Ultima VII was a great game (many consider it the greatest in the series), but it had one bad thing:
Voodoo memory manager.
Voodoo was Origin's answer to accessing Intel 80386 protected mode. Voodoo implemented what is known as a "flat real mode" (Meaning a flat memory model in real mode? I don't know the specifics, but I think this was accomplished by repeatedly toggling between x86 real mode and protected mode for accessing the memory, or some other crazy stuff like that). Apparently this was also only used to cache game data! This mode is different from the mode many other "DOS extenders" (like DOS4GW) did.
The good sides? Uhm... Voodoo had a cool skull logo in the game credits, but truth to tell, it sucked what came to the system configuration aspect.
The name became fairly obvious for the game players: Starting the game required appropriate amount of voodoo hoodoo to find out the correct parameter combinations in autoexec.bat and config.sys to a) leave enough conventional memory available and b) get the correct combination of XMS and EMS memory to the machine (hours of tuning of HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE parameters).
Also, Origin reported it had lost the source code to Ultima VII, and that news didn't courage the Ultima fans (though in recent times, there has been evidence the source lives somewhere)... U7's binaries, because of this memory manager, a pain to decompile and analyze. However, a great deal of data formats have been reverse-engineered, including the fairly obscure USECODE file, and Exult is a project to rewrite the actual game engine completely based on reverse engineered formats and detailed gameplay analysis rather than decompilation - they've done a great job so far. There are also hacks like U7DPMI that allow you to run the original executable in win32.
Oh yeah, and Microsoft did more or less good job providing DOS backwards support for Windows 9x. Just don't mention Ultima VII when MS engineers are present, or you may not live to tell the tale...
My stupid follow-up to one comment in Slashdot:
... they called it the "Voodoo memory manager". And the kids these days, they just throw the Voodoos in their computers and it *automatically* installs the drivers with a few mouse clicks! Back in the DOS, Voodoo really *meant* Dark Arts! It's this damn commercialization of mysticism and magic and these "look, I'm wearing an ankh" wicca-wannabes that make me yearn for the gone days... so imagine my joy when they no longer sold Voodoo and now teach the kids to follow the path of Science (laws of physics and these "G-forces" and stuff).