After over a decade you can buy the Ultima 7 games again.

As of today Good old Games offers "Ultima 7: The Complete Edition" for $5.99. If you don't already own it - go grab these gems now.
Fortunately the complete edition means that it's both games, The Black Gate and Serpent Isle, with their addons, The Forge of Virtue and The Silver Seed.

News about Exult are rather slow these days but Marzo has accepted the quest to take on the disappearing objects.

What we've been up to since the rc1 release and why there is no final version yet.

Let's start off with the the bad news:
We have a bug that causes random objects in the games to disappear forever. When this happens Exult tends to crash badly. Unfortunately this bug is unpredictable and we have no sure way of reproducing and thus fixing it. We have some ideas of what is happening but no fix yet. This is a real show stopper and unless we fix it we can't release another release candidate or a final version. If you encounter this bug (disappearing objects, random crashes, especially in combat) best you can do is revert to an earlier savegame.

The good news is that we welcome a new member to our team, Malignant Manor, a long time user of Exult.
He took on many bugs and improved many other things:

• command line option for portable use of Exult and Exult Studio for Windows
• fixed many NPC schedules (baking, serving food, eating food, ...)
• fixed talking to NPCs through locked doors (important for the Fawn trial)
• added a new combat option to make handling of charmed party members more realistic (and thus harder) and also fixed normal charmed behavior in some places
• added many options to the game menu that you could only change through editing the cfg file
• fixed some Silver Seed stairs teleporters
• possible to have separate settings for fullscreen and windowed mode
• fixed various things for new games created with Exult Studio
• and many other things...

We also put all our various audio files (digital music pack and the SFX packs) into an all-in-one package. You can download a zip file for manual installation or an installer for either Windows or Mac OS X. You don't need to download this if you already downloaded the audio packs individually before. And if you still prefer to download the smaller, individual packs, these are also still available.
Head to our download page to grab it.

Exult 1.4.9rc1 has been released!
It took us over six years, but with DNF seemingly getting ready to be released after all, we had to do something. To prepare for a full release, we have created a first Release Candidate, available on our download page. Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

If you have followed the news this list is likely already familiar to you, but we did a lot with Exult in the years since 1.2:

• Compatible with the stricter permissions of Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Rewrite of the Graphics system to allow switching to full screen on modern systems
• Better integration into Mac OS X with default location for the supported games
• Smooth scrolling (disabled by default, though)
• Aspect correction is now supported
• More data from the original has been decoded and thus improved gameplay and combat
• In-game Notebook with support for automatic notes (notes created by usecode)
• Integrated Pentagram's audio system which means support for real Roland MT-32 device, Roland MT-32 emulation and FluidSynth
• Removed dependency of the audio system on SDL_Mixer
• New shapes for the paperdolls
• Tons of bugfixes

There have been many changes to Exult Studio and our support for mods as well:

• Multi-map support for new games
• Moved hard-coded information to datafiles
• Increased limits on resource sizes (shapes, frames, etc)
• Greatly improved compiler tools to ease new game development
• Tons of work on our map editor Exult Studio and the ability to develop new games and mods

Worth mentioning is that our team member Marzo has developed two mods, which can be downloaded separately:

• Keyring for BG which adds a large quest to obtain a SI-style keyring, as well as a lot of other enhancements such as meditating in the shrines and viewing the Codex
• SIfixes for SI which corrects many mistakes in the game, for example you can now cure Cantra when you play with this mod