Some exciting news came out of the ScummVM development community about a month ago: they are on the cusp of adding support for a handful of the Ultima games into ScummVM:

I’m at a stage where I’m happy enough with the Ultima engine that I’ve been working on to open it for review for inclusion into master. This engine currently consists of work for three games in the Ultima series.

1. Ultima VIII – Pagan.
   This is based on the Pentagram project. I’ve finally got music playback working, and am about to start a full playthrough test of the game to may sure everything in the engine still works, and the game is completeable.
2. Ultima VI – The False Prophet
   This is based on the Nuvie project. I added two game detection entries, one for Nuvie’s “classic” mode, and another that turns on the Nuvie enhancements like Ultima 7 style gumps and a full-screen map. I haven’t really tested it much beyond the game starting up, the initial fight, and moving around the castle a bit. But everything seems to work. One downside is that I had to include the entirety of the Lua interpreter that Nuvie used in order for the cutscenes and various in-game monster AI and combat calculations to work. So testing it further, and seeing whether I can get it to use the common Lua code is going on a back burner until I’ve finished testing Pagan.
3. Ultima 1
   This is an in progress work based on my decompilation of the first Ultima game (not counting Akalabeth). Most of the in-game towns/castles, overworld, and dungeons are supported. It’s just missing the outer space sim section, and the endgame bossfight. Further work on this will wait until the other two Ultima games are done.

As you can see from the above, Pentagram — the cross-platform Ultima 8 engine — is the closest to being integrated into ScummVM. so much so that the Pentagram team have developed a custom splash screen just for that purpose.

ScummVM, for those unfamiliar with it, is a program that allows for the emulation of a formidable number of older games. It began as a means of running old Sierra games like Maniac Mansion on modern computers, but since then has expanded its portfolio of support to over 250 games (as of this writing).