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Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS.

They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.

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Ultima VII doesn't run in Real Mode, it runs in Unreal Mode.

https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode

Still real mode, just a variant.

Thank you for this rabbit hole. I don't remember why, specifically, but I do remember there being a rather annoying sequence I needed to go through in order to "boot" to U7. Just to hopefully be greeted by that weirdo in red.

Yeah that first day trying to play it after Christmas was a lot of fun ”wait, what?”

As a 10 year old at the time whose first exposure to memory management in general was the boot disc for Ultima VII, that game was the epitome of things that led me to love hacking things together.

This and Strike Commander are why I used a really weird serial port mouse driver I found on a BBS but used like 1/10th as much memory as the default mouse driver that came with the mouse.

But it got over the last hurdle of not having enough space.

Formatting config.sys and autoexec.bat was an artform.

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