So Here’s Exult, and Ultima 7, Running Natively on iOS

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iOS developer Litchie should be familiar to many of you; I’ve mentioned his most well-known iOS app a few times on the Codex over the years. That would be iDOS, of course…the port of DOSBox to Apple’s mobile OS.

Well…as it just so happens, Litchie seems to be working on a new iOS port of Exult, as well. And as the photograph above indicates, it’s quite possible to get Ultima 7 up and running in it. The app is evidently being coded with Universal support; it can also be installed on an iPad:

 
 

Now, a word of caution: don’t let the rather simplistic user guide fool you. Oh, it will serve as valuable enough reference when you’ve got the app installed on your iOS device and are looking to set up Ultima 7 or Serpent Isle on it. But…well…there is the matter of installing it on your iOS device.

Happily, a jailbreak is not required. To install Exult, you’ll need to grab the code from GitHub, open it in Xcode (specifically: open the project file — Exult.xcodeproj — in the iOS subfolder of the code), and build it for your device. Sadly, Xcode is only available for OS X, so if you don’t have an Apple computer at home (or OS X running in a VM, I suppose), you’re more or less out of luck for now.

That being said, my understanding is that at some point, Litchie intends to release Exult as an app on the iOS App Store (obviously not with any bundled Ultima 7-related content) at some point in the future.

Now: What do you suppose the odds are that Litchie can be convinced to follow up this project with an iOS port of Nuvie?

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8 Responses

  1. Goldenflame says:
    January 24, 2015 at 10:03 pm

    I have no iOS devices but I still think this is the coolest thing since sliced, rat-poisoned bread.

  2. Sanctimonia says:
    January 25, 2015 at 12:54 am

    I just got a new Android phone with a big-ass screen (it doubles as an airplane wing). Obviously that’s not iOS, but it made me wonder what an old 320×200/240 game would look like on a phone. The mouse interface should translate well with minimal tweaking, though you’d need something like MUNT to get decent sound. The Ad-Lib stuff is pretty bad… Nice work though, and yeah seeing Ultima VI would be awesome as well.

  3. Sergorn says:
    January 25, 2015 at 6:14 am

    We need a uber merging of NUVIE, Exult, Pentagram, xU4 to run all Ultima games like this.

    Kind of like ScummVM but for Ultima. UltimaVM.

  4. Frank says:
    January 25, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    and I think you need a apple dev subscription (99$/yr) to be able to install apps on your devices.

  5. robbo007 says:
    January 27, 2015 at 12:54 am

    Yes, you need developer account. $99 bucks a year 🙁 I got to the compile stage and found this out. LOL.
    Think I’ll wait. Don’t want to pay $99 to play on my iphone. Under iDOS it works 😀

  6. Dominus says:
    February 8, 2015 at 3:40 pm

    yeah, I didn’t realize you need a paid dev account. That said, if anyone wants to try it, send me your UUID and I can provision your device. I’ll then recompile and send out the app binary and you can run it on your device without jailbreak or other such things…