Some time ago, Zedex Dragon not only designed his own computer — the ZX Spectrum SE, an extended clone of the British Z80 — but also set about crafting a port of xu4 that would run on it.

In his own words: “I got quite far with the character generation sequence (which had to fit in a single 64K chunk of memory). Having designed the computer I realized that Ultima IV would be a great way to show off its hardware. I’m particularly pleased with the split-screen mode with the 12×8 hi-res version of the Ultima 6 in-game font I designed. The intro sequence graphics are ported from the MSX version, but the card graphics are original, although based on the set from Ultima 9. The game would have featured the standard U4 plot but with additional music (Stones during character generation and the Ultima theme on the title screen). I was also looking at having bitmap dungeon graphics as per Ultima 5. The idea was to make it the ultimate 2D version of U4. The development would have relied on porting the C++ of xu4 to C for the Z80.”

Some selected screenshots from the project website:

Sadly, Zedex has since stopped working on the project, but the entirety of its source is still available in a CVS repository he maintains, and an emulator for the ZX Spectrum SE is available. For the time being, the project will reside in the Orphanage, but if anyone wants to pick up and run with it, they will certainly find themselves able to do so.

I have created a project entry for it as well…yes, in the Orphanage, but even so. This site is as much a historical record as it is a news site, after all.