xu4 for Scratch
Produced by: Jude Greer
Website: My Scratch port of xu4
A port of xu4, the cross-platform Ultima 4 remake, to Scratch (the kid-friendly visual coding language).
Scratch, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a kid-friendly visual coding language developed at MIT. Available on a variety of platforms, it presents would-be coders with visual abstractions for all of the various logical components of a programming language, making it easier to grasp how programs flow without getting too bogged down in the specifics of syntax.
In mid-2023, Jude Greer — having gained some familiarity with Scratch after working on it with his son — happened upon xu4, and decided to re-implement it using Scratch. After eight months of work, he finally had something he felt comfortable showing off, which he did by way of the xu4 forums at Sourceforge. You can read there about some of the technical limitations he had to overcome in order to re-implement every aspect of the game. The port also exceeds the maximum allowable size of a project that can be shared online via the Scratch community. And if you’re curious about how the port plays, Jude has helpfully prepared a video:
To play this port, you’ll obviously need to have Scratch installed. Download the file above and extract the .sb3 file, load it into the Scratch editor, enable Turbo Mode, and you should be able to play the whole game.
1 Response
[…] making the port available at this newly-minted project entry here at the Codex will help add to the reach of Jude’s […]