I have always been interested in playing Ultima Online on the kind of hardware I played during its glory days of 1997-2000. I do not have the exact hardware I had then (and it ran rather slow on the P200 MMX), but I do have a Pentium III 600MHz running on a P3B-F and with a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, so I think that hardware is reasonably period correct. My system of course is a Windows 98SE, fresh install with no patching except as required for drivers and programs.

I have discs of the Charter Edition release and the The Second Age. The Second Age disc has a demo program on it that can give you a taste of what UO was like back in 1998. The demo program, which must be installed after the full game has been installed, contains a stripped down UO Client and Server limited to a single quest and a single town. On my system I had to set the acceleration to basic to avoid graphical corruption in fullscreen mode. The demo ran fine otherwise.

What about going further? There is a well-known T2A emulated shard, http://www.uosecondage.com/, but it requires clients released from 2005-2007. I would suggest that performance is likely to be lacking on my vintage machine, powerful for 1999 but a bit long in the tooth for 2005. Plus, I would prefer to use the older clients that come on the discs. The only thing I have found that allows that is a set of resources that unlike the Demo program identified above, but the software requires Microsoft .Net 4.0 Client Profile and Windows XP or newer. http://uodemo.uo98.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

I would be interested to know if anyone had any other ideas on how to use a vintage UO client on a vintage Win 9x computer.