Roughly a decade ago, Exult was ported to the Android mobile operating system by Ken “ceckak” C., although he ultimately stopped working on the port in 2013 as his family began to grow. The port was briefly taken up by msbalfe thereafter, although development on it quickly ground to a halt.

However, as of August 2021, Ken C. has resurrected his work on the Android port…and it turns out that his kids (who had previously been his reason for suddenly having no time for the port) are the impetus for his bringing it back:

I’m back with another go at an Android port of Exult. I shelved this 10 years ago when kids took over my free time, but now they’re playing with Android tablets and I figured it was time to introduce them to Ultima 

I currently have it working well enough to be playable, using the dpad virtual joystick from the ios port and a launcher that simplifies importing the Good Old Games files, digital music and mods. I still have a fairly long TODO list, but I think it’s far enough along that it makes sense to start upstreaming patches. I’ll work on getting them cleaned up and staged for a pull request next. Most of what I have is isolated in an android subdirectory, but there are a few areas I refactored other parts of the codebase that will merit closer review and/or discussion.

You can find early snapshot releases of the new version of the port at Ken’s brand new GitHub page, along with instructions for getting it working. And if you want to delve into some of the technical details of the port, there’s a new thread at the Exult forums that will be well worth following.

(Hat tip: Exult on Facebook)