Commenter Fearyourself, who has stepped to the fore to help Kevin Fishburne with his coding issue, has an Ultima-inspired engine creation project of his own, which I have just now gladly added a project entry for.

Its aim is to create a unified game engine that can handle both user-defined files and inputs, and also play many of the early Ultima games. As is often the case with projects of this nature, Ultima 4 is serving as the test case for the project (as can be seen in the screenshot, above).

The engine has been implemented with C++, OpenGL, and SDL. Fearyourself was initially experimenting with an Ultima 5-like tileset, but switched over to integrating game data from Ultima 4 at some point during the fall of 2010. Thus far, he has decoded the cities, stores, and conversations, and is (for the most part) using the original sprites that appeared in the game. A configuration option exists, however, to toggle between VGA and EGA graphics. Combat and enemy AI are also present in the game.

At present, Fearyourself hasn’t decided if he’s going to create a straightforward port of Ultima 4 or depart from canon to some degree. He also plans to integrate Ultima 5 into the project next, once he has finished with Ultima 4.