Using CodeIgniter's DB engine in a non-CI project

[eluser]robustus[/eluser]
I'm using CI for a number of new projects, but I have a few legacy projects that I won't be converting to CI. I do have some libraries that I'd like to use for both, though, and one major issue is the DB calls. If I could use CI's DB layer within a non-CI project, that would very much help portability for me.

Can this be done? Can I move some files around and do the equivalent of $this->load->database() within a non-CI project and get all the DB interaction methods supported in CI? If so, how?

Thanks.