Tonight I read a post on Howtogeek.com about the Apple IIe. The Apple IIe was our family’s second computer my dad purchased back in 1984 or 1985. I remember the night my brothers and I drove out to the Apple dealer on the far side of Pittsburgh, PA. If I remember correctly, it was past Green Tree Hill. The post on Howtogeek.com started reminding me of all the great times I had with that Apple IIe. Here are the specs:
- CPU: 65C02 @ 1.02MHz
- 128k RAM
- Mouse single button
- Duodisk 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive
- Apple Color Dot Matrix printer (unknown model)
- 1200 bps modem (unknown model purchased about 2 years later)
- Green mono-color monitor with tilt action
So I went to Google and searched for Ultima V Warriors of Destiny, and found some pictures of the game. And I thought to myself, “Oh, so that’s what it would have looked like in color.” One of my children came over and saw the screen and asked what I was looking at. So I explained to him about the game I used to play back in 1988 and I wished I could play it again. We did find a video of Ultima III Exodus and while the video was playing he said it looked cool and he wanted to try it too. So I sent him off to bed and I started reading on how I was going to play this game again.
I knew that VMware Player was going to be the tool of choice. I just needed a few things like MSDOS 6.22 in a preferred ISO format, a way for VMware Player to see the files, oh and the game itself. Well finding the game, manuals, maps, and scanned copies of the front and back of the box, and MSDOS 6.22 was easy. So I created a VM with 1GB HDD, 16MB RAM and a single processor (all over kill but who cares, it is a VM.) I set the MSDOS 6.22 ISO as the CD-ROM and booted from it. I was able to fdisk and create a C: drive and rebooted. I formatted the C: with the /s parameter copied over all the files from the CD-ROM, and rebooted into the VM BIOS. I changed the boot order to so the HDD would boot first instead of the CD-ROM. So now I have a VM of MSDOS 6.22.
But I could not figure out how to get the seperate files from the game into the VM. Remember this is MSDOS6.22 without any network support, just a base OS. A little more research brought me to a blog on WordPress which explained to me how to create a .IMG file. The part of that post which helped was was Creating the image:. Now I have a .IMG file of Ultima V Warriors of Destiny. That IMG file can be mounted as a floppy drive in VMware Player. From within the VM, just change to drive A: and run ultima.
Here are a few screen shots of the VM with the game when it first starts.
ratedmaxpower 