Over the Easter weekend, it just so happened that the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Ultima 7: The Black Gate came and went; the game was initially released on April 16, 1992. More on that — and on Easter — in the days to come.

Dominus, of the Exult team, decided to celebrate this milestone with an update to the venerable cross-platform engine for Ultima 7 and its sequel that he has been maintaining for many years now. Per the news update posted to the Exult site:

30 years ago Origin released Ultima VII – The Black Gate and many still hold this game in a very high regard. We certainly do!
Instead of waiting another decade this is the perfect opportunity to release our next version. Because of the measures we took to eliminate weird crashes it was important to make a new release available.
By default we will now play the extended intro of Serpent Isle, that we restored from an old recording of it. It was cut and slimmed down for the release of Ultima VII’s Part 2 to conserve precious floppy disk space. A shout out to Denis Loubet for creating this masterpiece.
Two important things were always missing from Exult in regards to the Black Gate:
The sound effects in the intro and the congratulations screen! Both are now present!
Currently we are in the process of merging Ken Cecka’s fork of Exult for Android (*). While this is not yet finished, Ken created a 1.8 version based on our release code.
You can find the Android, Windows and macOS releases on our download page (**).
Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

For now, you’ll have to grab the downloads — the Windows and macOS installers, as well as the Android APK — from the official Exult download page; I’ll update the project entry soon. There’s also a list of changes that have been made to the engine since the 1.6 release, which was the last “stable” release (1.7 never having had a “stable” release, or a release that was labelled as such):