, and both parts had an expansion pack). It featured very life-like graphics for an MCGA display and had wonderful music. The story is also very gripping and has several twists and turns. You will travel all over the land trying to investigate a series of ritualistic murders as well as solving a multitude of side quests. To top it all off, Ultima VII has an amazingly rich world in which you can spend much of your time simply living off the land.
The game is a fantasy RPG where you play the role of the Avatar, an embodiment of virtue who was whisked away from Earth to try and save the land of Britannia. The game functions much like the typical RPG with stats, spells, weapons and armor, but it also has an enormous amount of dialogue even beyond that of many interactive fiction games. Also, unlike most RPGs Ultima VII was very open in that you could perform most of the tasks of the game in any order instead of having to follow along a predictable path.
Ultima VII also featured very mature themes for a videogame in 1992. Some of these themes include, graphic violence and blood, ritualistic dismemberment, cults and false religions, assassination and espionage, prostitution and nudity, the murder of innocent men/women/and children, theft/burglary/and pirating, alcoholism, torture, gambling syndication, demon possession, and some good old fashioned swearing. Having one of these issues in a game back in 1992 was pretty bad, but having all of them was unheard of! Even with such a graphic display of mature themes the game doesn't glorify them, and it always shows the consequences of these crimes.
Music
The music of Ultima VII could be sent to several sound devices, but the Roland MT-32 had the highest quality, which is what is recorded here. The game's soundtrack contains a large amount of tracks (56) for a PC game of it's time and made great use of the technology. Some of the tunes are very familiar to Ultima veterans ("Stones", for example), but most of them are new and exciting.
The soundtrack is very fitting to the nature of a fantasy RPG including instruments of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian eras like trumpets, harpsichords, and pan pipes. There are even some classical pieces thrown in to give the game character like "Rule, Britannia!" and "Flight of the Bumblebee".
At the end of the game's credits they include the line "Soundtrack available from Origin, Inc." which they included as a joke, because they didn't make a soundtrack and really didn't expect anyone to want one. However, once the game was released they received an enormous amount of calls from people requesting a soundtrack. They were impressed by the demand, but had no product to sell, so the requests went unfulfilled. Upon the creation of Part 2 of Ultima VII, the credits read "Soundtrack NOT available, so don't ask!".
Luckily, a soundtrack was eventually released that had several of the more impressive sounding songs on it.
Ripping
Ultima VII's music files are located in the Static folder. They are compressed in several files, the bulk of the Roland music being in the MT32MUS.DAT. Once extracted they are found to be in type 1 MIDI format, however they are missing the proper SysEx data. The ending music is in XMI format and also located in the Static folder under the name Endscore.XMI.
The rip contains two sets of rips. One is the original rip from the game (missing the SysEx data and a couple of files), the other is a rip by Simon Quinn who has converted the instrumentless MIDI files into useable files and extracted the SysEx data and converted the XMI into MIDI files as well (although the ending music doesn't work, and the credits and quotes are missing). A complete working rip will be available as soon as we can figure out exactly how to do it, but for now, the complete Vorbis soundtrack is available.
Because the ripped soundtrack doesn't give titles to the music, the titles seen below come from various sources. Tracks with an asterisk (*) come from official Origin soundtracks. Tracks with a dagger (†) come from the game's credits. Tracks with a section mark (§) come from meta data found in the MIDI files. Tracks with a double dagger (‡) are old classical songs in the public domain. Tracks with a double asterisk (**) get their titles from a previous game. The composers attributed to the music are also derived from the game's credits, past game's credits, and soundtrack credits.
The track order is setup in a manner to simulate an actual game play through and when each song was often heard in the game. The game is very open, so an exact order isn't possible, but this should be somewhat familiar to Ultima VII veterans.
A wide gap in volume existed in the game music. Certain songs like the fanfares and combat music were very loud, and others like the shrines and houses were very quiet. The purpose of this was to establish mood by making more important music louder. However, this complicates the recording process so a small amount of volume correction was made to equalize the volume across all the songs.
Three of the songs are not played anywhere in the game. These include the Shrine of Humility, Triumph I and Triumph II.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VII
| 
