Brad Hannah has posted another update — weekly updates being a significant improvement in frequency over “slightly more often than yearly” — regarding his Ebiten-based reworking of Ultima V Redux on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group. Perhaps it’s just the early excitement of taking the project in a new direction, but he seems rather confident in this new direction:

I have been hard at work with the re-implementation effort so far on Ultima V Redux. I have learned so much from my initial kick at the can – and am saving a TON of time because I already did the reverse the engineering for so more components.

I spent a little extra time making a debug console – but so far we can do a few key things:

1. Walk around overworld/underworld/towns
2. Enter towns from overworld
3. Open and Jimmy doors
4. Basic world animations (more to come)

I know it’s not a ton yet – but I am loving this and can’t wait to reach an eventual finish line.

Brad has posted a couple of new screenshots, one of which is embedded above. At a casual glance, they don’t look particularly different from vanilla Ultima 5, but on closer examination there is a sharpness to the UI and text that far exceeds what the limited resolution of the original game was capable of.