For the Sierra games, you will want to look into the fan-made patches released by NewRisingSun. You can find them all here. Most of these are optional, but the one for Quest for Glory III is essential--I have the Collection Series release of that anthology, and the first time I tried that game, a bug wound up making it unwinnable. If the Collection Series didn't fix it, the earlier Anthology release wouldn't have fixed it either.

In general, a lot of the bugs Sierra games had didn't become known until years after the games were released, by which point it wouldn't have seemed cost-effective for the company to fix them. So you do have to rely on fan-made methods. The most common issue is problems with computers faster than what the games were made for (which is what most of NewRisingSun's patches fix), but another common one (at least on real hardware--Dosbox seems exempt from this) is problems with the audio drivers for some games. I forget what the solution I found for those was, because as I said I only had this problem with real hardware, whereas in Dosbox it seems to not happen.

All the Ultima games are patched to their latest versions (although this really only counts for Ultima 7 and 8 and Serpent Isle since the rest of the games existed in days before patching was known), and can be played just fine in Dosbox. There are still fan-made updates to give them things like enhanced graphics or to correct them running too fast if you're into such things though.

Hope that helped!

I personally own the following:
+King's Quest Collection Series
+Leisure Suit Larry Collection Series (predecessor to the Ultimate Pleasure Pack, not as complete)
+Quest for Glory Collection Series (basically a re-release of the Anthology)
+Space Quest Collection Series
+Ultima Collection

So if you have any more specific questions about those, just ask!

Hi, yes your answer definitely helped so thanks for that 😀

I did notice the NewRisingSun patches on the sierrahelp pages but didn't want to start downloading patches and then apply them if the collections were already patched. Now that you've told me that, I will start downloading them shortly. I'd rather patch everything up before I start playing so I don't run into any issues throughout the game. Plus I know that once games are patched, they tend to bugger up your existing saved games thus having to restart all over again and that's something that would really annoy me if I'm pretty far into whatever game it may be.

Regarding dosbox, I will only be playing these games on real hardware as I'm not really into emulation that much. Plus I'm a sound junkie and prefer to hear the music/sfx on real hardware. The only issue is that most of my pc's except for 1 (486 DX4-100) are too fast but I'm sure I'll be fine using MoSlo or by playing with caches. If those methods don't work then I do also own the Vivendi collections of Larry, Police Quest, Kings Quest and Space Quest so I guess I'll just have to play those which do use DosBox. That's a last resort though.

I'm also really hoping that the Ultima series, mainly 7 and 8, doesn't give me any trouble as I've read that they're quite a headache to get going on some pc's. The last time I played them was on my 486 but I'd love to play these on my Pentium 3 1ghz pc which has a GF4 TI4600 and a SB Awe32.

Well, okay, then there's some additional stuff I should link you to.

First of all, MoSlo sucks--when I used it, I had constant problems where sometimes it wouldn't load the game and I'd have to close the window or even reset the computer. A much better program is Slowdown by Bret Johnson, which not only does the same thing MoSlo does but also offers a wide range of benefits--it even contains a tool to enable or disable the CPU cache without having to go into the BIOS! You can find it on Bret Johnson's home page.

Secondly, one problem you may run into is that... Sierra had some questionable sound drivers, and you might get "Audio Device Could Not Be Initialized" errors, or the sound randomly cutting out, or crap like that. There are, however, fixes for this. One possible fix is to replace the driver with an alternate one from this page, however I personally had better results using the program GoSierra, which you can download here. I recommend trying GoSierra first, THEN trying the replacement drivers.

Even then though, I sometimes had games that would not detect my sound card for Sound Effects (they seem to always detect it just fine for music). When this happened, I would lie and tell it my sound card is a Thunderboard. This however stopped working when I started using a ps/2 mouse, but since you're on an actual 486 you're likely going to use a serial mouse, so you shouldn't have any problems. For the Ultima games, I sometimes had an issue where they refused to see my Sound Blaster card unless I told their setup program that it was an Adlib. But this is just my experience, you may not necessarily experience the same thing.

Ultimas 7 and 8 should play fine on a 486, just remember that these games don't play nice with memory managers like emm386, so you might either have to make a boot disk, or else configure your computer to have a boot menu where you select what setup you want at startup (this is what I did). For the older Ultimas you will almost certainly have to use Slowdown, but that's not too bad.

One more thing: Ultimas 1-5 were originally PC Booter games, where you stuck your disk in then turned the computer on and it booted right to the game (just like a console game). The only way to exit the games is to reset the computer (unless you're in windows, where you can alt-tab out of them). However, some fan-made upgrade patches will add "exit game" functions in addition to stuff like better graphics or having music. You can find just about any Ultima-related thing you would ever need at Ultima: the Reconstruction if you're interested.

Only U7 can be problatic as it doesn't like emm386 and needs a lot of free lower nemory...
U8 runs fine with emm386