dmaynard51/ultima4-ios — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Play Ultima IV natively on an iPhone or iPad using touch controls instead of a keyboard.
Build and run the game in the iOS Simulator without needing an Apple Developer account.
Install the game directly on a personal iOS device using a free Apple ID and Team ID.
Explore how a classic SDL2-based game engine was adapted for a touch-based mobile platform.
| dmaynard51/ultima4-ios | libretro/thepowdertoy | team-resurgent/flycast-x | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Language | C++ | C++ | C++ |
| Last pushed | — | 2026-07-13 | 2026-07-02 |
| Maintenance | — | Active | Active |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | moderate | hard |
| Complexity | 3/5 | 3/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | general | general | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires a Mac with Xcode and cmake, plus a free Apple ID to install on a physical device.
This project is an iOS port of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, an old role playing game, letting you play it natively on an iPhone or iPad with touch controls. It is built on top of zu4, which is itself a cleaned up fork of an earlier project called xu4 that reimplemented the original game's engine using the SDL2 library. Ultima IV was released for free by its original publisher, so the build process downloads the game's data files for you rather than including them in the repository. To install it you need a Mac with Xcode and the cmake build tool installed. There are two install paths. Running a script builds and launches the game in the iOS Simulator without needing an Apple account at all. Running a different script with your Apple Developer Team ID builds, signs, installs, and launches the game directly on a real iPhone or iPad, though you have to manually trust the app once in the phone's settings on first run, and the game is meant to be played in landscape orientation. A separate document in the repository explains the touch controls. The author describes this iOS port as a free, open source project made in their spare time, and includes optional links to support the work through Ko-fi or GitHub Sponsors, while making clear no payment is required to use it. The README also includes the original readme from the upstream zu4 desktop project underneath, which describes it as a cleanup of the older xu4 codebase, warns that the codebase may be broken in various ways, states the author is not currently seeking code contributions, and lists project goals such as simplifying the codebase and removing external dependencies from the core engine. No license is stated in the README.
An iOS port of the classic game Ultima IV that lets you play it on an iPhone or iPad with touch controls, built on the zu4 engine.
Mainly C++. The stack also includes C++, SDL2, Xcode.
No license information is provided in the README.
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
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