did you increase the amount of cpu cycles before you start ultima 8 ?

(if not do so ) Ultima 8 is quite tricky when it comes to speed.

Yes, I always do that. My CPU is at 100% and I increased Frame Skip by 4. The thing is, that the game worked with this configuration before. Everything was fine. Then the game didn't start a few hours later. And it still doesn't. When I start the game there comes a little text about Origin, then the screen turns black and stays like that. Even if I wait some minutes.

Ultima 8 has some problems in dosbox when saving/loading games. I guess your problem is because of a corrupt savegame. You may try to delete the current savegame and go back to another one from an earlier position. I dont know why these problems occur (damn pharlap games)...

I tried your hint and deleted the savegames. Unfortunately it didn't work. Still the same problem. I don't get it. I just wonder, because it did work before. One thing might have something to do with the problem: When I abort DosBox, because the game won't start, then Ultima creates a file named "NONFIXED.$$$" in the "GAMEDAT"-Folder. I deleted this file, tried to start Ultima, then again closed DosBox, because nothing happened, and the file was there again.

Seems I'm lost, uh? Hopefully the next DosBox version gets Ultima run perfectly.

try removing all files from that gamedat folder.

that is an extracted savegame i believe.

backup first to be sure though.

As QBIX said:
Both Ultima 7 and Ultima 8 have the recent state of the game in GAMEDAT directory (it is basically unpacked savegame). When anything gets corrupted there, the game will not start at all. Just delete the content of the directory, start the game and you can load some other save.

Mirek

Okay, I'll try that out. But I found something out: Yesterday Ultima suddenly worked again, but then it crashed in the game. After the crash I couldn't start it again. Well, I try this GAMEDAT-stuff, if it works then it would solve my problem. Maybe in the next version of DosBox it runs without crashes.

//Edit: I solved the problem for myself. I now use VMD Sound and a patch that make Ultima run with Windows. For interested ones here is the link, how to do it: http://members.iinet.net.au/~rsd/