Hi, I haven't tried compiling the code yet, but I did try to run the binary. Unfortunately running the binary resulted in an "Error loading blkindex.dat"

Yeah, the old blkindex.dat format is incompatible with this wallet version. You can delete it and run yacoin with '-reindex', should fix it. If not, try the loadblocks method - see the info here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948.0