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Read Only Memo

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Plus: Open source FPGA hardware's going to give the busy Android scene a run for its money.

readonlymemo.comLet's reverse-engineer how someone reverse-engineered a secret hiding in F-Zero GX for 23 yearsHello again! We're back, and yet another fortnight has passed without me losing the last shreds of my sanity while trying to distinguish between the shoddily assembled AI rubbish piling up in every corner of this little hobby and the good stuff that I delight in sharing with you all. Check back in two weeks' time for another exciting update! Oh, right: There's still a newsletter to do. Well despite being weighed down by said winnowing process, I've cobbled together some cool stuff for you, including a bit of insight into how someone found a secret hiding inside one of the best games ever made and a quick check-in on some of the emulation hardware we'll be playing our games on this time next year. It's not even Android stuff! As is often the case, though, the best stuff may be down in the Translation Station, at least if you're a fan of Puyo Puyo or strange, Bionic Commando-adjacent PS2 action games (_boy,_ am I!!). They're blessedly AI-free, and there are more people out there still fighting the good fight. Just wait for Mermanoid and Schrodinger no Neko from some crack teams! How do I follow a trailer like that? Easy: I don't. On with the news! * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. F-Zero GX bares it all When I started digging into the coolest news I've seen this month for today's issue of _**ROM**_ , I assumed it _must_ have involved emulation. Surely Dolphin's debugger had a hand in the find of the year, right??? By the time I realized it prooooobably didn't, actually, I thought ah screw it — it's close enough to an emulation story. Let's do it anyway! The news, if you missed it, is that a Japanese X user with the handle @BTEST4HE popped up with a previously undiscovered slew of codes for Sega's racing masterpiece F-Zero GX that unlock _all the stuff_ , including stuff from the arcade counterpart that for years has been thought to be inaccessible in this version of the game. A recap here: F-Zero GX fans uncover new cheat codes after more than 20 yearsBrand-new F-Zero GX cheat codes have been found, including some pretty big ones - here's the full list.Nintendo EverythingBrian > "_The codes unlock all content, including Japan-only arcade event exclusives, AX courses and machines, Dark Schneider, and the Gold Parts. Players still need in-game tickets to purchase the content once unlocked, but the codes allow you to bypass the need to beat the game on Master difficulty in Grand Prix mode and in Story mode on Very Hard. > > It’s also worth mentioning that the Gold Parts were originally special sets given away to the winners of Japan-only in-person events during the original release on GameCube. Now, however, other fans can get their hands on them as well."_ What really caught my eye about these codes, other than the novelty of a beloved game having a new secret uncovered decades later, is that most of them have to be input on four controllers simultaneously. Clearly no one was ever going to stumble upon them accidentally. So how did @BTEST4HE find them? I couldn't ask them directly, so I asked someone who knows a thing or two about finding game codes: Bo Bayles, whose Rings of Saturn blog is largely devoted to this very process. "I'm kicking myself, because last year somebody asked me to look into this store kiosk disc that had F-Zero GX content on it," he says. "I figured out what how that worked, and started looking at the main game. But then I saw how much was in the TCRF article already and figured it would be duplicative." Paradoxically, F-Zero GX was so well-explored that he never bothered to scrutinize it for hidden cheat codes. Maybe nobody else did, either, until @BTEST4HE. But here's how Bayles describes the process in general: 1. Figuring out where the target game stores input in its memory 2. Loading the game binary (or a snapshot of its memory) into Ghidra 3. Using Ghidra to trace references to the input memory addresses 4. Filtering out all of the boring things like menu navigation and player movement @BTEST4HE has a GitHub page set up with a custom pairing of reverse-engineering tool Ghidra and AI agent Claude. That discovery bummed me out a bit, considering it coincided with the news that the maintainer of Decomp.dev has decided to shut down the site due to AI's impact on the decompilation scene. Given the language barrier, I don't want to assume too much about how @BTEST4HE did this work. But just because the codes are long, and require being input on four controllers at once, doesn't necessarily mean they needed the brute force power of an AI to uncover. Gold ship parts unlocked in F-Zero GX. Image via @BTEST4HE on X. "With Ghidra you can just read out what the button combinations are. Most games for a particular system represent buttons the same way. So if you know address **_X_** holds controller input, and that value **_1_** represents D-pad Up, then you know that the game is checking for up if it reads address **_X_** and compares it to **_1_** ," Bayles said. "The thing Ghidra can't do is tell you where to put in the code. So a lot of times I'll find something in 5 minutes and then spend hours trying to figure out what the right screen is." It's a domain AI has proven very effective in, and when it comes to a game like F-Zero GX, just having the code will mean a lot to a lot of people. But in general, it's what he can learn through the process that drives Bayles: > "The AI tools are very good about understanding decompiled code like you would see in Ghidra, so I will not be at all surprised if cheat code discoveries start happening left and right like decompilation projects. I have a long backlog of things to write up, and several that will probably be scooped. > > My goal isn't to have the most comprehensive cheat code archive. It's to understand how a game works and then try to communicate that clearly in a blog. So if Claude or Gemini just said 'put in this button sequence here," that wouldn't be all that interesting to me. I find a lot of really vanilla cheat codes that might be interesting to fans of the game, but are totally standard in terms of how they're implemented. I don't usually write those up, but I might put them on Twitter or Bluesky. For example, this Red Zone code I posted today has a neat effect — a little demoscene thing that the programmer made. But finding it was totally boring — it's the same cheat code detection function you'd find in 1000 other games. Contrast that with Stormlord, which is interesting not only because it's a real live nude code, but also the programmer did something unique to implement it." @BTEST4HE has a website, but unfortunately hasn't written anything about the discovery process for F-Zero's golden ticket just yet. Hopefully they will. Because in the long run, that's the information that's really valuable — it's what has a chance to inform or inspire others to make discoveries of their own, and will contribute to the collective understanding of a game that's living proof there's always more to learn. To bring this all back 'round to emulation, though, if you're going to try the codes out for yourself in Dolphin, make life easier on yourself by going into the controller configuration settings and mapping all four gamepads to the same inputs. That's a whole lot easier than growing six extra arms, I'll tell you what. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ ### 2. The next wave of FPGA is open Now that the SuperStation One is bedded in, the MiSTer FPGA scene has a healthy range of options, from build-it-yourself boards to prebuilt easy street. And the MiSTer isn't the only FPGA game in town. There's ModRetro (and that's all we're going to say about them) as well as Analogue, which just announced a pair of refreshed FPGA consoles: the Mega Sg+ and the Super Nt+. Unlike the 4K-focused Analogue 3D, these two consoles are still built for 1080p, but they have a few new features, including built-in Bluetooth alongside 2.4G wireless support, USB-C power, an "evolved OS" and a USB-A port for "more convenient DAC support." At $220, they're a touch cheaper than the SuperStation One, and certainly more convenient for playing games straight from the cart. But they're also single-purpose devices at a time when the FPGA scene is becoming more open and more accessible every month. The MiSTer's frontends are getting better, too. More exciting, though, is the new hardware that's on the way without Analogue's limitations. First up: the Game Bub, "an open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld, with support for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games." GitHub - elipsitz/gamebub: Open-source FPGA retro emulation handheldOpen-source FPGA retro emulation handheld . Contribute to elipsitz/gamebub development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub While not a MiSTer device explicitly — its memory will be a limiting factor for cores like the PS1 and Saturn — the big selling point is that it can run games from cartridges like the Analogue Pocket _and_ is "fully open source and fully hackable, so you can use it as a portable, self-contained AMD Artix 7 FPGA development platform." The handheld's crowdfunding page promises "Game Bub is not locked down in any way: custom software gets unrestricted access to all on-board hardware." Quite a few MiSTer cores have already been ported over to work on the Game Bub, including the NES, SNES, Neo Geo Pocket, Colecovision and Atari 2600. Meanwhile, Taki Udon is gunning for _both_ the Super Nintendo and Game Boy Advance SP form factors. First up: codename SuperStation Pocket, with hardware that will run a stripped-down version of the Console Mode UI, so it will at the very least be MiSTer adjacent. > New progress on FPGBA SP UI, cartridge loading performance, and scaling options. > > — Taki Udon (@takiudon.bsky.social) 2026-10-17T16:56:14.514Z Taki's been aiming for this one to cost around $100, which may prove untenable with the delirious cost of components now. But it's clearly aiming to be a lower-powered device than his SuperStation NT, which will, at some point, apparently have a Genesis-shaped sister. > It’s time to run it back. Codename SSNT/SuperFPGA > > — Taki Udon (@takiudon.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T05:53:34.171Z Like Analogue's system, this one will run carts. Unlike Analogue's system, it will presumably also run every MiSTer core under the sun. "Our SNES and Mega Drive FPGA consoles are 4K and well under $200. That is all," Taki tweeted in a blatant _shots fired_ post after the refreshed Analogue systems were announced. Meanwhile, the MiSTer Multisystem crew are tackling a jumbo-sized handheld of their own: The MiSTer scene may still be divided over AI slop cores, a situation that likely won't be changing anytime soon, but the hardware scene is powering ahead and doing cool stuff regardless. Subscribe to ROM! ## Patching In **Azahar's next release gets fast on the slow stuff** – Build 2127, now in alpha, will help the 3DS emulator significantly in "JIT-less environments," enabling "greatly improved performance on iOS and tvOS devices, allowing devices as old as the iPhone XS to play games, even with playback speeds of over 200%." They've also fixed a missing echo sound effect and "greatly improved texture handling performance" for a bunch of games. RPCS3 does me a solid, fixes 3D Dot Game Heroes crashes – Damn, it wasn't but a few months ago that I was trying out 3D Dot Game Heroes, one of those _I always wanted to play that but never got around to it_ games. I played maybe an hour, and it didn't go too smoothly. Now I know why courtesy of developer Yahfz: "In 3D Dot Game Heroes, the PPU can wake up and free a SPURS task context before the SPU finishes saving it. That late save corrupts the heap and the next malloc crashes." This fix closes a issue thread on the RPCS3 Discord dating back to _2018_. Yahfz notes you'll need to adjust the PPU Event Wake-up Delay setting under the advanced tab depending on CPU speed, but with 25us being the tentative go-to setting. Keep an eye on the wiki page for more advice, though. Vita3K improves pausing (and unpausing) – Fairly important actions for any piece of software, and the Vita emulator does them better now. This fix stops it from accidentally running during a pause or crashing on resume. Other recent updates include a graphical fix for FSR running on Vulkan and an overlay for the newly improved pause screen that lets you exit the emulator. ## Core Report The MiSTer has an FM Towns Marty core, now – Unlike the absolute tidal wave of MAME-to-MiSTer arcade ports in recent months, this new core comes from longtime MiSTer contributor Kitrinx, who notes that it "Plays the entire library, though some of the games made for pentiums or DX4 will not run very fast." There's save state support and a database for saving per-game configs for convenience. Also, if you're _hardline_ against AI, I'm afraid this core isn't for you — there's clearly a divide in the MiSTer community between the vibecoders and the seasoned devs like Kitrinx who insist you should know how the codebase works before touching it and don't hold back their criticisms of the former group in the MiSTer Discord. But many (if not all) are still using tools like Claude to write code. I don't doubt they're doing much better work, but that work does indeed still involve AI now. Zaparoo Frontend gets a 2.0 rework – I just barely missed this update last issue, but the first of two UIs to arrive for the MiSTer has gotten a bit performance-focused overhaul. Since early October it's gotten a couple updates: "You can search your whole library from the couch and keep a search as a tile on the Hub," smoother CRT performance by matching the screen draw to the screen refresh, and better support for multi-disc games. The companion Zaparoo app for mobile also got an update, and it looks pretty snazzy. **Killer Instinct approaches** – The MiSTer Killer Instinct (1 and 2) core debuted as a test build back in August, and it seems to be closing in on a release; developer kconger is still working on slowdown, and last month even put out a call in the MiSTer Discord: "Anyone [who] has the ability or knows of someone who can run a custom boot ROM on their Killer Instinct 1 or 2 board, please message me." ## Translation Station A boxful of Puyo Puyo – Maud of Hoshi Hoshi Wo Miru Hito and Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon fame is back with another romhack from the Puyo family, this one a collection for the PS1! It includes the first two Genesis games, with one script ported in from a prior 2025 fan translation by RadioTails and a fresh one for the sequel; Maud also translated the rest of the material in Box, which includes an RPG mode, a "mishmash" mode, and the "Puyommunication" PocketStation feature. Not a drop of AI was used in hacking or translation. Way to go Maud! 'Cult classic' PS2 RPG ChainDive celebrates 23 years with a patch – "By hand, of course," project lead Gally responded when asked if this was a human translation or a machine-generated one. I know nothing about ChainDive, but judging by the trailer it sure looks Bionic Commando-y! To HG101 we go: "Despite being a 3D game, all of the action takes place along a 2D axis... All throughout the stages are little green orbs that act as grappling points. ... You are equipped with a sword, although this does not directly harm enemies. Instead, it freezes them, which then turns them into grappling points you can latch onto. You can then swing around and pummel them until they shatter. Destroying multiple enemies in quick succession will build up a combo – high combos will restore a portion of your life meter based on your performance. "The development team, Alvion, went on to develop Malicious for the PlayStation 3 and Vita, which is also worth checking out. They also aided PlatinumGames with other fast-paced action titles, like the Bayonetta series and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The cool funky electronica soundtrack was composed by Yuji Takenouchi, who hails from the old school Konami sound team, having worked on Metal Gear 2." Pu-Li-Ru-La-Yay – Sega hacker extraordinare Derek Pascarella is back with another project alongside translators DaVince21 and Walnut and playtester hasnopants, this one something a bit different: a beat-em-up for the FM Towns Marty! "Originally unleashed on arcades by Taito in 1991 and brought home to the FM Towns by VING in 1994, Pu-Li-Ru-La is one of the most delightfully bizarre games ever made," he writes. "Bop an enemy and it turns back into a fleeing animal. Wander into crystal mountains, dream-warped towns, and scorched deserts. Face down foes that only get stranger with every stage. It's a psychedelic picture book come to life, and now it can finally be enjoyed in English on the FM Towns." ## Good pixels Something a little different this week: Enjoy this archive of all the official wallpapers for F-Zero GX and AX. 💽 ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Also this issue: Praise for the all-human Ar Tonelico 2 translation patch.

readonlymemo.comPS5 emulation has gotten an AI turbocharge. So what now?Hello one, hello all! We're back, and somehow — I'm just getting reports of this now — it's _already spooky season_? How the hell did that happen, man. Wasn't I just writing about Screaming Mad George's pinball nightmare a few months ago? Did spending the first three weeks of September in Asia where it was like 90 degrees and wetter than the inside of a mouth throw off my seasonal radar? _Quite possibly_. But here we are barreling towards the end of the year nonetheless. I've fallen woefully behind in my optimistic plan to play a bunch of fan translations this year, though there's still some time left before I declare that plan a failure! I'm hoping to sneak in Cabal Translations' London Seirei Tanteidan by year's end, and am greatly looking forward to Hilltop's "Fan Translation Direct" which aims to celebrate human-made patches whenever it comes together. On that subject: You may have seen on social media that longtime translator Eien Ni Hen tragically passed away in recent weeks. I didn't know her personally, and wish I'd had a chance to interview her about her decades of selfless work in bringing Japanese games to English audiences. But if you'd like to get a sense of how meaningful her contributions were, please read this: Found in translation: the selfless legacy of Eien Ni HenFor those who followed the English fantranslation efforts of Japanese RPGs since the very first days, back when the idea of playing localized versions of Final Fantasy V, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean and Seiken Densetsu III seemed too good to be true and teams like RPGE and DeJap were like wizards inhabiting a different plane of existence, this scene was never just about perusing patches, but also about acknowledging and celebrating the people that made all of it possible.Magnvs' RPG JourneyMagnvs I'm reminded, not for the first time, that I _really_ need to play TearRing Saga one of these days. I'm more interested in where series creator Shouzou Kaga went with the strategy series after leaving Nintendo than the series proper has gone with the last couple Fire Emblems. That those games have a western presence at all is largely thanks to Ein Ni Hen. In this issue we've got a story about a cult fave 2000s RPG getting the translation it deserves, as well as a check-in on the cutting edge of current-gen console emulation. Hopefully by the time we're back in two weeks I'll have something spooky cooked up for the season. Until then — stay squashy. 🎃 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ ## The Big Two ### 1. PlayStation 5: Set to hyperdrive And I thought ShadPS4 moved fast. Since my July 19th issue of **_ROM_** , Get ready for PlayStation 5 emulation, progress in getting Sony's current-gen console games running on PC is moving like it's the bus from Speed with a turbo on it. It's the unstoppable train from Unstoppable. It's Jason Crankam in Crank: High Voltage. It's, uh, going really fast. I'm marveling at it just a bit, even though it isn't actually shocking. There are a few obvious things spurring this rate of progress. Anger over Sony ending PC ports, and then even more anger of it planning an end to physical discs; the impending release of a high profile, console-only game in GTA 6; the underlying technology at work being more about translation than full, bottom-up hardware recreation in software. A quick recap on that front from last time: > "Since the PS5 is an x86 system much like a PC, the primary task here is translating system calls and APIs unique to the PS5 into ones Windows (or Linux, etc) can understand. ShadPS4, WINE and Proton are also compatibility layers." But of course those are only partial explanations, and there's one more that dwarfs all of them. PS5 emulation development is going absolutely _Ape. Shit._ on AI. LLM coding agents have made their way into plenty of emulation projects as they've settled into place as a normalized tool in the software development world. But to this observer's eye, at least, PlayStation 5 emulation is the first to be born into this new AI era. And without mature, organized projects with established safeguards to manage the influx of tokened-up novices and torrents of pull requests and custom builds, it's absolute chaos. Here's a representative conversation from the PS5 Emulation Discord just yesterday: > **User 1:** "There are literally 500+ builds out there with everyone using AI to fix specific games and make them run faster." > > **User 2:** "The problem is its really hard to merge these large changesets and keep the emulator on course architecturally. on the other hand i dont see much guidance on what you SHOULD be doing so everyone just shoots off in different directions." > > **User 1:** "Oh it’s a cluster fuck. We need leadership and a chain of command but it’s the wild Wild West. Is what it is I suppose. Hell I’m a developer with AI lol. Everyone is." Spend a bit of time in the Discord and you'll see tons of custom forks of popular emulator KytyPS5; there are nearly 600, according to its GitHub page. The other big name, SharpEmu, has more than 500. New kid on the block AnyPS5, which calls itself a "tool for automatic PS5 executable porting to Linux and Windows," has already whizzed past 275 (it also works basically the same way as the others, despite how it's presented). Those numbers don't _necessarily_ mean anything — long-established emulators have thousands of GitHub forks belonging to contributors who port their work back into the main project or are trying out something custom — but for projects this relatively young, I think it's still broadly telling of what's going on. Tons of folks in the Discord are spinning up game-specific forks to get a few more playable frames in a game like Wolverine or Demon's Souls by setting Claude loose on the code. This has been a gold mine for YouTube channels that put "game name" + "FPS!!!" in their titles, and inevitably leads to a bunch of people in the Discord help channel asking why the game actually only runs at 3 fps for them. Does the "work" behind these game-specific branches then feed back into the core emulator's progress? So far it's hard to tell. SharmEmu, at least, does seem to be making slow and steady progress — with "slow" here still being really damn fast compared to the development pace of a decade ago. A couple recent posts from SharmEmu's lead developer: > We are now achieving the most accurate visuals in this game, where just a week or two ago we were looking at nothing but a yellow screen, and I thank all my teammates who made this improvement possible. > > Demon's Souls is an important game for me. And we achieved this. pic.twitter.com/H3grxiFf50 > > — Scarecrow (@CursedIfElse) October 3, 2026 > It’s not finished yet. > > SharpEmu has prioritized hardware accuracy from the very beginning, and we’re finally starting to see that investment pay off. It was built completely from scratch, and this is how far we’ve come. https://t.co/PwpqXqxA3l > > — Scarecrow (@CursedIfElse) September 29, 2026 KytyPS5's compatibility site boasts significantly more entries, and its developers have started posting weekly updates about which games have become playable — in the sense that you can at least get past the main menu. That doesn't mean they run well, or are bug-free, a distinction not really brought up in your typical AI thumbnailed YouTube gameplay vid. My takeaway right now is that it's all just kinda chaos. And as impressive as the rate of improvement currently is buoyed by AI, it's hard for me to get too excited about PS5 emulation. For now the hardware demands are too high and the list of desirable exclusive games is too short; the idea of hunting down a custom fork for a few extra FPS in every single game is far less appetizing than it was when, like, Primehack was the _only_ fork that mattered. The thing I can't stop thinking about is what this says about the future — for Switch 2 emulation, or whatever ends up being the next big thing. What's the right way to grow and shepherd a project when anyone can "contribute" AI compute? Do you go closed source? Forbid AI code contributions of any kind? Just let the chaos reign and merge in the quality stuff that maybe floats to the top? I have no idea, but I have a feeling _growing pains_ won't come close to capturing what a pain in the ass it's going to be. ### 2. The big Ar Tonelico 2 retranslation: "Please, play the game that changed my life" FioraAeterna doesn't mess around. I know that from interviewing her more than a decade ago about her contributions to GameCube emulator Dolphin, so when I saw she'd released a new patch for PS2 RPG Ar Tonelico 2 featuring an "artisinal human translation job" of more than 550,000 words and "countless bugs" fixed, I thought: Yeah, that sounds about right. I knew Fiora was a fan of developer Gust's long-running Atelier series before I even knew Ar Tonelico _existed_ , but according to the wonderful throwback 2000s website she built for this translation, it's never too late to find a game that changes your life. "Our translator played Ar Tonelico 2 for the first time in 2023 (in Japanese) and quickly became obsessed with it. She then recommended the game to all her (English-speaking) friends, only to rapidly discover the hard way that the game she had blindly passed out to her friends was… a drastically different game than what she had played," Fiora writes. "I've spent over a year of my life working on this translation, and I did so because I wanted to share with all of you a game that was deeply important to me and changed my life in a way no other work of art ever has." Project Metafalica 2.0 — Ar tonelico 2 RetranslationA complete retranslation and remaster of Ar tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica for PS2, with bugfixes and QoL features.Project Metafalica 2 This project borrows from "an enormous amount of technical work" previously done by fans for a 2016 retranslation project, but Fiora argues that one didn't go far enough: it was attempting to fix an unfixable English script, the result of a rushed release that punched up a "very earnest, genuine game" with "everything from sex jokes to quips about 'emo hair.'" "At the time, translating visual novel-length games into English had basically never been done before, and the amount of time and budget they were given was grossly insufficient for the task," she writes. "On top of that, almost their entire previous localization experience was with parody games a tenth the size, like Disgaea. If anything, it’s a wonder they managed to release the game at all." Project Metafalica goes significantly beyond reworking the script. In addition to those heaps of bug fixes, it also re-adds jumping in combat, something you could do in the first game, and makes it possible to pull up the text history for "almost the entire game." It's somewhat uncommon for fan translation patches to support multiple releases of a game, but this one supports _all_ of them. US, EU, Japanese, even the reprinted Japanese discount copy. The international releases deleted something like half of the Japanese voiceover for space; the patch restores that text. Which is ideal, since the written text now diverges starkly from the English dub. And here are the sorts of features that skilled hackers and translators go out of their way for that I _love_. This is the level of care that AI-driven translation projects are wholly lacking: * _The rendering and spacing of many font glyphs have been improved from the original game. Some new glyphs have been added that the original game didn’t have, too._ * _“Lazy” text playback mode is now much faster; its speed should be comparable to the original Japanese game (Japanese has fewer glyphs than English, so it needs to be made faster to keep the same perceptual speed)._ * _Typesetting has been greatly improved across the game script and UI._ * _The font spacing has been made a bit denser to allow for more room for better translations._ * _A variety of changes have been made throughout the game’s UI to accommodate longer names and larger amounts of text. For example, item images in crafting skits have been moved up slightly to allow for larger text boxes below._ * _Autoplay textboxes in NPC conversations have been retimed for more comfortable viewing._ * _Fixed a bug that caused Japanese characters to be loaded into the font cache, resulting in glitchy text when using upscaling in PCSX2._ Looking out for emulation, specifically! Glorious. There are fixes to the battle system and overall balance; mechanics are better explained; some conditions where you could lock yourself out of a quest have been reworked. There are even a couple save points added where they were "conspicuously lacking." Compared to so, so many translation patches I've looked at recently where someone claims to have hacked a game, jammed in some unedited, poorly spaced machine translated text, and then released the patch as if it's done — with clearly no meaningful testing done to ensure it works worth a damn — this is truly nourishing. And if it seems like an insane amount of work for one person to do: it would be! But unlike so many of these AI translation projects that could be so much better if their creators just... tried to make some friends in the scene to collaborate with, this one was a proper team effort. Check out the long list of hackers, editors, and supporters who contributed on the credits page. Finally, here's the best patch note of them all: * _Textbox arrows now render correctly when characters are lying in bed._ Helllll yeah. Claude could never. Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In Dolphin on Android gets cross-platform netplay – Previously only available on PC, Android Dolphin players can now get their online gaming on and even play against folks on desktop — though with some caveats. 1. "Using NetPlay over _mobile data_ is not recommended. Even if you can get it to work, the packet loss and latency are not particularly suitable for lockstep multiplayer." 2. "Most phones use ARM processors, and Dolphin uses different JITs depending on the host CPU. While our ARM64 and x86-64 JITs are very similar, they are not completely identical, and those JIT differences are likely to cause desyncs." Hit up the progress report for a bunch more updates, too. ShadPS4 celebrates Shadoween – "the glory goes to the huge amount of GPU fixes that improved so many games, some of them are really playable now," lead dev Shadow says of v0.19.0. The emulator's online support also now includes PSN trophies. **Eden gets fixes for Nier Automata, Biomutant and more** – Switch emulator Eden hasn't had a major release since June, but its developers have nonetheless been hard at work on fixing issues for a number of games that had crashes or performance problems. Biomutant didn't boot, Nier Automata had graphical issues on Android, Ender Magnolia had a notable crash, while multiplayer in Absolum, Overcooked, Dave the Diver, Diablo 3 and Hyrule Warriors had various issues. Those have all been addressed, while the team is also working on implementing post-processing shaders in a future build. ## Core Report **Go MAME Racer, goooo** – Namco's 1995 Speed Racer game will be playable in the next MAME release, 0.290, thanks to developer cam900... and AI. Longtime dev David "mamehaze" Haywood described how MAME devs are using the tech in a recent YouTube comment: "When the tools are used appropriately they can be incredibly useful for the type of research we need to do in MAME... The code isn't fully written by AI. The reason some of the stuff I mention hasn't gone in yet is exactly that. It's being used to guide, provide a better understanding, and suggest code fixes, but there are still humans working with that output. Writing an emulator is all about understanding the correct logic, how a board would work. With tools that can analyze large amounts of data and compare many, many more cases than would be possible by hand, it's easier to find that logic, which means the people writing the code can implement it with greater confidence." He and developer Andrea Bogazzi also collaborated to fix the background tilemaps in IREM's Beyond Kung-Fu prototype. Jotego updates Konami cores with sweet sweet sounds – Thanks to some long-awaited reverse-engineering work, Jotego's team have been able to properly recreate the output of Konami's 054539 sound chip that "powered X-Men, Run and Gun, Premier Soccer and dozens more." Jotego's core lineup has also expanded to support Toaplan platformer Wardner, too. ## Translation Station Summon Night Swordcraft Story 3's translation lands after 10+ years – With a custom website and some nice words from some of the folks who worked on the project over its decade and change in the oven. "Everything has been translated by people who know Japanese and English. Then proofread several times by native English speakers," they write. There were stops and starts, but they finally finished — just look how many people are credited on the download page! While I don't know the series myself, I feel confident in saying this is pitch perfect GBA art. Enter the Spectral Tower if you dare – A proudly AI-free fan translation of a PS1 game infamous enough to rival Ancient Roman and Innocent Tears, and sure enough SnowyAria is involved in this one too! Not as primary translator this time around, though: most of the credit for the project goes to hacker Tasos500, translator thequadehunter and graphics editor NicheTopic. "At one point, a thief stole all my items including the sword I had equipped, and when I got lucky and killed him he didn't drop any of it," writes Bluesky poster MakeMonsters. "Perfect game, no notes." Time may change me, but I can't strange time – Pennywise and Cabal Translations are back with a deep cut: the Famicom adaptation of 1986 anime film Time Stranger, itself based on a novel. I watched this movie and gave it three stars on Letterboxd, and now can't remember much about it! I was more into the slightly trippier GoShogun: The Time Étranger, a totally unrelated film whose characters have shown up in Super Robot Wars from time to time. Also totally unrelated: Digimon: Time Stranger. I think they took a magic school bus back to Nobunaga's time in this one? Might make for a pretty cool adventure game, tbh. ## Good pixels More Summon Night pixel art! ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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A vacation issue that should get you up-to-date in 5 minutes.

readonlymemo.comMicro ROM: (some of) the September news that's fit to printHello! Has it really been two weeks (and a day, oops) since last issue? I've been on vacation, time both seeming to slip away in a blink and stretch out indefinitely since I last sat down to put together a newsletter. I've barely touched a game or a proper computer in that time, so I'm just getting back up to speed with activities other than eating my weight in Thai food, saying "wow" at the majesty of nature, etc. I did mange to snap a _few_ photos that feel on brand for the newsletter, though: After taking some much-needed time away I considered punting this issue a week, but my vacation just so happens to be feeding directly into a weekend of working at Tokyo Game Show, which will be busy as heck. So instead I've put together a sort of micro **_ROM_** : The usual patch notes and fan translation details, but without the main stories. Snackable! Hope you enjoy some light grazing — and if you want something a bit more substantial, I've also got a few reads I recommend on other sites. Give those a look and I'll see you back here in a couple weeks. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## Read these Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle and the Good New JRPGThere are a number of origin points for the RPG including performance, wargames, cybernetics, and literature. It’s this last element that I briefly want to focus on. Following the release of TSR’s …Ogre RunOgre Run _From '80s tabletop RPGs to former Vanillaware artist Yoshio Nishimura's new Witch of the Dark Castle._ Talking games | Detective Saburo Jinguji: The Shinjuku Central Park Murder CaseWhen a corpse is the worldTsundoku DivingBaxter _Baxter writing about a game that I once bought a Famicom cart of for 100 yen because I was like "hey that looks like Clint Eastwood"_ [News] Satellaview Super Mario Bros. 2 MSU1 Release (Blog Post) - Yakumono’s Personal SiteYakumono _Satellaview fans continue to discover, archive, and restore access to versions of games that have been unplayable for decades!_ Project Dream (SNES, N64) - Games That Weren’tCancelled & Unreleased Video GamesGames That Weren'tFrank Gasking _A rare Rare project resurfaces!_ Release reblue v1.1.0 · zolaware/reblueWhat’s Changed Localization UI - add portuguese brazilian by @GABRIELNNK in #32 feat: add macOS update/install and zip handling by @Graine25 in #22 Fix interpolation Fix various Linux and Vulkan r…GitHubzolaware _Blue Dragon's recompiled port hits v1.10, fixing framerate interpolation issues and more._ Releases · Retro-Remake/ConsoleMode_DistributionContribute to Retro-Remake/ConsoleMode_Distribution development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubRetro-Remake _Tons of features added to Console Mode, and there are even some new ones since this post targeting the Neo Geo Pocket!_ How did the niche gem Suzuki Bakuhatsu come to be? The producer explains the bizarre bomb disposal game’s origin - AUTOMATON WESTTakehiro Ando reveals how the PlayStation 1’s quirkiest Japanese puzzle game ended up featuring cute models, weird bombs and a robot anime parodyAUTOMATON WESTVerity Townsend _The backstory for one of the newly translated games featured below!_ Subscribe to ROM! ## Patching In BlastEm hits 1.0 with "100% artisanal AI-free code" – After 13 years of development, Sega-focused emulator BlastEm hits a big milestone, now supporting Sega CD and 32X and CD+32X, the Sega Pico and Yamaha Copera, Game Gear, SG-1000 and SC-3000. There's an improved debugger that may prove quite helpful for hackers. The emulator's also no longer limited to x86, with ARM support a key part of the 1.0 release. "BlastEm today is made up of 100% artisanal AI-free code and I intend to keep it that way," writes developer Michael Pavone. "When it comes to commercial development for modern platforms, I get that ROI concerns make AI hard to ignore... Retro software developmpent is a different though. Much of this software is not particularly useful for any real work. People develop it for the challenge and the sense of personal achievement. If a computer does all the hard work, what's the point?" While Sony ditches discs, RPCS3 says hey, we can play from those – I have to say it's pretty funny, and perhaps a bit embarrassing, for a PS3 emulator to do more to support the survival of disc-based console games than the company that literally makes the game console... and the discs. "Recent changes to RPCS3 have extended direct disc drive play support from being Windows-only to also supporting Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, and have optimised install times for package installations from the disc drive," the RPCS3 team writes. You can find a list of supported Blu-ray drives on the wiki. Azahar squashes bugs, now warns you about mismatched save states – A QOL improvement for the 3DS emulator: it'll now let you know when your save states from an older build are incompatible with a newer one; until now, trying to use them would just crash the thing. You can now scale up to 18x original res (8K :O), and a range of rendering issues and game-specific problems have been cleaned up. ## Core Report The MiSTer has a Sega Model 1 core now, partially – No audio and one working game makes this one clearly a work in progress, and its implementation of the v60 CPU is from another dev's vibe coded project, so I'm a wee bit stand-offish about this one at the moment. But it definitely stands apart from the many AI-ported-from-MAME efforts in recent months, since the Sega Model 1 is in fact not fully implemented in MAME either. This has the potential to be a major MiSTer core if the arcade system ends up fully reverse-engineered. For now, it's a way to play Virtua Racing on mute. The future of update_all is shiny – Developer theypsilon continues improving the hell out of update_all, and recently showed off an upcoming UI overhaul that looks quite snazzy, with design language inspired by the Zaparoo Frontend. If you're a MiSTer purist, though, no need to fear: there will still be a classic UI option and update_all will remain command line-friendly, too. Check it out at the link! NeXT! – What do the MiSTer and Apple have in common? An appreciation for Steve Jobs' _other_ computer company, apparently. There's now a NeXT core for the MiSTer, built on top of the emulator Previous. So yes, the next NeXT is based on the Previous NeXT. Hope that clears everything up. ## Translation Station Madou Monogatari, Saturn style – We've seen the Sorcery Saga series 'round these parts before, and this Saturn RPG goes top-down for exploration and side-on for combat, instead of sticking to the old first-person dungeon crawler style. I don't think it belongs to the pantheon of sprite art Saturn games that make your jaw detach and clatter to the floor, but it's nonetheless a beloved series from Compile that now has one more entry filled in. Translator Maud is also a **_ROM_** regular and ain't laying a finger on AI; see her work on Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon and legendary shitty game Stargazers. Congrats to Maud on the hashbrown bowl. Kazetrigger's back with a bang: it's Sukuzki Bakuhatsu – What a couple weeks for recurring hacker/translators featured in this here newsletter! Hot off the release of Pixygarden, Kazetrigger (who also goes by Dothacktranslate) has put out a human-and-not-machine-translated patch for a quirky PS1 puzzle game. It's FMV heavy and there's not much in the way of in-game text, making it a fast project. It's also the epitome of an experimental PS1 game. Just scope this description: "Suzuki Bakuhatsu is an action puzzle game in which the player controls Suzuki (the daughter of a bomb demolitions expert), a woman whose has been tasked with disarming bombs that are disguised as normal everyday items." Umineko can now Cry on the PSP**** – I know nothing about this visual novel series except its connection to writer Ryukishi07, acclaimed for his work on it as well as the more recent Silent Hill f. I think people are pretty obsessed with them? Obsessed enough to create a project to translate Umineko's various releases, anyway, which is the script used in this PSP release. Speaking of **_ROM_** regulars, SnowyAria — who coincidentally worked on other Madou Monogotari games, but not the Saturn translation — was involved in helping hacker Kotcrab release this version of When They Cry. ## Good pixels > ghost in the shell / psx exact, 1997 > > [image or embed] > > — dvlsblsh (@devilsblush.bsky.social) September 13, 2026 at 3:34 PM > The Master System was my first system so enjoying brand new SMS games on 2026 is well worth celebrating on this #ScanlineSunday 💫 Razing Core 2026 - Bad Computer Master System Sony BVM A20 CRT 🟥🟩🟦 > > [image or embed] > > — Turom (@turom.me) September 13, 2026 at 4:12 PM > For #ScanlineSunday this week, I'll squeeze in a polycule roster of selectable characters from Hired Guns on Amiga. (RGB SCART, 13" flatscreen LG crt vhs combi) > > [image or embed] > > — Sasha's Retrobytes 🏳️‍⚧️ (@sharkabytes.bsky.social) September 14, 2026 at 2:54 AM > Participating on #ScanlineSunday for once Changeable Guardian Estique (Cat Hui Trading) NES (MiSTer via RGB) > > [image or embed] > > — nicole✨ (@renaryuugu.bsky.social) September 7, 2026 at 3:59 AM > Aqua GT (PS1) (2001) 4/4 > > [image or embed] > > — 📉𝙇𝙤𝙬-𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙮 📈𝙃𝙞𝙜𝙝-𝙍𝙚𝙨 (@lowpolyhighres.bsky.social) September 11, 2026 at 11:31 PM ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Also in this issue: Concluded at long last, the Super Famicom Robot Wars have.

readonlymemo.comChasing the Blue DragonBlue Dragon is here! Blue Dragon is here! This issue is going to be just a tad bit leaner than usual, as I'm off traveling for my first honest-to-god extended vacation in more than a year. But I wasn't going to pass up the chance to dig into the first major, fully featured PC port to come out of ReXGlue, especially as lead developer Tom and I have been talking about his work on the project on and off since March. Dang, time flies! Consider this issue of **_ROM_** a part two (or a supplement) to my feature on the port on PC Gamer published on Wednesday. While that was an announcement of the port's imminent release and a breakdown of what its whole deal is for the general PC gaming audience, this newsletter will of course be for da sickos interested in a bit more of the technical stuff. Blue Dragon is finally free from the Xbox 360: a fantastic PC port unlocks the FPS, goes 4K, and moreThis Xbox 360 recompilation proves how good fan ports can be when they aren’t vibe-coded.PC GamerWes Fenlon Not featured in-depth in this issue, but way too big a deal to skip over, is this late-breaking bit of news: the completely AI-free Donkey Kong 64 recomp surprise dropped on Saturday. Don't ask me which one you should play first! I'm also unsure if someone needs to be flogged or applauded for naming it "Rekongpiled." GitHub - Rainchus/Donkey-Kong-64-RecompiledContribute to Rainchus/Donkey-Kong-64-Recompiled development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubRainchus Read on for a quick Super Famicom translation spotlight and some PC-98 art to see us out. Oh, and you can play Third Strike on your MiSTer now. A non-slop version. Nice. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. Re:Blue is here, so let's spend a little more time talking about ReXGlue's first landmark release ReXGlue may have technically been available on GitHub for most of the year, but in a sense it's _properly_ launching this week, with Blue Dragon PC port re:Blue showing just what the toolset is capable of. This is the first Xbox 360 port since Sonic Unleashed kicked this whole phenomenon off to feature a native renderer and all the bells and whistles you could realistically ask for — and probably a few more that you wouldn't even think to. Here's the link, if you missed it. ReXGlue creator Tom isn't himself a Blue Dragon superfan, though he played and enjoyed the game back on the 360. He saw it and its undocumented engine as an ideal challenge for a meaty ReXGlue project, but he also had a superfan ready to work as his right-hand man. "The people I met, like rcold and InfernoZotza, were great to work with. And their passion for the game and the history behind it, wanting to make something cool, really inspired me and drove me to finish this," he said. rcold hadn't programmed "a day in his life" before jumping into re:Blue, and is currently getting his PhD in aerospace engineering. But he's loved Blue Dragon for years, and before long was knee deep in RenderDoc helping bugfix and spot differences between the in-progress PC port and the original game. "I was really working with intuition," he says. "I presented Tom with one of my Python scripts to reverse-engineer the 3D model files or textures, etc. It was a total mess, but fortunately Tom did not stop at that first impression and taught me a lot." rcold has been studying Blue Dragon for years, so when he saw the recompilation project kicking off, he knew he had to join in. Together they started taking Blue Dragon apart, and soon started learning some fun tidbits about the engine. Here's Tom: > "The first thing a lot of people do in reverse-engineering is look at the strings that are embedded in the binary. That's what I did. It's pretty interesting, because this was a game developed by Japanese people, but it was handed off, I think, another company that specialized in localizing it for the global market. So there's a lot of romaji in there. You'll see stuff like 'fonction,' for example, had an O in it. I guess if somebody was speaking Japanese, that's how it would sound phonetically? There's a lot of funny stuff: one of the characters is named Kluke, and in the game code it's written like 'Crock'. As well as the pre-localization names, there are some pretty wild enemy names that you don't see because they were touched up by the English localization team. One of the locations is the Debbie Nest instead of Deeve." A big point of discussion around re:Blue, and ReXGlue more broadly, has been the distinction between using Xbox 360 emulator Xenia's backend for displaying the game's graphics and creating a native renderer. A key component of N64 Recompiled, for example, is RT64, which has been years in development. When Tom started work on Blue Dragon, he figured a lot of the work he did on it would be transferable to other 360 games. And there is still stuff that will feed back into the project, but not as neatly as he originally thought: > "Almost everything in re:Blue can be generalized in principle... But when it comes down to making it look nice and the features, that's all going to be game-specific." he said. "Every game you port tells the SDK where its seams are in the wrong place, and that was the biggest thing: where are these boundaries we've created in the SDK causing pinch points when people are using it to extend [Xbox 360 games]. It's meant to be the backbone, as well as provide for extensibility. Things that might look game-specific in one title might turn out to be a platform that belongs in ReXGlue. File I/O, input and device hot plugging, the list goes on. Those are things that generally turn out to be something that could be pulled back [into ReXGlue]. The end state is to basically have as much as we can generalized, but not _too_ general where it's still enforcing a specific paradigm and how you use it." rcold added that they got very lucky with Blue Dragon because they found a number of debug menus that help them test how different maps loaded, toggle on and off shaders and effects, and more. Ultimately that sort of testing is critical to a quality PC port. Some before and after shots of issues Tom fixed with Blue Dragon's native renderer re:Blue's native renderer was actually up and running, and in good shape, within a couple months. But it took far longer to make it really shine "and not still look like an Xbox 360 game" on PC. "It was arguably correct, but it didn't look good," Tom said. Bloom, specular intensity, and gamma all had to be adjusted because the expectations for displays were so different 20 years ago. They wrote new shaders to fix some rendering bugs. With those major issues solved, many of the port's fancier features were then driven by playtester feedback. The mod tools that rcold and Tom collaborated on was "probably harder than the entirety of the recompilation:" > "That's what we bonded over. Cold has the skeleton key of knowledge, if you will. That is madman stuff. If you ever ask anybody how they feel about reverse-engineering mesh formats, it is a nightmare. [But] yeah, we call it Shadow Forge, it's a fully featured toolset for extracting the models, textures, we can import brand new models with animations. We're able to decompile all the scene scripting and recompile and put it in. There's a custom mod loader that works in-game. It's essentially a fancy overlay: think Skyrim or Fallout where you've got a mod list and it loads the mods in order." rcold added that they could add a whole new dungeon to the game, or rebalance it or change the AI behaviors, which I can imagine there being demand for considering Blue Dragon's notoriously easy on its default difficulty. Speaking of AI: that was a reference to Blue Dragon's monsters, but of course we talked about the generative stuff, too. Boo, hiss, etc. But it felt important in this case, since Blue Dragon is _the_ big proving ground for ReXGlue. Back in July Tom put out a statement in the ReXGlue Discord not banning AI or castigating developers for using it, but articulating that its use can take harm the advancement of the recompilation scene if vibe coders don't know what their agents are doing, while also making the project look bad. I asked how he's currently feeling about generative AI and "vibe coded" recompilation/decompilation efforts as the creator of a tool that several people have chosen to use in that way. "As a fellow gamer, it's very annoying, because people like when this stuff comes out, and to always be disappointed, it makes you feel, wow, is any of this shit worthwhile? It puts a bad taste in a lot of people's mouth, I think, especially when they see it came from my project," he said. As the maintainer of ReXGlue, Tom discourages using AI, but also says he understands it: > "I always say 'keep it in your own backyard.' Ship it outward only when you're certain of what you've got. The problem isn't that the model wrote it: the problem is when nobody can tell you why it's correct, why it doesn't run, or why it _might_ be correct. It's very frustrating. It's one thing to get a 1 or 2 line fix that's trivial end-to-end. I can look at it and go 'yup, looks good.' And at that point I don't really care who wrote it. If it's right, it's right. If somebody put effort into finding an issue and resolving it, if they used AI to help, I don't think that should be a knock against them. > > But on the other hand, a pull request with hundreds of thousands of lines, most of them being generated comments, that's not very reviewable by anybody. It's frustrating. So I disapprove the mass garbage pumping out, but I don't disapprove using it as a tool; we've got to be real with the age we live in that it can be a very helpful tool. But it's all about responsible use." That answer won't be popular with folks who'd prefer to see a hardline stance against AI, which would be my preference, too, given who currently owns and stands to profit from these tools, how the LLMs were created, and their potential environmental impact. Tom and I agreed, though, on how many issues can stand in the way of generative AI use actually being responsible. When I brought up the N64 Recompiled project's stance against using AI for, among other reasons, how difficult it will make projects to maintain long-term, he said using it is actually "even more dangerous than that." "Emulation and recompilation in general is a hostile domain for generated code because ground truth lives in the assembly. The disassembly you're looking at to make the emulation make sense, that's something a model never sees. It's never trained on that stuff. So to try to get it to understand in the moment, it might do a pretty good job based on what it knows about reverse-engineering, generate output that compiles, looks idiomatic, and nothing is confidently wrong in its default failure mode. It _looks_ fine. In most software, a bad guess produces an error. Here, it's subtly wrong for the entirety that it's in the codebase until somebody realizes it was a bad edit." Likewise, he sees the AI pull requests with miles of comments as irresponsible if someone can't explain what it's doing and why, as is so often the case. While Tom wants to give some benefit of the doubt to current AI tools being trained on open source software, following those projects' stated licenses, and essentially resembling a large scale version of how he got his own start as a programmer by copy/pasting code from Stack Overflow as he learned, he knows that the lack of transparency around the tech makes that all unclear. "I'm hoping some of the new regulatory things that are in play will help discern that line, but only time will tell," he said. "It's such a new thing. "I wouldn't be where I'm at today if it weren't for the guys who took the time to do it right and give me an example to look at and to drive future improvements off of. In my mind that's always been the goal of open source. Somebody makes something cool, and you build on it. I think that's what's founded a lot of the great software in our time, that collaboration and building — not shitting out something that is just a Frankenstein of a bunch of other peoples' repositories put together in a way that mathematically is correct, but is not correct in terms of how we do things." As of the time this newsletter's going out, he's been spending the weekend hard at work on fixes unearthed by the wider range of players jumping into re:Blue with the arrival of 1.0. Check out the nightly releases from GitHub for the latest and greatest. Releases · zolaware/reblueRecompilation of Blue Dragon. Contribute to zolaware/reblue development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubzolaware * * * ### 2. Finishing the Super Robot Wars "To be honest I don't remember when this one started. I have individual text dump files with 'modified' dates in 2005, but that may or may not be accurate," says longtime romhacker Gideon Zhi. A few days ago, he published his _eighth_ fan translation of a Super Robot Wars game, this one capping off a run of the tactical RPG series' mainline series on the Super Famicom. There are so, so many of these games, and long before they started getting consistent official releases in the west, Aeon Genesis was carrying the torch for them. Aeon Genesis ~ Super Robot Wars 4 Super Robot Wars 4 concludes a sort of trilogy with 2 & 3, released in 1991 and 1993, and it introduces some features that would wind up sticking around: "SRW4 is interesting because it's the first game in the series that lets players create their own main character insert," says Gideon. "There's name entry, gender, character portrait, personality archetype, birthday, blood type, and whether they pilot a real or super robot (which the player also gets to name and pick the color scheme for.) Name entry limits for both character and robot were a significant challenge for this one that none of the earlier games had. AFAIK only 4, F/FF, and Alpha go quite this far — future games still have main character selections but they're all generally pretty well pre-defined. From a technical challenge perspective there's also the karaoke mode, which had unique discovery work around highlight re-timing for romanized lyrics, and there's animation on the title screen that had to be redone as well. SRW4 also adds new mechanical features that remain to this day. The big one is that during the enemy turn phase, when one of your units gets attacked you can pick whether to counter, evade, or defend; prior games just let you specify orders for your entire squad that were carried out automatically. SRW4 also adds database entries for background and trivia on all included characters and robots, something that a lot of the following games continued to feature." As far back as 2018 Gideon was posting progress updates for Super Robot Wars 4, but it's finally done thanks to help from a team including translator TheMajinZenki, a frequent collaborator on the series. Another member of the scene also helped this one finally get over the finish line. "BobSchneeder45 (Clock Tower hacker) is credited on asm assistance –– he helped diagnose and fix a pre-existing race condition in the game's battle scene engine that would cause soft-locks when strings were too long, a consequence of the proportional font print routine taking longer to render than the original text display routine," Gideon says. Next up: Crime Crackers!? Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In shadps4 v0.18.0 - codename UltraPersona is more itself than ever – Get it? Ahem. Broken video playback in some games now works properly, and an issue crashing Shadow of the Colossus has been fixed. "Another big feature is the experimental red zone protection, which fixes an issue specific to 12th generation and onwards Intel CPUs exclusively on Windows, that was causing crashes and other undefined behaviour in lots of games that were not expecting to have their stacks' red zone clobbered by Windows exception handling," writes developer George Moralis. "A few more fixes on GPU are included, such as fixing shadows in Persona games, or some effects in inFAMOUS and Gravity Rush 2." **Switch emulation still has its paradise** – Despite the recent hubbub around Nintendo DMCAing a bunch of Yuzu forks on GitHub, the real surviving Switch emulation projects continue. Eden, for example, is quite active, just not on GitHub. Most of the commits are above my head, but a recent one that stood out to me was improved image quality on mobile when using Snapdragon Game Super Resolution upscaling. Another improved the carousel library view, and another fixed the software keyboard in Monster Hunter Generations. Nice to see that Eden has a strict AI policy: "No LLM or AI usage, *period*, for patches, pull requests, issues, comments, debugging, brainstorming, etc." Ares now supports the Atari 5200 – The multi-system emulator takes on another console, including save states and support for the CX53 Trak-Ball, which, if you haven't seen it, is an absolute unit. * * * ## Core Report Third Strike at last – Jotego's CPS3 beta core finally arrives at _the_ game. Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. Now playable for Patreon supporters, eventually for everyone. A little trivia from Jotego: "Third Strike is the biggest game supported by a JT core so far. The stream file from your SD card to the FPGA is 82,432 KiB. Before including CPS3, this honor fell onto Vampire Savior, with 45,320 KiB. Third Strike is almost twice as large. The smallest game we have in the catalogue is Konami's Ping-Pong 48 KiB (2,000 times smaller)." Neo Geo Pocket Color gets a new core – Developer Kitrinx released a new core for the handheld, though it's not the first — Jotego had one in the works awhile back. For the moment I'll leave it to the Neo Geo heads out there to determine what the improvements are here, but this one support savestates and cheats, so some fundamentals are covered. > Kitrinx developed a new Neo Geo Pocket core for MiSTer FPGA. Check it out! pic.twitter.com/NJISzZljAz > > — Porkshop Express (@MisterAddons) August 24, 2026 **MiSTer's SNES core saves saves in Mega Man X2/3** – Contributor Fred B. Night added savestate support for SNES games that use Capcom's CX4 co-processor, used in the second and third Mega Man X games on the console. This sweet chip is (I assume) a major reason why those games are so damn expensive. * * * ## Translation Station Not-so-innocent PC-98 RPG Innocent Tour gets the deluxe treatment – An impressively robust translation effort here from a pair of translators to tackle this '90s boardgame RPG _and_ recreate a whole manual telling you how to play it, complete with B&W screenshots. Note that, like practically every PC-98 game, this is a naughty one, so I particularly appreciate this option for the translation patch: "For the Patch file, pick the downloaded file Eng.ips (regular PC-98 version) or EngCensored.ips (PC-98 version using censored graphics from the Korean DOS version)." Some art from it down below! **Become a Pachi-Pro with Pachi-kun** – Longtime translation scene member Filler translated the script for this Famicom pachinko game way back in 2019, but only got around to turning it into a patch recently. Note that they used Codex AI for "Technical implementation" and "script insertion." Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist gets thoroughly translated – This Game Boy Color Yu-Gi-Oh! game got its first English translation last year with the official compilation Konami released on Steam etc., but fan nyuu was working on their own patch beforehand, and just kept on trucking. They put an impressive amount of work into it, including a whole-ass companion website and some nuances that I'm sure make it different from the official release: _"We have attempted to preserve context and feel. So: Japanese names rather than localized ones, generally keeping onomatopoeia and sound effects, maintaining speech patterns, and declining cultural substitution. We do one class of deviation. Sometimes the base text is ambiguous or even flatly wrong. So, when writing a card’s effect-text, we take into account what the effect**actually** does and describe **that**. When “deviating”, we still try to preserve what we can; many of these rules-texts have flavor or voice that can be used while not-misleading."_ **Rezel Cross gets an A+ for human effort** – A poster on the RetroGameTalk forums recently shared their translation for Rezel Cross, saying "I'm really proud because I did it 100% myself — without any AI! I even rewrote the text three times because I just wasn't satisfied with it." Hell yeah to that — though a quick look at their screenshots of the PSP RPG makes me think this one might need some more polishing. They're also currently distributing it as a patched ISO of the whole game, which prooobably needs to change. Hopefully some folks chip in for an edit pass! * * * ## Good pixels Non-translated images via PC98.org ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. 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Time to go deep on PS2 oddities! Also in this issue of ROM: A detailed look at the translations of Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode, Kamaitachi no Yoru, and London Spirit Detectives. https://readonlymemo.com/pcsx2-stuntman-fork-interview-dirge-of-cerberus-translation/

readonlymemo.com25 years into PCSX2's life, Stuntman is finally playable — and that's the tip of the iceberg for a new fork focused on "the issues on the edge of emulating the PS2"Also in this issue of ROM: A detailed look at the translations of Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode, Kamaitachi no Yoru, and London Spirit Detectives.
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This week @index@aftermath.site wrote a detailed look at some recent AI-free fan translations, particularly digging into the importance of SNES visual novel Kamaitachi no Yoru. Go read it! https://aftermath.site/kamaitachi-no-yoru-london-spirit-detectives-kownloons-gate-innocent-tears/

aftermath.siteFan Translations Still Are Being Done The Hard WayKamaitachi no Yoru, London Spirit Detectives, Kowloon’s Gate and Innocent Tears are getting their spotlight in the west thanks to fan-translations done without AI.
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Hands-on with Console Mode, plus an interview with the team behind a new fan translation of Japanese Xbox RPG Innocent Tears.

readonlymemo.comThe MiSTer Console Mode is finally here, and it's every bit the UI I hoped it would beHey folks! This issue is coming in a touch late, as I wanted to get a good amount of time in with Taki Udon's first public Console Mode release after its months hanging out in beta land, and my schedule has been nuts-o lately. But it's here! Instead of prattling on about this and that at the start, I'm gonna stop wasting time and get right into it. Let's talk USER INTERFACES! ## The Big Two ### 1. The MiSTer's Console Mode is here at last Beta no more!!! After months of testing, and months of his SuperStation One MiSTer being out in the wild, Taki Udon's Console Mode frontend for the FPGA system is now available for all to use. It's stable, it's fast, and it's almost exactly the MiSTer interface I was hoping for. Installing Console Mode is easy, at least from a fresh install. Because I already have an SD card used to test the Zaparoo Frontend, I opted to go for a separate card and start from scratch with the Console Mode image on Taki's GitHub. In Windows I just flashed it to my SD card, then stuck that card in the SuperStation and turned it on. I got a black screen, which is normal — at least right now, on an HDTV connected via HDMI the system won't output a signal while the installer is running. I had faith, waited about 15 minutes, and when I glanced over it was alive and well. Console Mode is impressively flexible in terms of display options. It defaults to a list view for viewing your game library, with a list of names in a column on the left and box art appearing for the highlighted game on the right. There's also a typical grid view, a big grid view that's more CRT friendly, and two horizontally scrolling views inspired by the Switch and PS4 that are each quite nice. Taki's favorite is the latter, SS4, and I can see why. It makes the leftmost, highlighted game art bigger, with a slick animation as you swap to the next entry in the library. If you tend to blaze full speed through hundreds of games, there's an option to turn off that animation for faster performance. I tried it both ways, and didn't see any reason to leave the animation off: performance seems quite good at 1080p60. That's been my biggest surprise with Console Mode in general after trying the Zaparoo Frontend: This thing is fast. Unfortunately all my screenshots came out of the MiSTER garbled, so I'm using a few representative ones from Taki's GitHub. Style-wise, I much prefer the aesthetic of Console Mode to Zaparoo's iconography; I quickly switched from black to the pleasant blue background color. If I had to draw a line between the two, I guess I'd say that Console Mode _feels_ more like a game console, while the Zaparoo's look is more... 2010s Android icon pack? Both accomlish the goal of making the MiSTer much more approachable for those turned off by the sytem's basic DOS-era menu. Both frontends place a menu item in the MiSTer's default UI that lets you boot back into them, and both also can smoothly load on boot, making it so that at least 90% of your time with the MiSTer can now be spent using a graphical interface. Enough fiddly things around the edges remain that I don't think the MiSTer is yet a system for someone who wants the simplicity of, say, turning on a Game Boy and booting a game off an original cart. But considering the funky error codes I've occassionally run into when troubleshooting an Xbox Series X and the mild circle of hell that is dealing with that UI, I think just about anyone who spends time with a modern console could now brave a MiSTer and survive. And that's an exciting place for the system to be, especially with the SuperStation soon being able to run games off actual discs. Some MiSTer cores are starting to pop up that offer preliminary disc playback support; RetroAchivements recently arrived on the system; and both Console Mode and Zaparoo Frontend are open source, so we can (and will) soon see forks and improvements and alternate skins. I really appreciate some of Console Mode's little option touches, like switching from the 24-hour to 12-hour clock. Having a Fave button is great; so is the customizable History view, which shows you the last X number of games you've played. By default Console Mode does a great job of hiding the file and region extensions of game names, but you can turn off one or the other if you want. And it's particularly nice being able to hide games from the library, rather than deleting them, if you think you might someday care about comparing the US and European versions of the same game. I switched off "background artwork," which is a screenshot that will pop in a couple seconds after you've highlighted a game. It's a nice feature in theory but I don't think works too well in execution; the wait is _just_ long enough to be unsatisfying, though it's better than flashbanging yourself with screenshots while you fast scroll. The biggest problem is the default scraped screens tend to be quite ugly and poorly scaled to fullscreen, though you can use your own custom screenshots which would certainly look much better. Speaking of scraping artwork: It's built in and works quite well, but good lord is it _slow_. If you use the MiSTer's update_all list to download loads of arcade cores, expect to leave the system running all night to download all the artwork, and then give the system another full hour to run its optimization process — a separate menu option — to ensure everything stays snappy. I suspect this is a limitation of the hardware moreso than a limitation of Console Mode, but either way it's that classic bummer experience of getting a new device and then realizing you have hours of updates to download before you can use it. Console Mode works perfectly fine without the artwork, of course, but why use a GUI without the G? There are still a few key features missing from this initial Console Mode release that are stopping me from calling it the definitive MiSTer interface right now: * CIFS (aka NAS) support for loading games over the network * "It just works" support for seamlessly merging game folders from the SD card and a USB drive — Console Mode didn't see my USB SSD's games, for some reason * A display mode that includes metadata like a game's developer, year, genre, etc. * Sorting/viewing by genre or other tags, and by played/unplayed * A more customizable "home screen" The first bullet point there is a biggy, but Taki says CIFS support is already in the pipe for Console Mode's next update, so it may be here very soon (there's technically already a workaround, but it seems more trouble than it's worth). Once that feature is live, I expect more folks in the MiSTer scene with big game libraries to _really_ start testing Console Mode. And there's already a custom theme for Console Mode with the metadata stuff I'd like to see, which is rad — though unfortunately this one is made with AI and full of AI art that bums me out. Still, it bodes well for the future. I'd say the same goes for Console Mode in general. It may have taken longer than expected to get here, and it still has some little issues. I really like the SS4 layout, for example, but it isn't properly scaling artwork when enlarged, resulting in blurry images. But overall Console Mode does a nigh-miraculous job of running stably and smoothly on hardware never designed to run this sort of UI, while accomodating HD screens and all sorts of analogue displays (even interlaced, even rotated!). For Taki, I imagine getting this out into the world feels like crossing a finish line. For everyone who's now free to contribute, mod, and fork Console Mode, it's the crack of a starting pistol. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ ### 2. In kusoge, can any Tears truly be Innocent? There I was, all set to make this issue's second feature about a fan translation for Mahjaventure: Warring Tiles, a cute mahjong-slash-adventure game for the Famicom, when translator SnowyAria went and released a _second_ patch this week. And this one, Innocent Tears, is for the Xbox, home to far fewer untranslated Japanese rarities. As you may (should) expect from the translator behind Ancient Roman, it's a weird, messy, and ultimately charming game, and this translation has been in the works for several years. "The vibe it puts off right at the start definitely pulled me in," says SnowyAria. "I'm a bit of a sucker for angels and demons in a dark setting. ... It's not often I have to dig deep into Christian Apocrypha to figure out what on Earth is going on in the plot of a game!" Hmm. Well, that doesn't sound all that weird or messy. To the trailer, then! Some more odd details about Innocent Tears, as compiled by blogger Renne: * It was supposed to release on the Dreamcast in 2000 before ultimately arriving on the Xbox in late 2002 * Artist Hiroyuki Utatane is better known for drawing adult (yes, that kind of adult) doujinshi * "For reasons that aren’t particularly clear, the people that remain in the devastated Tokyo area now belong to three distinct groups: angels, fallen angels, and humans. In an imperfect rock-paper-scissors configuration, the angels are hungry and eat humans; the fallen angels, upset about the human consumption thing, hunt angels; and the humans, who are just kind of confused and upset about things, attack anything that moves." It looks like a budget, but at least basically competent, strategy game. At least, from the outside. But hacker Yuvi found something a bit different when he went poking around in the code to implement SnowyAria's translation. "This game might be one of the few Xbox games to do something I have never seen," he says. "Most Xbox games have only 1 XBE file, which is where all the main code is and handles everything for the game. But Innocent Tears had to be special because it has 6 XBEs. So this game for every type of thing it did would have a new XBE. You load the title screen that's its own XBE, saving and loading, battle system, map system, visual novel system, and status menu system all their own XBE. When I first looked at this game nearly 3 years ago I was like, this is brutal.... But with enough time, courage, and research I dug deep, and figure out how to get these XBE to bend to my will." Yuvi says Innocent Tears was "an absolute nightmare" to translate because all of the game's files, other than images, sounds, and movies were stored inside one of those XBEs. Whenever they needed to modify something, they had to go rooting around in an executable, where even tiny changes have the potential to crash the game. Worse, it meant that any universal changes they wanted to make with the patch — like adding a custom English font — had to be carefully implemented in each executable. That meant six times the workload: > "The game essentially had 6 different executables it would jump between at any given time. I was able to expand the XBE by roughly 10 megabytes, which gave me plenty of room to work with for each XBE to fit all the new English script, and all the custom code required to make it functional and work for the English market. We ended up having to adjust the UI a lot, as it was misaligned for English characters, and too long to fit with all the work we were doing. > > "Everything required me finding the position values inside of the XBEs for each executable we needed to move graphics, text position or anything to make it all look proper. > > "The nightmare scenario being you have to repeat the same thing 6 times, because the code and functions between them were not always the same. So it was manual effort to find it all." Both Aria and Yuvi mentioned how much fun they had working on the translation thanks to the developer's comments they found leftover in the code. The whole script was contained in one giant file, with commented out asides next to dialogue like "I'm terribly sorry, but this script has been moved to offset 4134." "I loved trying to get into the character writing voices for everyone," SnowyAria says. "Most of the cast are crass young adults, so a lot of lines are pretty flippant and edgy (like Kagari trying to fluster Haruaki by saying 'Wanna go bang one out?'). Haruaki's constantly sarcastic, which was a fun challenge trying to get just right while still giving the same feeling the Japanese audience would get. For the priest Father Johannes, I ran most of the lines by a friend who grew up in a heavily Christian family to try and get the feeling right there. Hopefully he comes off as authentic when people play! Claude was your typical arrogant twit, which I personally adore writing arrogant and pompous dialogue for. (That and I can appreciate beating the tar out of a jerk named Claude in 2026, oddly cathardic)." Like Mahjaventure released just a few days before, Innocent Tears' listing on Romhack.ing includes what seems to be Aria's new slogan, a fitting one for the present moment and for her taste in quirky games: > _"No AI was used for this patch. Only genuine stupidity."_ RHDIClassic game mods and resources "The original Xbox honestly has so many good Japanese exclusives we never got, and I love to keep being a part of the team that brings them to English speaking audiences," Yuvi says to wrap things up. "So I’m really looking forward to bringing more one day. Tenerezza, another Japanese exclusives for OG Xbox is in the works and the hacking is complete, the translation just needs to be finished. So I cannot wait for that to come out." Subscribe to ROM! ## Patching In LaserActive Ares core fixed up – Some recent changes to how multi-system emulator Ares works with discs broke the LaserActive core's handling of LaserDisc games, but those issues have now been corrected across a couple updates. Developer Nemesis has also fixed some bugs discovered by testing more recently ripped games, including "a video mixing issue which affected graphics in the Demon's Judgement LDRom2 game for the Pioneer LaserActive with the NEC PAC." Yaba Sanshiro gets a new rendering engine on PC, fixes loads of games – The Sega Saturn emulator's been getting a new update every few days in the back half of July, with some major improvements first coming in v1.20.25 for the Android version: "Overhauled emulation timing accuracy for much closer real-hardware behavior," "Refined CPU memory access, cache behavior, and bus control to match real hardware," and "More accurate CD-ROM read/seek timing, bringing load and FMV playback closer to real hardware." Then in v120.29, Windows got its "rendering engine renewed to a Vulkan-based asynchronous architecture, unifying behavior with other platforms." Quite a few games that would freeze or crash on startup have also been fixed. ShadPS4 v0.17.0 introduces archived game support, preliminary online features – The rocket ship PS4 emulator now has its own network support backend, which doesn't mean games are playable online yet, but _does_ set the ground work for that being possible in the future. More immediately exciting: a whole host of updates across interface, kernel, graphics, memory, and more that mark steady accuracy progress. And here's a big win for ease-of-use: "Forget the 20.000 files per game you can now use ZArchive files for compressing games and having them in 1 file instead of hundreds." Vita3K gets nicer Linux builds – What it says on the tin. And we love a better Linux build around here if it means one fewer reason to use Windows, right? Dolphin gets better controller support on (Flatpak) Linux – A Dolphin dev recently noted that its Flatpak build was shipping with an oudated version of the SDL controller library that meant "Flatpak users currently miss out on a lot of controller support, notably for Switch 2 controllers and the Steam Controller," so that's now been brought up to speed with the other versions of the emulator. ## Core Report Updater gets new databases and uninstalling – MiSTer cores sorted into databases can now be uninstalled as groups, with those various databases listed here. This includes databses for systems that support loading from physical discs, and a number of new hybrid cores, including DreamSTer, that are partially running via software emulation on the ARM chip, and partially FPGA recreation. N64 MiSTer core now supports the 64DD – Including mouse support and a RTC so Animal Forest works. Time to get your Doshin the Giant on? **Jotego keeps calling out AI MiSTer cores, and I'm here for it** – How much does it suck trying to separate quality human-made cores from hastily made AI ones, right now? _It sucks a lot_. > AI slop has three negative effects on the #MiSTerFPGA > 1. Turns the platform into a second class MAME, that tries to emulate what the emulator does. > 2. Drives human talent away > 3. Discourages research > > — jotego (@topapate) July 27, 2026 ## Translation Station Surging Aura surges into English and Korean after 30 years – A white whale translation patch for '90s Sega Genesis kids who wanted more RPGing after Phantasy Star IV. They got it, with a lot of purple and some gorgeous sprites... at least in Japan. Attempted translations of this one have started and stopped for decades, but one finally crossed the finish line, thanks to hacker Sparkstar carrying on the work of prior hacker and translator RedComet and Guadozoku. Somewhat worryingly, Sparkstar (a native Korean speaker, hence the English/Korean combo here) had originally used ChatGPT to translate the game into English, before inserting the script from Guadozoku — so as far as I can tell, it's the real human deal. Fullmetal Alchemist 3: The Girl Who Succeeds God transmutes Japanese into English – Congrats to Sonicman69 and the AGT team for the release of this previously unlocalized Square Enix action-RPG! This one has been in the works since Sonicman's release of another PS2 anime game, Cowboy Bebop, as featured in an earlier ROM. "While this game is the third in a trilogy of games, prior knowledge of the games is wholly unnecessary to enjoy the story, as they are only connected through references and not at all by plot. As long as you get the gist of the manga or either anime adaptation you shouldn’t be too lost," Sonicman writes. And yes, this one is completely AI free. A bright future for Brightis, with two translations – A 1999 action-RPG from Soul Blazer developer Quintet, Brightis saw a translation pop up on GitHub a week-ish ago, prompting a bit of confusion — it turned out to be a fork of a project from an existing group of devs that had been dormant for awhile, but happened to have recently resumed development. That situation has been resolved amicably: the fork by developer Wado is playable now, while the original project is still in active development and even got a callout on Wado's GitHub page. Nice! ## Good pixels Let's appreciate that Surging Aura spritework a bit more, shall we? ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Also this issue: Saturn, 3DS and N64 emulator updates and a translation of a PS2 Simple 2000 Series curio.

readonlymemo.com"Like chewing glass:" Why Kowloon's Gate was Hilltop's hardest hacking challenge ever, and also worth it: "It is such a singular experience"Hot off the presses, we've got a fun one this week! 24 hours after Hilltop and a team of contributors announced a translation of Kowloon's Gate, we hopped on a call to talk about one of those legendary PlayStation games that's long deserved to be playable by more people. I'm excited to share some of the story about how this patch came together. As with any fan translation for a game of this size and complexity, we could go on and on about the localization, the hacking, and the game itself. This issue mostly focuses on the unique language challenges of a Japanese game based on Chinese culture, as well as the brutal hacking challenge it presented. Hopefully the English translation spurs a whole lot more writing about why the game itself is a fascinating '90s cyberpunk adventure, when that word meant something darker and frankly cooler than it does these days. More Johnny Mnemonic: In Black & White than, idk, The Surge or Cloudpunk or any game that hitches too much of its identity to neon. This is already a long issue, so I'll hop to it — with just a small programming note that two weekends from now I'll likely be at Summer Game Fest in LA, so **_Read Only Memo_** might be delayed a week. Never fear! Different Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. How the English translation of PS1 cult classic Kowloon's Gate came to be Translator Cargodin has me all figured out. Twenty minutes into my Discord interview with her and hacker Hilltop, two members of an all-star team toiling away at an English translation of 1997 art piece/FMV adventure/dungeon crawler Kowloon's Gate, she spoke aloud the headline that was already orbiting in my mind. "People that are fans of Hilltop are going to see 'I love this game. There's nothing like it, dot dot dot: I had to eat glass.' People are going to be like, I need to see the game that made Hilltop eat glass." "Playing the game is also a bit like eating glass," Hilltop interjected. "It's like eating the glass dust — it's not quite as bad." But let's back up. On Friday, Hilltop announced that his next fan translation patch, coming June 9th, is Kowloon's Gate. It's a 1997 game for the PlayStation published by Sony Music, the more experimental publishing arm of the game company. It's set in Hong Kong's famous Kowloon Walled City, which in the game's bizarro cyberpunk world has reappeared despits its demolition several years earlier. It was, you'll be unsurprised to find after watching this trailer, never released outside Japan. More than five years ago, Cargodin and her hacking partner EsperKnight started working on the game, but it was clear from the start it wouldn't be easy. First, there's the setting: Kowloon's Gate is peppered with Cantonese and even has some characters who speak Vietnamese. Second, there's the programming. "At every possible step when the developers could take a shortcut and do a one-off thing with a band-aid, they did it," said Hilltop. "The game is really, really, really resistant to being subtitled. This is the most difficult project that I've ever worked on, period." Hilltop got involved about a year ago, after EsperKnight had done some of the initial hacking and Cargodin and other contributors had made progress on the script. Even getting to that point was, as it often is with fan translations, a long-term on-and-off process. As Cargodin explained, there's a common misconception that 2017 VR prequel Kowloon's Gate VR Suzaku — which _did_ get an official English translation and release — lets you experience the original game, so there's no need to play (or contribute to) a fan translation. But the VR game is basically just a photo gallery, letting you briefly step back into the world. It's no replacement for the real thing. Eventually Cargodin did find someone online interested in translating Kowloon's Gate: someone named _dk, who had posted about it way back in 2016. Five years later, EsperKnight's early hacking progress was proving that a patch should be possible, so she messaged _dk to see if he was still interested. It was a longshot, but he was. "I tried, in my naïveté, to translate it all by myself and learn about romhacking as I went along, which was why I started asking questions online about it," _dk told me. "I was quickly humbled, but those posts became how Cargodin found me. It's funny how that worked out!" _dk was born in Hong Kong, though he didn't grow up there. After moving away at a young age, he turned to media from and about Hong Kong as a way of connecting to it, and was particularly fascinated with the Walled City. When he came across a video of Kowloon's Gate from a Japanese Let's Player, he thought it did a surprisingly good job of "making the Walled City feel like a real lived place despite dialing up the mysticism to 11." "Most other pieces of media just treat it as a cool looking set!" he said. His translation attempt started because he wanted more players to be able to experience the game, which still has a passionate following in Japan decades later despite initially poor sales. After the last few years of combined effort to do the game justice, he praised Cargodin's commitment to accuracy. She's a bit more self-deprecating about her role. "Here's my lexicon, the dictionary and stuff I've been writing for it, would you like to critique it?" Cargodin remembers messaging to _dk when she first started working on the translation. "And he went, sure. And he completely ripped it apart. I was absolutely decimated. But I was also starry-eyed. I'm like, 'this is good.' Because I _love_ when someone can actually just brutalize something I wrote. That's how I know there is freak to be matched there." Together they collaborated on translating Kowloon's Gate's unique blend of Japanese and Chinese; _dk handled all the Cantonese, with his personal experience informing how to interpret the character dialects and giving Cargodin the resources she needed to learn more. He said that it's clear the developers spent time in Hong Kong researching for the game, which shows in the pronunciation guides they built in for Japanese players: > "It was easier for me as a speaker of Cantonese and Mandarin to tell which dialect the devs meant to use when they put the katakana in the game. My local knowledge of Hong Kong also helped in recognizing some of the landmarks that the devs referenced. For example, there is a dungeon named 遮打苑, with the katakana pronunciation チャーターコート given. A direct translation would've been 'Charter Court' but I recognized 遮打 as the name of an actual park in Hong Kong, and realized that it should be named 'Chater Court' because it was named after a British colonial officer. > > More generally, translating the game's Cantonese into English could be a hurdle to those who are not familiar with Hong Kong. Cantonese has at least two major romanization schemes academically but you'd almost never encounter them in the wild. Instead, what you see as English translations of names in Hong Kong is more haphazard, almost pidgin-like. Cargodin really wanted to make sure we portrayed this part of Hong Kong authentically." "It's a completely different game from what I played just looking at it from Japanese text, to English," Cargodin said. "So I'm very grateful to this whole experience." After EsperKnight had to step away from the project, Hilltop decided to help get it over the finish line, despite having looked at it from afar as something he "didn't want to touch with a 10-foot-pole" because it was so complicated. There were still lots of bugs to sort out, and unlike many games, which have singular systems for, say, rendering dialogue or video subtitles, Kowloon's Gate is not so neat and tidy. "The stuff that's going on to make the subtitles work is labyrinthine and difficult and arbitrary," Hilltop said. "You cannot stumble your way through Kowloon's Gate — it's really technically demanding. You need to understand how videos are rendered on screen, how the PS1 cuts up videos into strips and renders slices at a time, how to blit data onto and image before it's loaded onto the framebuffer to make everything work, and how to load your own font. There were no shortcuts. ... It's like chewing glass all the way through. You have all these different, tiny permutations of what to do when you want to display an image and have a voice play. There are dozens of variations that they just use for like, one scene." "It's definitely an art piece that got made into a game, not a game that tries to be an art piece," Cargodin added. Hilltop is a fan of the experimental stuff Sony Music was publishing on PlayStation at the time, but stressed that Kowloon's Gate isn't just a curio that's interesting because it's odd. The music itself is good. The voice acting is good. And despite his joke that playing it is also a bit like eating glass dust, he loves the challenge of hacking. He took time off work — where he also does comparable hacking at a game dev studio — to get it done. "And it was worth it," he said. Just the process of getting to the original Japanese text was trickier than usual. Every single text box — Cargodin estimated there were about 3,000 across Kowloon's Gate's four discs — was its own individual document. Kowloon's Gate also featured some characters speaking Vietnamese, which in-game wasn't even written out — it would just say something like [Speaking Vietnamese], which most Japanese players wouldn't be able to understand. The team recruited volunteers Neutronoid and Ninkintn to transcribe the speech by ear and add it into the game in written Vietnamese; they had to manually add a font that could display the language's diacritics correctly. English-speaking players still get the experience of hearing (and now also reading) a conversation they likely don't understand, but as a bonus an English translation of that text from Neutronoid and Ninkintn will also be included in the patch's readme. The same goes for an in-game TV program called Happy Hour you can watch; it's plastered with Cantonese graphics and looping audio that gives you little clues and hints about the game world. That sounds like something you'd want translated within the game, but remember that a Japanese player at the time likely wouldn't understand the Cantonese, either; putting a translation in the readme keeps the English patch faithful to the original experience. (It was also _yet another_ one-of-a-kind system Hilltop would've had to hack in subtitles for). They ran into some fearsome bugs as they worked to insert all the translated text, and bugs that were already present in the shipping game made playtesting trickier. At one point they discovered that making a specific character's name too long, in English, made it so you could no longer interact with them using the Circle button. You had to press Triangle — _which is otherwise_ _never used in Kowloon's Gate._(The extra characters in the name were, somehow, corrupting the scripting logic). In one of its strangest design decisions, the game would simply stop rendering new frames when audio was playing over a static image; Hilltop had to figure out how to make it keep rendering new frames so that they could draw subtitles as the audio played out. In just the last year, it's become increasingly common to see fan translations released by single hackers, largely relying on AI tools like Claude or Gemini to both hack the game and machine translate all the text. Hilltop already said his piece on that trend in a long essay. But he and Cargodin also see this proejct as proof of why that approach just fundamentally doesn't work for doing a game like this justice. Cargodin pointed to one of her favorite characters, Bowler Hat Man, who is "supposted to be symbolic of the British imperial influence over Hong Kong." In the original Japanese dialogue he'll occassionally toss in an English word, so Cargodin reached out to a friend in the UK to give him a "floral, British-as-fuck" localization pass. "Now I'm way more attached to Bowler Hat Man than I would have been, because I know I couldn't have done this as well," she said. "I have relationships with these people, and I'm way more attached to Kowloon's Gate because of that. That's why I'm so sad when a project is like, 'two people worked on it, and [one] was the computer, and the computer's still [visible] in the scripts." Hilltop described Kowloon's gate as "maybe _the_ most game of linguisitic telephone that has ever been." "It's a game about the Hong Kong area, from Japanese devs, and here we are translating it into English. It also borrows a whole bunch from other parts of Asia. All those elements get mixed and cook together. There's so much to sift through and make decisions on. This is a patch that needed to be worked on by this many people, or it just wouldn't have been right." Inside the 10 years it took to translate Linda Cube AgainIt took 10 years to translate Linda³ Again, but almost 30 to peel back the mysticism of what this one-of-a-kind RPG is truly about.Read Only MemoWes Fenlon Much like Cargodin and I discussed about subversive Japanese RPG Linda Cube Again, there's also so much _to_ Kowloon's Gate beyond just being "insane," a reductive label slapped on too many Japanese-only games with cult appeal: > "Linda Cube is an extremely belly-up story about parenting, about loss, about closure and acceptance after tragedy and trauma, and it just kind of gets written off as 'LOL murder Santa game,'" she said. "I want people to go into [Kowloon's Gate] and say, okay, this is actually a historic fiction text with droves and droves of research that went into making this make sense. It's a pragmatic story that it's telling through a lot of intense visuals. > > You can sensationalize it — Japan was sensationalizing Chinese culture and esoterica and Hong Kong specifically here, but I don't think you're going to run into a story [in another game] about Kowloon that actually features Chinese-named characters. Stray, Blade Runner — no Chinese identity whatsoever even though they're based on these things." Kowloon Walled City remains a fascinating place and moment in time for _dk and many others because it "represented Hong Kong, which defies easy generalizations." "That it thrived even when the rest of Hong Kong wanted it gone is downright inspiring," _dk said. "It symbolizes, in a way, the can-do and communal spirit of Hong Kong that so often gets overlooked under the shiny image of the Hong Kong that its officials want to project: a global financial hub." _dk praised the characters in Kowloon's Gate with stalls selling extremely specific goods: mirrors, springs, loofal sponges. That mirrors the real Walled City, where the denizens of one apartment "would make fish balls while the one next door could be making cocaine, and down the corridor there would be a dance hall with lady dancers." One of the developers encountered someone selling exclusively leeks in the real Hong Kong, which inspired the character of the Young Shrimpg Peeler in the game. "What's more is that these people talk! _dk said. "Not only to you the player, but to each other as well (stopping short of actually walking around, because of technical limitations) or through the game's email system. Which, incidentally, touched upon Hong Kong's underground hacking scene in the 1990s. I initially thought it was something they coincidentally thought up as a plot device, but no! They actually knew to interview Kowloon Kurosawa (infamous for Hong Kong 97) who had been writing about the homebrew hacking scene in Hong Kong and southeast Asia!" You'll be able to experience Kowloon for yourself soon. The Hilltop patch will be out on June 9. If you support the Patreon before then, you can get your name in the English credits. Subscribe to ROM! * * * ### 2. It's hip to be a (rotating) square That was a long 'un, so I'm keeping entry two here real short this week. I've been more drawn to the Anbernic RG Rotate than just about any other gaming handheld design of the last couple years. I love that it conjures up the creative design spirit of early '00s phones, is quite compact, and has a clear vision for what it's best suited to with that square screen and simple face buttons. There's no analog stick here, because the RG Rotate is not trying to be one of the many it-can-play-everything handhelds. Anyway, here's a thorough video from Retro Game Corps putting it through its paces. If you're thinking about buying one, the Bluetooth latency seems like the biggest downside to me right now. Maybe that's something Anbernic can improve via software update? It's not a slam dunk, best handheld to buy situation, but at under $100 in these cursed times I don't think it has to be. If you're getting one of these things, it's all about the novelty. * * * ## Patching In Azahar 2126 alpha tests GPU improvements – The next build of Azahar implements GPU timing emulation, bringing it closer to the original console. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon "is now made playable without use of the 'delay render thread' option with this change, but likely impacts many other games as well." Also fixes a loading issue with Super Mario 3D Land saves. Yaba Sanshiro gets a big update on Android and Windows – A cheat browser and a new shader method that makes for more accurate representation of the Saturn's graphics, as detailed by Sega Saturn Shiro. Yaba Sanshiro's pretty frequent Android updates keep progress flowing steadily, but this is the first Windows release developer miyax has called out in quite some time; it's also unfortunately not at parity with the Android version, currently lacking RetroAchievements and leaderboards. PCSX2 makes sure everyone knows its policy on LLMs – I keep hearing about open source projects being inundated with vibe coded commits, so it's nice to see a big one like PCSX2 lay out specific guidelines that contributors _must_ declare if they used an LLM, can only use it for a portion of the code, and must be able to explain what their code did without relying on the LLM. PPSSPP makes its ad-hoc multiplayer easier to join – In its last planned update till Christmas, PPSSPP builds on its most recent release with some multiplayer changes: "Ad-hoc servers can now have live status displayed directly in the app, where you can see what games are being played, and by who." There's a server listing page, too. Ares JITs its way to faster N64 performance – A "huge amount of code" went into this overhaul, resulting in some pretty major performance improvements (VPS is basically how fast the CPU is running): Mario Tennis went from 86 to 125 VPS, Conker went from 112 to 182 VPS, etc. Vroom vroom! ## Core Report Gradius 3 joins Jotego's cores, while Red Earth boots – Jotego subscribers can now play Gradius 3 on the MiSTer, while Capcom's CPS3 fighter get closer to playable. > Red Earth booting up in simulation, all layers finally visible. Very short simulation, but sound works, graphics works. Palette and garbled tiles are easy to fix, no worries. #MiSTerFPGA #CPS3 pic.twitter.com/z6EbMuRS74 > > — jotego (@topapate) May 22, 2026 Looking good, Mr. Firebird & Watch – The MiSTer now has a core for Nintendo's eeeearly days, 1980 arcade shooter Space Firebird. And that's not all! There are also updates to the Tamagotchi and Game & Watch, making them compatible with more games and hardware. China Gate and SD Gundam Psycho Salamander no Kyoui join the party, too – What a month for arcade MiSTer releases! A Technos beat 'em up and Genki shooter, I hadn't heard of either before these cores dropped. Both are 1.0 releases, and you know I gotta drop the Gundam footage. I don't think it's going to win any awards for best Gundam game ever, but, cute. Developer rmonic79 is already working on their next core, too: Act-Fancer. ## Translation Station PS2's Simple 2000 series Taisen! Bakudan Poi Poi bombs it up**** – I love that there's an entire line of PS2 games that's basically "this is the craziest idea we could up with and execute on in like 6 months" and here's one of those games about throwing bombs at people. Considering the brevity of the story, the translation seems plenty capable. Lupin is back again! – Not long ago I covered a Lupin game for the Sega Saturn getting a translation, and now here we are with the SNES game Densetsu No Hihou O Oe! (Hunt for the Legendary Treasure?) with a Spanish/English translation patch. Translator Jackic has done loads of Spanish (and some Catalan) patches, but only a few in English. The text here is pretty simple, though, as you spend most of your time exploration platforming through samey, mazelike levels, so I bet this gets the jobe done and then some! ## Good pixels And finally, a pile more screenshots from Kowloon's Gate courtesy of Hilltop. 💽 ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Also this issue, Killer Instinct arcade emulation for all.

readonlymemo.comAYN Thor owners rejoice: Wii U emulation on Android is nighHellooooo! We've got some straightforward emulator news this issue, and our main story should please the _legions_ of Wii U fans out there to no end. There are legions, right? Hello? Anybody? It's cool, I promise!! I've got a couple things I want to highlight here before getting into the meat — these are exciting developments in stories I've covered in prior issues. First up, from the world of Japanese keitai: it's getting easier to actually play the games that the folks in the preservation scene have worked so hard to salvage. > Introducing ReMEXA > > A full SDK reimplementation of all three JPhones SDKs into a single modern Java application that will work for Windows, Linux, and Mac. > > MA2/3/5 Audio support, 3D support, Online Bluetooth Gaming, In-game Live Translation > > Android support coming soon!… pic.twitter.com/hjHZ1RolaY > > — Yuvi (@YuviApp) May 6, 2026 This is a story I will hopefully dig into more soon, since it's been awhile since we visited it. Also, last August in **_ROM_** I wrote about the marvel that is CrankBoy, getting Game Boy emulation working remarkably well on the Playdate. Since then it's seen some upgrades to handle slowdown in some of the system's more demanding games. Development was quiet for awhile, but it didn't stop — and now CrankBoy has gotten the official stamp of approval. It's in the Playdate Catalog! CrankBoy for PlaydateFull-speed GB emulator (games included!)Playdate You can buy the emulator as a show of thanks to the developers, but your $10 is more than just a tip jar donation. The Catalog version of the emulator comes packaged with four homebrew games! Err, three games — a platformer, a cute puzzle/adventure starring a ghost, a narrative adventure — and a chiptune album. Development on CrankBoy continues, too, so who knows what it'll be capable of in the future. It also now has a companion app, CrankBoy Manager, to simplify the process of loading game ROMs and cover art over to the Playdate. There's also an auto-updating list of games that have special CrankBoy patches that make use of the Playdate hardware — using the crank, supporting widescreen display, or even swapping the HUD to the side of the screen. And since the project is open source, anyone inclined to get in on the action can help patch their favorite Game Boy game. Okay, enough crankin' — on with the show! * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. Cemu? On *your* AYN Thor? It's more likely than you think. Way back in September 2024, developer SSimco forked Wii U emulator Cemu and put up a first experimental stab at an Android port, bringing what had once been a PC-exclusive emulator to a huge new audience. For the first several years of its life Cemu was actually Windows exclusive, but when it went open source in 2022 it marked the arrival of Linux support and MacOS followed soon after. The early Android builds were not exactly highly publicized, or fast or compatible enough to play many games. For the last two years SSimco has steadily been polishing up the standalone Android port, and on Saturday — just 18 hours or so before I hit send on this newsletter — they opened a merge request on Github to have it become an official part of Cemu. "This PR contains the Android port of Cemu, as well as the necessary core code changes used by the Android port. For now, I think this state of the app is fine as a first version with basic android support," they wrote. SSimco is no stranger to Cemu: they've also contributed to the emulator directly, and Cemu's maintainers say they plan to look at the code and will likely merge it in if it's ready. Code review takes time, though, which means it might take a bit before the mainline release of Cemu integrates the Android code. It's not a trivial decision, given the added maintenance overhead of supporting a whole new platform with very different needs from PCs. But it's also exciting, because there's one very obvious use case for Wii U emulation whipping ass on Android: the AYN Thor. The dual screen clamshell Android handheld is currently all the rage for Nintendo DS emulation, which is an obviously perfect match. But I can't think of a better format, really, for duplicating the Wii U's combo of gamepad and TV displays. Here's a great (timestamped) walkthrough from Retro Game Corps from just a month ago, showing the setup process, downloading some more performance-tuned GPU drivers, and how to get two-screen play up and running. But I'm going to embed another video showing off more gameplay from another YouTuber; while it's slightly older and thus an earlier build of SSimco's fork, it shows a lot of games running on the handheld. Wind Waker HD looks very, very nice. Compatibility isn't at the level of desktop Cemu yet, and I imagine mobile drivers and GPUs will continue to present challenges with what games can run properly and how fast they can go. The Wii U was not exactly a beast of a system even when it came out, but we're still talking about emulating a more-than-1GHz processor on mobile hardware. I expect it's still going to be awhile, yet, before that's trivial for any Android device. For the moment it's wait-and-see time; while anyone can download the Android build separately and throw it on a phone or Android handheld, it'll obviously make Cemu on Android much more accessible once it's integrated into the main build. Hopefully all goes well and it features in the next big release! 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ ### 2. Rich Whitehouse's Killer Instinct emulator goes public as the Atari Jaguar roars again Friend of the newsletter Rich Whitehouse, whose Atari Jaguar emulator BigPEmu I wrote about in the early days of ROM, spent last year working on an emulator dedicated to arcade classic Killer Instinct. Until this week, it's been available exclusively to Patreon backers; now BigInstinct v1.0 is public, with some specific features still reserved for Patreon members. The primary draw is BigInstinct's script system, which works much like the one in BigPEmu to enable "features like stereo sound, stereoscopic 3D rendering, training mode, and gameplay adjustments." For example, with the 1.0 launch there's now an adjustment script for "more forgiving special move inputs and programmable special triggers," as detailed in the patch notes. "Patreon subscribers also enjoy exclusive access to the stereo audio module, which adds true stereophonic sound (with multiple options for audio spatialization) to KI and KI2," Rich writes. Probably the biggest perk if you're a patron: access to online multiplayer, complete with server list. BigInstinct is available for download on Rich's website for both Windows and Linux. Same as BigPEmu, which also got some updates of its own alongside this release. Here's the rundown from the Jaguar emulator's patch notes: * _Added a new "cheat_codes" script module. When this script module is active, the user will be prompted to toggle any available cheat codes (provided by cheat_codes.json) any time a software image is loaded. Cheat codes are provided for every cartridge and CD title in the Jaguar's retail library. Many of these cheat codes were adapted from jguff's BigPEmu scripting work, you can find the relevant scripts (and more) here:_ https://github.com/jguffer/BigPEmu_Scripts * _Implemented the Blitter GPU interrupt. (mainly for developers; this functionality isn't used in any retail software)_ * _Lots of new scripting API functionality, as well as some minor fixes/additions for existing scripts._ * _Reworked a bunch of BigMaster stuff under the hood. You may need to re-enter some of your BigMaster credentials when updating from a previous version of the application._ * _Fixed various potential bugs related to using per-game configs in network mode._ My favorite thing about Rich's emulators — beyond the fact that they run their games so damn well — is that they really care about putting some personality into the user experience. Nothing else looks like them, and that's increasingly rare in this day and age of universal launchers and samey (though extremely easy to use!) Qt interfaces. Subscribe to ROM! ## Patching In Cowboy Bebop gets an 1100% speedup – That's, uh, _a big difference_. "This wasn't checked before, but some games (Cowboy Bebop and Detective Conan) will set the texture address to the same as the Frame, even though it's not using it, and this was confusing the code, causing ... massive slowdown," writes developer refraction. At 6x resolution the game could slow to a crawl, but now it runs at around 175 fps on an AMD RX 9060 XT. That's fast!! PCSX2 now also happens to support Olympus cameras and storage, used with two pieces of software: Dejikame Album: Kuraemon and TV Kuraemon. **Ymir speeds up Saturn rendering** – Recent release 0.3.1 "adds many performance optimizations to the VDP2 renderer, bringing up to 40% more performance on graphics-heavy games." Weaker CPUs can now easily run even 'demanding' games like Virtua Fighter 2, sweat-free. There are bugfixes, too. A couple weeks ago, v0.3.0 added some sizable features as well: an undo save state button and an undo load button, plus fixes for some notable games including Burning Rangers, Virtua Cop, Road Rash and Real Bout Garou Densetsu Special. Gopher64 gobbles up the turf – This successor to simple64 has been making fast progress in recent months, so rather than highlighting just the latest update from a few days ago, here are highlights from over the last two months: * Windows ARM support * Drag-and-drop ROM loading * VSync added * Auto-reconnecting disconnected controllers * Supersampling anti-aliasing * Toggle for viewing "FPS (internal game FPS) and VI/S (emulated refresh rate)" ## Core Report Jetpac goes beta – Developer Anton Gale posts that Jetpac for the Taito System SJ is now ready to play. Seems likely just a matter of time until it'll pop up on the MiSTer for an easy download_all. Zaparoo gets a fancy-pants launcher for the MiSTer – For those who enjoy an element of physicality with their MiSTer systems, tap-to-play with NFC cards or QR codes that jump right to specific games are a fun way to avoid infinite choice paralysis. The Zaparoo devs now have a whole fancy, controller-friendly UI that runs on the MiSTer! While it's an early release, it's definitely going to be interesting to compare it to the SuperStation One's UI when it makes it out of beta. This is looking _really nice_. **The Castle and Wonder Kid, mapped out** – In the unstable nightlies channel of the MiSTer Discord, the Sega Master System core gets "support for The Castle and Wonder Kid mappers with CRC detection." It's not exactly the first time these games have ever been playable via emulation, but hey, always nice to see a system inch closer to completion. ## Translation Station _Note that there are a couple other recent translations I'm not featuring here, because they are fully machine translated, and I question whether they'll be a good experience to play through in that state._ Triggerheart Excelica brings it back to the DC – This classic shmup has been officially released in English in recent years, but its original Dreamcast launch was only in Japanese. Derek Pascarella (and collaborators hasnopants, Walnut and Malenko) to the rescue! This isn't just a translation patch; as usual, they've gone above and beyond: "All dialogue text translated, using Switch/Steam re-release as base. All graphics translated. Analog stick support added. New invincibility mode added. Other forms of clean-up and enhancement." Fray: Shugyou Hen shmups, Game Gear style – Seemingly a first-time translation patch from user BacklogOddy, this covers "all dialogue, menus, and cutscenes" for this game gear shmup, which is a prequel to the action-RPG Fray, which is itself a spin-off of the Xak series. Pretty cute pixel art, though that's not enough for you to trick me into playing a Game Gear game. Popol0crois Monogatari updated – I was sad to see the news recently that Popolocrois series creator Yosuke Tamori died last month at the age of 74. Perhaps coincidence or perhaps spurred by his death, the fan translation group behind this English patch for the first RPG based on the series has released version 1.5, the first in quite awhile. Here's what it changes: "Game freeze at the Black Market in Chapter 3 fixed. Numerous visual glitches in Chapter 3 fixed. Shop menu fixed. Various misspellings and text overlay fixes." ## Good pixels It's been a long time since I've featured screens from the awesome Dvils Blsh, so let's do that! Check out their site for printed zines and hit up the Patreon to support turning game screenshots into an art form! 💽 Images via Dvls Blsh on Bluesky ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Also this issue: RetroAchievements come to the MiSTer, and a PS1 cross between Zelda and Tomb Raider gets a translation.

readonlymemo.comIf you're going to hype up the Neo Geo+, at least admit you know about all the bloodWell everybody, unlike the issues of **_ROM_** built around interviews with brilliant people doing brilliant things in the emulation scene, I can't say this week's topic was the result of long-term planning on my part. It happened as a result of me spending yesterday thinking about what I should write about, and getting madder and madder the more I looked at the existing coverage of the newly announced Neo Geo+. It's a cool piece of kit, no doubt. I'm not mad about that. I'm mad about what was going unsaid about SNK's owners in pretty much every bit of coverage, and I was even madder about the tired, predictable arguments from those whining about experiencing even the mildest of criticism for jumping on the thing. So that's what this issue mostly ended up being about. If you just play some neat little games on your emulators and don't care much about the media — maybe skip on down to #2. This rant is less for you and more for the legion of retro YouTubers out there. Do they read newsletters? Who knows! I had to get it out, anyway. On a brighter note, last month I had the privilege of being on a panel at the 2026 Game Developers Conference to talk about the emulation community's contributions to game preservation, which you can now watch online. Here it is! What’s New in Game History: 2026How do games live on after launch? Documenting the underrecognized last stage of the development ecosystemgame afterlivesthis fast-paced panel spotlights the most vital new work in game history, preservation, and community practice. Four…GDC Vault Logo Please enjoy and sorry about my posture. I did not think to just bend the obviously bendy microphone to stand upright. Guess I'll just have to do another one of these someday! 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. Nostalgia for the Neo Geo isn't an excuse to pretend SNK's ownership doesn't matter The gaming industry has faced no greater evil over the past decade than the acquisition sprees of giant corporations. Under the consolidation of Microsoft and Embracer Group and beyond, game studios that should've — could've — survived were instead shut down or hollowed out because somewhere in the billion-dollar balance sheets their corporate overlords maintained, the wind shifted. They were profitable, but not _enough_. Or they no longer fit the _strategy_ , possibly after being told to stop doing what they were good at to pursue said top-down strategy. Or they were doing great, actually, but it turns out the big boss went $2 billion in debt because he thought the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was going to hand him another $2 billy and when that didn't happen the cuts would run so deep anyone and everyone's head could wind up on the chopping block. Okay, actually — all those layoffs and games canceled and careers ruined are only the second greatest evil infecting the gaming industry over the past decade. The real #1 is the guy who owns the chopping block. The internet commenters who show up to wail about keeping politics out of their hobby should perhaps hop on a plane to Saudi Arabia and express that opinion to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the country's Public Investment Fund, purchased 96% of SNK Corporation in 2022, and recently partnered up with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to buy Electronic Arts for $55 billion. Before all that, he was best known for having a journalist killed and dismembered. That's not a very fun thing to think about, so many of us choose not to. I don't really want to think about the fact that the company behind some of the most beautiful 2D games ever made is, in Degrees of Kevin Bacon terms, zero steps removed from an authoritarian ruler who ordered a writer he deemed a nuisance to be entrapped at a consulate, chopped up into pieces that were placed in plastic bags, and incinerated in an oven later used for a barbecue. _Bummer alert!!!_ Maybe those details weren't precisely bin Salman's call, but if you know anything about him — or the way Saudi Arabia has been spending its money over the past decade — you know he's all about a good cover-up. The Kingdom's investments are about both remaking its image and diversifying its economic footprint, and so we've seen this same uncomfortable story play out in videogames, in comedy, in golf, and many other sports. And the only argument I've seen as to why none of this matters — as to why it's fine to just shrug or hold one's nose and ignore it — is that a lot of bad stuff happens in the world, actually, so there's nothing wrong with buying a reproduction Neo Geo for $249.99. Look at this sexy thing, though. It's got new chips, expertly reverse-engineered by members of the open source hardware scene! New carts are reasonably priced! If you buy it, you'll feel young again! There are _~so many~_ positives; surely enough to overlook the reality that some portion of the money spent on re-buying Metal Slug is ultimately enriching a man who has overseen "an unprecedented number of executions, including the execution of child defendants, disproportionate executions of foreign nationals, and politically motivated executions of individuals sentenced for acts related to the exercise of their right to freedom of expression" since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, a killjoy of an organization if I've ever seen one. (That number's over 2,000 btw). Now I have to admit that like many other people, I'm guilty of participating in society. I paid taxes to the American government this year, and didn't much like doing it — the same government that's extrajudiciously blowing up people in boats, brazenly starting wars and insider trading off the chaos, and happily supporting a genocide from both sides of the aise. I live in a country that did slavery and the Trail of Tears and put its own citizens in interment camps, and I can't say I do much of anything personally to make amends for those historical wrongs. But damn does it piss me off when anyone drilposts their way into buying a new toy by waving vaguely at the concept of other bad things having happened at some point in human history. That's baby brain shit. It's either disengenuous, or an underdeveloped teenage edgelord brain's simplistic view of morality. It's embarrassing to pretend there's not an _obvious and measurable difference_ between supporting a company now 100% owned by a bad dude and another company like Nintendo or Capcom that he has a much smaller, non-controlling stake in. Or by deflecting with "other governments do bad things too!" when those other governments are not the ones _actually profiting from the videogames_. If you're just somebody who loves videogames and always wanted to own a Neo Geo, I don't think you're automatically a bad person or whatever if you buy one of these things. I wish you would do something else with that money, but I'm not going to cuss you to your face — I'm just going to ask if you know who owns SNK these days, and hope to get you on my side by talking about how fucking stupid it was they tanked the new Fatal Fury by putting Cristiano 'I belong to Saudi Arabia' Ronaldo in it. But if you're someone who **_covers_** videogames, as a writer or especially as a YouTuber with a younger-skewing audience, it **_IS_** your responsibility to think about this thing we'd all rather not to. And you need to tell people about it, repeatedly, because it's a noisy world out there and not everybody knows that the guy who now owns some of their childhood favorite games happens to have a lot of blood on his hands. No, it's not as fun as just talking about the stuff you loved as a kid. But the blood at least deserves a mention, you know? And judging by my scattered survey of the endless coverage on YouTube this past week, even an off-hand mention is seemingly too much to ask for. A lot of people have already bought a Neo Geo+, and a lot more will before it ships in November. Embracer's Lars Wingefors, re-entering this story like the Kool-Aid Man at a wake, posted that the console's sales wildly exceeded expectations and are "a clear example of how passion, cultural heritage, and business can come together." Embracer subsidiary PLAION is producing the hardware. (By the way, if you're keeping score: the comments on his LinkedIn posts include zero mentions of Mohammed bin Salman, and one pitch for how AI will enable people to make new Neo Geo games without game dev experience. Awesome.) Anyway, I'm not stupid: There's no way to guilt trip our way to a better world, where billionaires who can snap their fingers to have someone cut up and put into plastic bags don't also stand to control Mass Effect and The Sims and every EA sports game and also a shiny new Neo Geo. But ignoring that reality sure as hell isn't going to make things better, either. It's just more comfortable. Jamal Khashoggi was a fierce advocate for his people, and for that he was gruesomely murdered. He was murdered while trying to sign some paperwork to get married. I don't think it's too much to ask for anyone hyping up a new game console to sit with that for a minute, and think about how uncomfortable it is to be advocating for something from the man responsible, before talking about its "Unmistakable and uncompromising arcade-grade build" and "Original AV output for CRT enthusiasts." * * * ### 2. The MiSTer gets Retro Achievements support for SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, N64, PS1 and more Achievement hunters, start salivating. If the MiSTer FPGA has become your retro gaming destination of choice in recent years, with the nagging limitation of not being able to rack up Retro Achievements that prove you've got some skillz — problem sorted. Developer odelot has been working on a MiSTer integration, and it's now available on Github for anyone who wants to swap to some in-development cores with RA support. GitHub - odelot/Main_MiSTer: add retroachievements supportadd retroachievements support. Contribute to odelot/Main_MiSTer development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubodelot "The upstream Main_MiSTer binary manages cores, user input, video output, and the OSD menu on the MiSTer platform. This fork adds a full RetroAchievements integration layer on top, without modifying any existing core functionality," odelot wrote on the project's Github page. Here's a demonstration of it in action. There's also a pretty digestible breakdown of how the project works on Github: 1. _**Init** — On startup, the ARM binary maps the DDRAM mirror region, starts an HTTP worker thread, and loads credentials from `retroachievements.cfg`. Login to RetroAchievements is **deferred** : it only fires once the FPGA mirror's magic value (`"RACH"`) is detected and its frame counter is seen advancing. This means that loading the **standard community core** (which lacks the RA mirror module) silently suppresses all RA activity — no spurious login or network calls are made._ 2. _**Load Game** — When a ROM is selected in the MiSTer menu, the binary computes the ROM's MD5 hash and identifies the game against the RA database._ 3. _**Per-Frame Poll** — Every frame (~60 Hz), `achievements_poll()` checks whether the FPGA has written new data. If a new frame is available, it calls `rc_client_do_frame()` from the rcheevos library, which evaluates achievement conditions against the current RAM state._ 4. _**Unlock / Notify** — When an achievement triggers, the event handler displays an OSD notification and optionally plays a sound (`/media/fat/achievement.wav`). The unlock is reported to the RA server asynchronously._ 5. _**Unload / Shutdown** — State is cleaned up when switching cores or shutting down._ While games are running you can press a key to see an overlay list of that game's achievements. New quality-of-life features are hitting the project fast: just yesterday odelot added a notification if you boot up while offline, and it can automatically reconnect to Retro Achievements once your MiSTer's back online. The big question is whether this will get official recognition and integration from the MiSTer project and Retro Achievements maintainers. Given how popular both are, I'd say odds are good, but we may have to wait a few weeks or months to see odelot reach something of a 1.0 release and for other developers to weigh in on any potential integration issues. The draw of achievements waned for me somewhere around the end of the Xbox 360 era, and at this point I view friends who still talk about "getting the Platinum" (in PlayStation trophy parlance) as an alien race. I ain't got time for all that! I've likewise never felt the pull to go out of my way to install Retro Achievements; the only kind of tracking I do of any kind I do with hip-fired movie ratings on Letterboxd. But I know they're damn popular — the RA Discord has nearly 30,000 members — and I do think they're actually a great solution for retro gaming's choice paralysis problem. If you've ever (_gasp_) thrown an entire romset at an emulator or MiSTer, you've been there: scrolling through a list of hundreds of games, prone to play something for just a minute or two before bouncing to something else. We all know how unsatisfying this can be compared to the natural limitations of owning a handful of consoles or a stack of CDs; knowing you only had so many options in front of you encouraged committing to a game long enough to get better at it, or to push past a slow opening to find the fun lurking beneath the surface. It's a harder and harder problem to solve with just willpower as hundreds of new games are released every month, sales drop prices to trivial levels, and an infinite supply of addictive short form videos await us on every screen. Anyone who uses Retro Achievements to focus what they play, to stick with a game longer than a frayed attention span otherwise would let them — I salute you. Get them cheevos on your MiSTer, stop scrolling, and find your fun. **Here's the full list of odelot's MiSTer RA cores, as of April 25:** * NES * SNES * Genesis, Sega CD, 32X * Game Boy / GBC / GBA * Nintendo 64 * PlayStation * Neo Geo * PC Engine * Atari 2600 Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In RPCS3 now auto-configures game settings – Is RPCS3 easier to use than a real PS3 at this point? Maybe! At the very least, I don't have to confront a "you didn't turn your console off properly" warning and file integrity check every time I boot up the emulator. You can still make your own configuration tweaks, and game patches for things like unlocking framerates won't be turned on automatically but can be enabled if you want 'em. "The emulator's target for Playability is that the game must run unmodified as it does on a real console," the RPCS3 folks explain. Cemu integrates a graphics pack downloader – Another pure convenience update, here. The Wii U emulator has long supported graphics packs for fancying up textures, and now it has a built-in window that lets you slap in the URL of a zip file and it'll grab it for you. No need to download it and then move the file and extract it and all that. Final Burn Neo tackles the PolyGame Master 2 – I shamefully don't think I've mentioned emulator Final Burn Neo once in the history of this newsletter, but that changes today! While overshadowed by the endless system support of MAME, FBN is a cool emulator in its own right, with an intentionally more limited selection of games and systems supported meaning it's easier to get up and running and has lower system requirements to boot. It's also not _just_ a Neo Geo emulator, with support for a number of consoles and arcade boards. But an interesting arcade addition of late caught my eye: the PGM2, a 2000s Taiwanese arcade board perhaps best known for some beat 'em ups like Oriental Legend 2 (based on Journey to the West) and Knights of Valour 2/3 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Oriental Legend 2 flanked by Kknights of Valour 3, via dink. Considering how breezy that style of game is, I'd definitely rather jump into them in FBN then wrangle a MAME configuration. Feel the burn! * * * ## Core Report MiSTer's Update All goes manual(s) – Don't panic!! The MiSTer's preeminent automatic downloading solution isn't switching over to manual operation. Version 2.8, released a couple days ago, can now pull from a database of 8,010 game manuals (those things we used to print on paper and fill with cool art and helpful tips and include in the box for free??). "MiSTer has been able to display manuals for a long time, but without people doing the heavy lifting, the feature never really took off. Well, I think that’s about to change," writes maintainer theypsilon. There are a few things to keep in mind with the feature: the initial download will be slow because it's a whopping 22 gigabytes, and also the viewer is a bit clunky and crashy until someone puts some more work into the UX. Even more appealing to most users is the second feature added in 2.8: a **CRT Video Mode Selector and Screen Position Adjustment tool** "that helps you pick the best resolution to view your scripts and Update All on a CRT." It offers a bunch of resolution/video mode options that should make the script much more usable on an old tube set. Pico-8 comes to the MiSTer – The littlest "fantasy console" still has a vibrant indie dev scene as far as I'm aware, so this is a very cute new way to play its games, especially for folks who have CRTs or displays ideally suited to 8-bit systems. "A PICO-8 fantasy console emulator for MiSTer FPGA with native video and audio output. The FPGA handles video timing and output directly, bypassing the MiSTer scaler for zero-lag CRT support," explains core developer MiSTer Organize. I'll take any opportunity to highlight how much I love the look of Pico-8 train sim Cab Ride. Darius II core with triple screen support coming along – The absolutely sick triple screen arcade machine for horizontal shmup Darius II is getting a MiSTer core, and it seems to be coming along nicely. Still WIP, but fun to watch even so. Who's playing this on an ultrawide? * * * ## Translation Station Tiny Bullets gets a not-so-tiny bit more playable in English – Hot off the presses! This new translation from Chapu dropped riiight as I was wrapping up this issue. Described as "a bit of a mix of Legend of Zelda and Tomb Raider," where you "jump, roll, solve clever puzzles and shoot your slingshot across 9 areas to reach the end and the final confrontation," Tiny Bullets looks kinda sick? Great art, at the very least. This one's going on the Steam Deck. Ninja Casey, meet ninja Sasuke – Sunsoft's 1994 Shonen Ninja Sasuke, which strikes me as a less farcical Goemon action platformer, got an official English translation for the first time just a year back, and now someone's gone and made a fan translation of their own! Why? I have to imagine the localization choice with the name "Justice Ninja Casey" had something to do with it. The fan effort is called Legend of the Ninja Kid, and it's from old hands Cabal Translations who have a loooong history. Swapping Sasuke for Casey in 2025 sure was a choice. Langrisser III returns – Langrisser is a blind spot series for me, though if you stuck a halberd to my head and demanded I tell you everything I know about it I'd at least manner to stammer out "uhhhh strategy RPGs with '90s as hell anime art???" and thus avoid summary execution, were you feeling merciful. I believe they're fondly remembered, though far less so than, say Shining Force; perhaps part of the reason for that, as highlighted by Kimimi in their take on Langrisser III, is the series not-so-successfully reinventing itself as time went on. Just look at that art, tho. The fan translation for this entry also seems borderline cursed, considering it started in 2001 and has been picked up and then dropped again a few times since. This time it seems like it might actually stick — there's a new efffort now on Github marked at v0.4 building on those prior efforts. It's definitely unfinished, with funky line breaks and some crashing issues reported. Bookmark this one, in other words, to come back to later — and maybe cheer on new developer ralfguth to help them over the finish line. * * * ## Good pixels Here's a fun thread on Bluesky — sorry about the embeds, email readers, but clicking on the dates to jump to the posts is worth it. It's skelly time. 🩻 > YEEEEEEAH BUDDY > > — jarsh (@jarsh.zone) 2026-04-25T22:24:46.984Z > Hands down! > > — GeorgieBoysAXE (@georgieboysaxe.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T11:52:49.221Z > "BEATCHU AHP!" > > — 𝔻𝕠𝕔𝕥𝕠𝕣 𝔹𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕖𝕣 ➡️⬇️↘️➕🌸 (@doctorbutler.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T19:12:00.109Z > — Janne Johansson (@icepic.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T16:11:26.476Z > u know i gotta choose daggerfall's skeletons, theyre so cute n angry > > — Salem 🏳️‍⚧️ (@salem-bitch-trials.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T20:16:03.764Z ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Plus: Catching up with a spring blossom's worth of recompilation progress in just the last 2 weeks.

readonlymemo.comIt's amazing! It's here! MiSTer's Saturn dev breaks down his new 3DO core and why it may never be *quite* perfectWhen I see the words "The 3DO Company," my mind goes to a very specific place: _Battletanx_. The arcadey masterpiece that was 1999 sequel Global Assault probably spent more hours slotted into my teen years N64 than any game this side of Goldeneye or Mario Kart, thanks to a genuinely inventive array of asymmetrical multiplayer modes, tank archetypes and impressive-for-the-time destruction. The second place my mind goes is Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, the shittiest videogame I've played in my entire life (and my best friend in first grade owned E.T.). So, y'know. Win some, lose some. I have no personal affinity with the 3DO itself, an oddball console that the company launched in the early '90s, but by all accounts it falls into the "lose some" category. It only lasted a few years before The 3DO Company shifted to just developing and publishing games for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PC. Despite shutting down in 2003 (should've made more Battletanx and fewer Army Men), the company legacy does live on today in a few forms. 3DO originally published pioneering online 3D MMO Meridian 59, which I wrote about last year on PC Gamer because it's one of the oldest videogames in existence still being updated today. It came out in 1996!! Also, more relevant to this newsletter: the 3DO console now has a MiSTer core. Somebody get Trip Hawkins a MiSTer Pi, stat. That's the main story this week, along with a brief follow-up to last issue's long read on Xbox 360 recompilation. That bit of the emulation scene is absolutely on fire right now, so I imagine we'll be dipping back in preeeeetty regularly to cover what's new. Speaking of new, I think most folks who read this newsletter probably jibe with metroidvanias, especially those that lean towards platforming reminiscent of '80s and '90s games. If that's you, I can't recommend Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland enough — I've been absolutely loving it this past week and find it quite a refreshing throwback to simpler games in this style, without the combat gauntlets that define the likes of Silksong and Blasphemous. The hand drawn art is lush, the music sublime; it's just an out-and-out charmer. A really well balanced blend of the new and the old, made by a tiny indie team who could use some love. Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland on SteamExplore a dream world as the iconic Little Nemo, armed with toys, candy, and stuffed animals in this cute & colorful Metroidvania adventure. Experience NES-era platformer gameplay in a vast, non-linear world that has been hand-animated frame-by-frame, as you unlock new abilities to progress.STEAM Also, speaking of the new and the old — check out the next episode of the Video Game History Foundation's podcast, cause I'll be on there talking about **_Read Only Memo_** (just a little bit) and the emulation scene more broadly (a lot bit). In rare snatches of free time I've also been continuing my background mission to play some fan translations this year, so you'll find some evidence of that quest in the Good Pixels section to close out the issue. Dive on in! 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. MiSTer miracle worker srg320 dishes on the new 3DO core On January 15, 2025, developer Sergiy "srg320" Dvodnenko — best known for the near-miraculous Sega Saturn core for the MiSTer FPGA project — posted a YouTube video titled 3DO FPGA WIP. It was exactly what it said: an early test of whether it was possible to run games designed for Trip Hawkins' CD-ROM console brainchild. Well, not _that_ early. "I started development in October 2023, but I spent most of my time working on Saturn," Dvodnenko said in an interview with **_Read Only Memo_**. A little over a year after posting that YouTube vid, on March 21st of this year, he released the first public build for testing on Github. 'It's Happening' gifs flooded the MiSTer Discord. In total, Dvodnenko said, it took him only about two months of development work to get this initial release up and running when he took breaks from working on the Saturn core. But this wasn't necessarily the hard part. "All the main modules are done," he said. "Now it's time to find and fix any issues. And that usually takes much longer." There's already a community-sourced testing spreadsheet for tracking which games work and which don't from the 3DO's library of some 250 games. When you consider multiple regional releases and revisions for many of them, though, the testing matrix balloons; there are 639 lines on the spreadsheet as of this writing, with more than 400 games marked as "playable" but with caveats like crackling audio or visual flickering. Many might even be finishable, but the core is so young that volunteer testers haven't yet run through them from start to finish. And there's still stuff that won't boot at all: Dvodnenko said he hasn't yet implemented the arcade implementation of the 3DO which was used for a handful of games, and PAL games currently all run with NTSC timings, an inaccuracy that will inevitably cause issues (like that crackly audio). It's already made some noticeable progress in just the last two weeks, though, with a move from only supporting MiSTer setups with dual RAM sticks to now running on single RAM. But right now Dvodnenko isn't sure how close to perfect the final version of the core will end up being. "The core itself is not complex and does not consume a lot of FPGA resources (it currently uses about 55% of the resources)," he said. "The main problem is VRAM emulation. This is likely what prevented other developers from working on the 3DO core. Accurate VRAM emulation requires a certain amount of internal FPGA memory, which it doesn't have. Therefore, unfortunately, the core cannot be accurate on the MiSTer." I asked him to dig into that particular memory problem more, and what it potentially means for games: > "The main issue with VRAM is that it has a buffer the size of a single page (512 words). A single command can transfer data between the buffer and a memory page. This capability is actively used in the console. To ensure this page-copying speed, I placed the VRAM in the FPGA’s internal memory. But the FPGA’s memory is only sufficient for 1/3 of the total VRAM. The remainder had to be placed in DDRAM (in burst mode). > > I implemented the feature of placing this 1/3 'fast' portion of VRAM at different addresses relative to the entire space. Because the most speed-critical parts of VRAM are those where the framebuffers are located. And in some games, these framebuffers do not start from the beginning. This trick provided a slight performance gain and slightly improved the accuracy of VRAM emulation. > > In theory, it could [cause graphical glitches or slowdown]. But it's hard to say for sure at this point. We'll see once all the other issues (not related to VRAM) have been fixed." Dvodnenko said the biggest challenge in adapting the 3DO to the MiSTer has been the console's sprite engine, its most complex component and the one that will need the most work to dial in accuracy. He broke down the work that's gone into it so far for me: > "The Sprite Engine renders most of 2D and 3D graphics. Only FMV does not use it, but instead copies data directly into VRAM (framebuffer memory). Some parts of the Sprite Engine are described in the documentation. But that’s not enough to figure everything out. The sprite engine is closely tied to DMA. So, I connected my homemade logic analyzer to the original 3DO board. > > I wrote a few test programs and captured a lot of data from the buses. This allowed me to understand how DMA works and implement it in the core. By understanding the sequence and timing of the DMA components, I figured out the sequence of the Sprite Engine modules. Unfortunately, some details can’t be clarified, such as the capacity of the various FIFOs that are part of the Sprite Engine. So, absolute accuracy won’t be achievable. Perhaps someday the MADAM and CLIO chips will be reverse-engineered, and we’ll learn more." Inside a 3DO. Image via Sergiy Dvodnenko Dvodnenko is himself still learning some of the intricacies of the 3DO hardware, which will no doubt continue to feed back into the core. But even with access to documentation and a machine to hook up a logic analyzer to, he'll only be able to get so far without someone going the extra mile to decap the 3DO Sprite Engine's chips and fully study them. So far updates to the core have been coming in every few days, so hop into the Discord server if you want to try it out yourself. And if you'd rather wait until it's a little more mature, well, here's a Jeff Gerstmann stream to live vicariously through, instead. * * * ### 2. Two weeks and a whole lot of recomp progress later... Wowee zowee are these things moving fast. Since the deep dive into ReXGlue in the last issue of _**ROM**_ , I feel like new playable ports have been dropping left and right, decompilations have been breaking cover and hitting promising milestones. Rather than the usual lengthy writeup here, I'm just going to drop a pile of links on you from stuff that's either appeared or seem some sort of major update in just the last few weeks. They're not all going to be finished or necessarily even playable — as covered in the ReXGlue issue, a lot of this stuff is still _very_ beta — but you can, if you want, play Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts natively, on your computer, right now. Wonders never cease. GitHub - masterspike52/reNut: Banjo-Kazzoie Nuts and Bolts Recompilation with RexglueBanjo-Kazzoie Nuts and Bolts Recompilation with Rexglue - masterspike52/reNutGitHubmasterspike52The most hardcore Jak & Daxter heads in the world have finished their native PC ports of the entire trilogyAughts excellence.PC GamerTed LitchfieldZelda: Twilight Princess PC port inches closer to release with new showcase video—and modders have already added Linkle into the gameThat’s the most important feature taken care of, then.PC GamerWes FenlonGitHub - mariopartyrd/marioparty4Contribute to mariopartyrd/marioparty4 development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubmariopartyrdGitHub - MaxDeadBear/Re-CherryContribute to MaxDeadBear/Re-Cherry development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubMaxDeadBearGitHub - MaxDeadBear/NaughtyBear_ReStuffContribute to MaxDeadBear/NaughtyBear_ReStuff development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubMaxDeadBear Subscribe to ROM! ## Patching In GBE+ 1.10 adds a year's worth of Game Boy paraphernalia – The great Shonumi, who chronicles all his Game Boy accessory reverse-engineering at Edge of Emulation, released a no-foolin' April 1 update for GBE+ with support for tons of peripherals. Many of these are for the DS rather than the GB (the emulator supports both): the Wave Scanner used in a Mega Man game, the Wantame card scanner, and the unreleased WorkBoy, which would've given the Game Boy a dang keyboard. There are general emulator updates, too. A major release! Dolphin gets Game Boy Player support – Dolphin has supported GBA connectivity for years now for games like Four Swords thanks to its integrated mGBA core. But here's a new one: the GameCube can now emulate the Game Boy Player emulating the Game Boy Advance. The ultimate emulation turducken! Note that this feature is only in the dev branch for the moment, but I'm sure we'll get a nice deep dive into the Game Boy Player support next Progress Report. DuckStation respects your buttons – PS1 emulator DuckStation will now change its fullscreen UI's button icons to Xbox / PlayStation depending on what controller it detects you're using. I think that's swell. ## Core Report **Darius MiSTer core in testing** – In the testing channel in the MiSTer Discord, this core looks like it's damn close to finished, with "4/5 ROM sets fully playable: World, US, Japan rev1, Extra Version." There's one noted graphics glitch and one noted audio issue, but otherwise the Taito shmup seems near finished. 1983 maze shooter Cavelon joins the MiSTer – Not many 43-year-old games are on Steam, but this one happens to be! "Originally released in 1983 in arcades, and the following year on home computers, this classic maze shooter saw players take on the role of Arthur as he ascends to the top of Castle Cavelon to save Guinivere from an evil wizard!" reads the description. MiSTer contributor Macro added support for the game to the Scramble arcade core. **Unstable SNES core gets a pile of fixes** – There are multiple patches affecting memory and timing and a few others I don't understand, but... progress is progress? ## Translation Station Oh no? No, Yu-No – A foundational PC-98 adventure game from ELF, this translation hack of Yu-No follows just a few months behind a similar project for Shizuku, which came out the same year (1996). And yes, both are adult games, so download only if you're appropriately, uh, horny. This release actually transplants an existing English fan translation by TLWiki, made for the Windows re-release of Yu-No, into the original PC-98 version. You just can't beat that PC-98 pixel art, man. Sakura Wars 2, spiffed up – The translation of beloved Sega tactics RPG/visual novel/adventure came out last year, and you can read about all the work that went into it in a prior issue of ROM! A year later, this 1.10 update isn't anything radical; it fixes up some typos and other script errors, and also translates some remaining menu graphics that had been left in Japanese. If this is still on your to-play pile, make sure to grab the latest version before you play. Sakura Wars 2 is 28 years old this month. A Progenitor update – Much like Sakura Wars 2, this is a translation update for a game previously featured in ROM. This one's an older PC-98 adventure. "Thank you to everyone who's played this translation so far, I'm genuinely happy to have seen it well received on YouTube and social media," says hacker/'lator BNK. "I've now translated the remaining text, though I still lack context for some of the scenarios. But I've done my best based on the characters / profile pictures of the speakers involved and the dialogue itself, so hopefully none of them are out of place." There's a nice story behind this first-time translator being inspired by a retrospective write-up in an RPG-focused newsletter. Warms the heart! Finally, here's an interview on Sega Saturn, Shiro about a new translation of **Fantastic Pinball**. Sign and prepare yourself for some (tempered, but still a bummer) AI mentions. Patch Translates Kyuutenkai/Fantastic Pinball into EnglishA hacker new to the Saturn scene released a patch Tuesday that translates Kyuutenkai, also known as Fantastic Pinball, into English. ShivaSaturn posted a thread on SegaXtreme talking about their ne…SEGA SATURN, SHIRO!Danthrax ## Good pixels And finally, I'll leave you with 1998's b.l.u.e. Legend of Water, as translated by Hilltop Works. Stay cool. 💽 ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Plus: A launcher for recompilations and a new PS1 fan translation.

readonlymemo.comInterview: How ReXGlue is bringing the Xbox 360 into recompilation eraHello hello hello! In this week-late-but-worth-the-wait edition of **_ROM_** , I'm back to my old hijinks with a meaty interview for one of the most exciting open source projects on the scene right now: ReXGlue, the Xbox 360 recompilation tool. You may have seen some videos of early days PC ports for 360 games floating around in the last couple months. Those are indeed thanks to ReXGlue, and I've got a whole buncha words from the toolkit's creator to get you up to speed on how it works and what it's currently capable of. No, you can't properly play Lost Oddysey on your PC just yet, but are you going to be able to at some point? _Hell yeah._ One point of confusion about ReXGlue I've seen floating around is whether it's essentially "just" emulation because a good chunk of its codebase is based on the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia. I bet you'd be able to guess that the real answer is a whole lot more complex than that assumption. Over in the world of hardware emulation, I've had just a little bit of free time in the last week to dedicate to the beta of Taki Udon's "Console Mode" UI for the MiSTer, testing it out on the SuperStation One. The software isn't available for everyone to use yet, and there are still some rough edges as you'd anticipate from a beta. But expect me to be writing impressions of it as soon as it's kosher to do so. That's going to do it for a speedy intro this week, as I've got a date with the excellent Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn to get to. If you see me wincing next time I sit down in public, assume it's because my ass is still sore from this game mercilessly kicking it. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ a small tip__to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. Getting into the sticky details with ReXGlue creator Tom Last year, something caught the eye of programmer Tom, a longtime Xbox 360 fan: Sonic Unleashed Recompiled. The blue hedgehog going faster on PC than he ever had in the game's original console version sparked his interest in static recompilation, a promising technique also being used with N64 Recompiled to translate game code from its original platform to run natively on the PC. As impressive as the Unleashed project was, he could tell that much of the work that went into it was tailored to that specific game. What if he could go bigger? "Around that time, someone reached out to me about a community working on the Fable 2 Recomp," says Tom. "That's where I came into contact with a great group of people who shared similar goals and aspirations. Loreaxe (Ryan Fisher) was the owner of that Discord server and became my biggest supporter during the early days of getting the project off the ground. "I was experimenting with how we could build something that provides the foundational pieces for an emulated backend while also giving developers the ability to implement native rendering, audio, and other subsystems. That is really where static recompilation shines." That's how ReXGlue was born. In the few months since its reveal, a host of recompilation ports have popped up in early development using the tools that Tom and other contributors have been working on. It's a list that, unsurprisingly, contains quite a few games that never made it off the Xbox 360 as well as some other favorites: * Blue Dragon * Lost Odyssey * Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts * Ninja Gaiden 2 * Halo 3's beta * Crackdown 2 * Viva Pinata While Tom keeps a fairly low profile, he says he's been dipping into the Xbox 360 emulation and modding scene for essentially as long as it's been around. He did some modding for Source Engine games back in the day, but his professional background in systems & platform engineering gave him the right experience to build a bigger project like ReXGlue. As the Github page cautions, the proejct remains "in early development" and it's not yet time to get psyched about playing pristine, perfect PC ports of the games above. But what ReXGlue's current state _does_ give us is a great opportunity for insight into how recompilation works for a platform as complex as the Xbox 360. Tom makes no secret that ReXGlue is heavily based on the work of the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, Unleashed Recompiled, as well as XenonRecomp, a tool for converting the 360 game code to native C++. But getting a game running on PC is hardly as simple as slapping those three things together and calling it a day. "As the project matured, we made the decision to adopt Xenia's codebase wholesale and replace its JIT backend with AOT (ahead-of-time) mechanics, similar in concept to what parts of the Unleashed Recomp did, but packaged as a consumable and extensible SDK," he says. "That distinction matters: ReXGlue is not meant solely as an emulator. It's a platform. Static recompilation opens the door for things that are extremely difficult or outright impossible to achieve in the realm of JIT emulation. Things like deep modding support, native subsystem replacements, and platform-specific optimizations that just aren't feasible when you're translating instructions on the fly." I asked Tom for a breakdown of how ReXGlue's approach differs from N64 Recompiled, given the dramatically more complex console hardware. "The hardware is very different, but the core concept of static recompilation remains the same and that's really the beauty of it," he says. "Static recompilation is universally applicable because the fundamental idea maps directly to how any CPU processes instructions: you're taking the original machine code, analyzing it, and producing equivalent code for a different target architecture. The specifics of the instruction set change, but the methodology doesn't. "Where it really shines is in what comes after the translation. Once you have native code for the host platform, you get all the benefits of modern compiler optimizations that the original hardware never had access to. The result is code that can run not just correctly, but often more efficiently than the original." Indeed, you can see that even in the very early versions of ReBlue, the Blue Dragon recompilation Tom is working on himself. He calls it "the pilot title for most of my mad scientist experiments," like getting multi-disc games to work seamlessly. Even in nascent form the framerate is already much better than it is on console, echoing the performance advantage inherent to running code for these decades-old games natively on PC. The fact that ReXGlue uses pieces of the Xenia emulator, though, can be hard to understand for those of us who aren't wizened programmers. Is this recompilation or emulation? What's the point of all this work if an emulator already exists? Those questions are the crux of what makes ReXGlue special, and the nuance is in what it can do _right now_ vs. what it will eventually be capable of. Tom explains in detail: > "That's a question I see come up a lot, and I'll be honest, it's a frustrating one because it usually comes from people who haven't looked at what we've actually built. The short answer is: yes, it is absolutely a recompilation. The game's CPU code, every PowerPC instruction in the original binary, is converted to native C++ ahead of time through our codegen pipeline and compiled with Clang. There is no JIT. There is no instruction interpretation at runtime. When the game runs, it is executing native host code that was produced offline by the recompiler. That is static recompilation by definition. > > The confusion comes from the GPU side, and I understand why. Right now, we use Xenia's Xenos GPU backend for graphics. But the GPU is not the game. The game logic, the physics, the AI, the scripting, the kernel interactions, all of that is statically recompiled native code. The GPU backend is a rendering service that the recompiled code talks to, the same way a PC game talks to DirectX or Vulkan. Nobody would say a PC port "isn't real" because it uses a graphics API. The GPU backend is a subsystem, and it's one we fully intend to replace with native rendering over time. In fact, the entire graphics system is an abstract interface in the SDK. It's injected at build time, not baked into the recompiled output. That's by design. > > What people also tend to miss is that emulation and recompilation are not opposite ends of a spectrum with a clean line between them. With hardware as complex as the Xbox 360, you need to provide a compatible environment for the recompiled code to run in. That means memory layout, kernel objects, threading, filesystem access. Those are real systems that need to exist regardless of whether the CPU code is JIT-compiled or statically recompiled. We inherited Xenia's kernel layer and have heavily modified it to work with our execution model, but the fact that some of that infrastructure has roots in an emulator doesn't make the recompilation any less real. It means we were smart about what we built from scratch and what we adapted. > > The difference in execution model is significant and measurable. In Xenia, when a thread executes, the JIT translates PPC instructions on the fly, manages a code cache, and makes runtime optimization decisions. In ReXGlue, the function dispatch table is populated once at startup with native function pointers. When a thread needs to execute a guest function, it looks up the address, gets a C++ function pointer, and calls it directly. No translation, no cache, no interpretation. The recompiled code can be stepped through in a standard debugger, profiled with standard tools, and optimized by the full Clang optimization pipeline. That is a fundamentally different execution model from JIT emulation, and the results speak for themselves." As ReXGlue processes, it'll eventually come to include native rendering, audio, and input support. Once it's replaced the GPU emulation from Xenia, games will be able to run even faster on PC — but that's a big job still to come. The Xbox 360's hundreds of games used its GPU in different ways, which means that for the forseeable future each individual port project will be figuring out how _that_ game did things and feed that understanding back into the ReXGlue SDK. Tom has already been doing that with his work on Blue Dragon. "Everyone tries things out and reports back with improvements or things that need to be fixed," he says. "In my experience, that feedback loop is the best way to keep experimental research projects like this alive and moving forward. Experimentation drives innovation." ReXGlue is open to anyone interested in getting involved, with its own Discord server for organizing. Like N64 Recompiled, ReXGlue doesn't exist just to make it possible to develop PC ports of these games, but to make them better; to make them accessible playgrounds in ways they weren't before, even if _really_ dedicated modders were able to hack their consoles and mess around with games 15 years ago. "The goal has always been to make this a platform that others can build on, not just a black box that runs a game," Tom says. Halo 3 via Twister on ReXGlue Discord So, the big question: When will we be able to play Blue Dragon, or Nuts & Bolts, or any of these other recomps? Tom knows better than to guess at a date. "I honestly don't have a timeline. For Blue Dragon specifically, it needs to be at a place where I can say it is genuinely worthy of being put in front of people. That's a high bar, and I know it's a subjective one. I hold my own work to a strict standard. Getting a title to boot is a real accomplishment, and the effort involved should not be understated, especially for people who have limited exposure to systems-level programming. But booting is a starting point, not a finished project. There is a long distance between 'it runs' and 'this is something people should play.' I want the projects that come out of ReXGlue to represent what the SDK is actually capable of, not just that it technically works. When something is ready to be released, it should demonstrate real quality: clean implementations, thoughtful use of the SDK, and genuine progress beyond initial boot. That is the standard I hold Blue Dragon to, and it is the standard I encourage everyone in the community to hold their own projects to as well." 💽 * * * ### 2. N64 Recomps get an all-in-one launcher Fortuitous timing, giving we're talking all about recompilations this issue! As more and more of these projects arrive, keeping tabs on each one will either mean a cluttered desktop of icons, manually adding each to your Steam library, or... using a dedicated launcher! N64RecompLauncher, currently v1.56, has actually been around since last August, but a bevy of updates since then have seemingly gotten it into pretty good shape. It currently runs on Windows and Linux, and I got it installed and cruising in just a couple minutes. It's got a built-in updater and a bunch of UI options, so you can choose a layout more suited to a big library, a desktop monitor, or a more cramped Steam Deck screen. Installing each recomp takes only a second or two, because this is really just an organizer for those projects which each have their own launcher and require providing your own copy of the game ROM before they can be played. But it's definitely convenient. My favorite option in the settings menu is "Show Experimental Games," which is off by default; this prevents a load of early, incomplete recomps from cluttering up the interface if you just want to play the ports that have stable releases or are actually finished. But tick that box and you can see a bunch of in-the-works projects like Mega Man 64 and Chameleon Twist, playable (at least somewhat) on your computer! There's also another switch for "custom games" which are not specifically recompilations, but other ports of console games based on decompilations, like the ones I've been keeping track of on my Decompilation projects and N64 Recompiled PC ports list. RexGlue's Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Legend of Dragoon: Severed Chains, Perfect Dark, Link's Awakening DX HD, and more can be found within. Some of the classifications might be a bit wonky — Nuts & Bolts is listed as stable, for example, but that's only because the Github project's _launcher_ is billed as 1.0, while the underlying recompilation tools for the Xbox 360 are still very much in development as the interview above covers. That's not going to be anywhere close to a pristine experience. But the option to have all of these ports organized in one place with easy updating is a big win, particularly if, like me, you want to eventually try them all. For native PC games we used to groan every time Steam had to launch another launcher, but in this case I think it's a welcome convenience. Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In Azahar 2125 brings the noise, and an offical Libretro core – For Retroarch folks, the premiere 3DS emulator is now available as a core across Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, but that's just the tippy top of the iceberg for this update. It also includes a disk shader cache for Vulkan to avoid shader recompilation; CPU usage improvements when using the Artic Base streaming app; restored texture filtering support; new video scaling options; and loads of platform-specific fixes and additions. Android users can now automap controls as on desktop, for example, while on desktop controllers with touchpads like the DualSense can be used to control the emulated 3DS touchscreen. Neat! ShadPS4 v0.15 does stuff, sets the stage for Bloodborne netplay**** – The Bloodboo—er, PS4 emulator hit a new major version number, though none of its listed improvements like "Prevent protects during unmaps" or "Threads: initialize TLS on thread creation" immediately mean much to me. The release notes also mention bigger improvements to come in the next release, and over on YouTube developer George Moralis posted a taste: online play working in Bloodborne. I'm guessing there will be some problems or limitations for quite some time to come, but it's tantalizing nonetheless. PPSSPP continues to polish, including savestate-undoing – The PSP emulator's big recent release is up to .3 in bugfix and polish patches, including one that fixes a missing prompt to undo a savestate you've just made, if it was a terrible mistake. A handy feature! You can also now apply game-specific settings to homebrew, and DualSense Edge controllers work. RPCS3 lets you add games to Steam from within the emulator – Quite a cool quality-of-life feature here, the PS3 emulator now includes a right-click menu entry to add a shortcut for any game to your Steam library, so you can boot 'em right up like any other PC games. Seems quite nice if you're a Big Picture Mode user especially, and to that end RPCS3 also just rolled out a new in-game menu UI that seems a bit more organized. Dang... it's almost like they planned it. > You can now add games to Steam directly from RPCS3! > > Games can be launched directly from Steam, without going through the main RPCS3 UI. pic.twitter.com/3QUAEuGZPR > > — RPCS3 (@rpcs3) March 16, 2026 * * * ## Core Report A hearty helping of MiSTer tweaks – An unusually big roundup from Sorgelig this week with updates for a number of systems. The SNES core gets both rumble and save state support, my nemesis the CD-i gets some fixes, and the MiSTer as a whole get a nice QoL feature: "video_off_hdmi option to power down HDMI on idle timeout." Taito System SJ heads to the front line – Developer Anton Gale reported this past week that an update to the System SJ core for the MiSTer now includes Front Line and The Tin Star, following Sea Fighter Poseidon in February. Get yer '80s action on. * * * ## Translation Station Blaze & Blade Busters bursts into English – I have to say, this is an endearingly uggo PS1 action RPG. Is it a better game than its apparently dogwater predecessor, Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest? That I cannot tell you! But where that game got a PAL release this one never did, until now, thanks to fan translator Ben128. The multiplayer (with 4-player multitap support!) seems like fairly uncommon for an RPG of the time, and at least according to whoever submitted it to the GOG Dreamlist, it's seen at least some improvements: " Sherlock Holmes for the SG-1000 paints an English portrait of Loretta – Given the number of Sherlock adaptations out there, I would not be surprised if you told me there were literally dozens of games outside the modern Frogwares series that I've never heard of. There's certainly at least one! Sherlock Holmes: Loretta's Portrait was released on Sega's first console (predating the Master System) in 1987, and now it's been translated thanks to Jamiras. "What stuck out to me about Loretta's Portrait was how ambitious it was for an SG-1000 game," writes YouTuber NintendoComplete. "The machine wasn't designed to handle much beyond simple early 80s arcade-style shooters and platformers, and yet here we see a fully explorable city, full-screen background images, window overlays, boatloads of text, and a save system. As crude as the graphics and sound are, I can't help but be impressed by what Sega achieved with this cart." Honestly, rudimentary as it is, there's some pretty nice art in here. * * * ## Good pixels Closing out with a dip into the always delightful #scanlinesunday. Stay sharp! > Did you ever wish your favorite light novel characters could battle it out? This #ScanlineSunday you can in Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax for Playstation 3 🥖 in this 1v1 fighter from French Bread, select one of 12 characters and an assist from 22 titles, with some new and others you know! > > — Sick Combos (@sickcombos.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T04:15:28.899Z > With Bio Hazard/RE's 30th Birthday in its twilight, I thought I'd revisit the original Capcom haunted mansion for this week's #ScanlineSunday. A not-so-Sweet Home in its own Forest Zone and with creepily opening doors… 📺: Toshiba VTW-2187, composite, snapped with an Olympus Camedia C-765 > > — Sasha's Retrobytes 🏳️‍⚧️ (@sharkabytes.bsky.social) 2026-03-22T21:17:40.821Z > SCR$: International Karate+ / ZX Spectrum via MiSTer RGB / Sony WEGA 21" CRT TV #CRT #photography #retrogames #scanlineSunday > > — CRT ART Books (@crtartbooks.bsky.social) 2026-03-08T13:40:41.102Z > Bought a Gameboy player recently, and i've been having SO MUCH fun seeing what all these games look like on a crt! #ScanlineSunday > > — Neimi (@aquaticscent.digital) 2026-03-08T19:03:34.539Z ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Plus: AI's squeeze on memory makes cool pocket computers less and less affordable.

readonlymemo.comDREAMM explores a galaxy of fun as it rescues more LucasArts games from obscurityHello! A week ago, I posted on Bluesky that the next issue of **_ROM_** would be about the fan translation of Segagaga, based on an interview I conducted with some of the folks who worked on it. As the public's joy at seeing this Dreamcast game translated after decades of failed attempts turned to very much not joy over its use of AI translation tools, I knew a straightforward how-it-got-made story wasn't going to be the right approach. So I started working towards a different sort of story that would talk about how the patch was made, why people reacted the way they did, and how the decision to use those tools manifested in the translation itself. As you can probably tell from the headline, the rest of the newsletter you're reading right now is not about Segagaga. Long story short, time wasn't on my side for this weekend, so a deeper dive into the Segagaga fan translation will have to wait until later in March. Sorry! But hopefully it'll be worth the wait. Given the increasing frequency with which AI is turning up in our day-to-day lives and sparking debates about quality and accuracy and morality and environmentalism and all that, I don't want to rush through the process of looking at the highest profile game fan work to use it so far. So! This week is a bit of a lighter issue, with no big interview or breaking news, just some nice things happening around the emulation space. Enjoy! The horrors will be back soon enough. _(This issue does still actually contain some mild horrors, sorry)._ 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ _****a small tip****_ __to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. DREAMM a little DREAMM of Yoda's Challenge Activity Center One of my very favorite emulators, longtime MAME developer Aaron Giles' passion project DREAMM, has hit 4.0! What started out as an emulator specifically focused on the LucasArts SCUMM adventure games has since expanded to support more and more of the company's '80s, '90s and 2000s developed and published PC games, including more obscure ports to systems like the FM Towns. While many of these games it'd be possible to get working through DOSBox or the like, DREAMM makes the process of playing them so much smoother. And that's just the (very good) use case for a Windows PC: DREAMM also supports Linux and Mac, where most of these games were never playable in their day. Also, the UI is really cute. This big release includes support for a bunch of new games from the Lucas Learning series that I know you've been _dying_ to play — but if for some reason you're not all about edutainment, it also now supports a bunch of Star Wars games "for adults" and, also, Willow's here. The full new stuff list: **Six new late-90s Star Wars titles:** * Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter * Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance * Star Wars: Rebellion/Supremacy * Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D * Star Wars Episode I: Racer * Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace **All eight released Lucas Learning games:** * Star Wars: DroidWorks * Star Wars Episode I: The Gungan Frontier * Star Wars: Yoda's Challenge Activity Center * Star Wars: Pit Droids * Star Wars: Anakin's Speedway * Star Wars: Early Learning Activity Center * Star Wars Math: Jabba's Game Galaxy * Star Wars: Jar Jar's Journey **Two new licensed games:** * Monopoly Star Wars * Willow Some of the big higlights of this release include experimental netplay support, auto-solving copy protection, "more flexible" controller mapping, loading games straight from .7z files, and default audio/video settings that will apply across games. Since the list of supported game has grown significantly, there's also now filtering to control which you see. Aaron's FAQ is incredibly comprehensive in explaining what DREAMM can do and how to configure it, but it's also a remarkably easy to use emulator considering the complexity involved in emulating PC games from the DOS and Windows eras. Most of it is just drag-and-drop. If you want to hear more about DREAMM 4.0, there's a two hour interview with Aaron going live hours after this newsletter arrives in your inbox — you can watch it here! If I can stress one important thing for you, though, it's that DREAMM allows for easy play of two very important games: Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures and Yoda Stories. I mean, just look at this. Can you imagine videogames getting any better? Images via CollectionChamber.blogspot.com * * * ### 2. Get ready for the emulation handheld price increases (thanks AI!) In February, AYN, the Chinese company behind the popular Thor handheld, posted the following on Discord: _"We were informed today by our DRAM and storage supplier that memory prices are expected to continue rising. Unfortunately, the broader storage price surge largely driven by sustained AI-related demand is still impacting the entire industry."_ At the time, AYN said the price of the Thor would likely increase in April, and that "the final increase [would] depend on how much the component costs rise." But it didn't take that long: as of March 8, the Base Pro and Max models increased in price by $10, $30 and $40 respectively. "Based on the information we've received, memory pricing pressure is expected to continue for approximately the next year," AYN posted alongside the new prices. It would be a touch too dramatic to say that the era of cheap emulation handhelds is over — but the era of cheap emulation handhelds with generous helpings of memory probably is. "The storage vendors are killing us," the CEO of Ayaneo apparently said (translated from Chinese) when announcing the $2,000+ Ayaneo Next 2. Ayaneo’s New Handheld Has Eye-Popping Price, Thanks to Memory ShortageThe 128GB model of the Ayaneo Next 2 will retail for a staggering $4,299, which the company blames on the ongoing memory crunch.PCMagMichael Kan On Friday, Valve posted a 2025 year in review that said it "hope[d] to ship" its Steam Machine in 2026, but was having challenges with memory and storage shortages. Valve quickly updated the post to reaffirm that the hardware _will_ ship this year, but it's clear the outlook isn't nearly as rosy as it was when the company first announced this tech just a few months earlier. Official Steam News - Steam News HubCatch up with the latest news and announcements from official Steam news feeds.STEAM The Steam Deck OLED has been flickering in and out of stock in recent weeks, and I expect that's going to continue for the year to come as RAM remains squeezed by production lines focusing on data centers. The Analogue Pocket, meanwhile, blames its price increase not on memory but on tariffs. It's $40 up from its original price. Analogue Pocket Gets Hit With A Price Increase “Due To Recent Tariff Announcements”Dock is back in stock, thoughTime ExtensionDamien McFerran Retroid killed off the 12GB model of the Pocket 6, while bumping up the 8GB model a reasonable $15. We're still wildly spoiled for choice when it comes to powerful portable game systems that can play decades' worth of console games via emulation, and right now price increases of $10 or even $30 aren't going to change that. But there's certainly a possibility that as these shortages stretch on, and the Trump administration erratically shits out new arbitrary tariffs, that the systems will keep getting a bit less affordable and a bit harder to obtain. Some of the smaller players may die off completely if memory supply is hard enough to come by. So if you really, really want one, I'd suggest getting it now. Let's revisit this post in a year and see if I was being overly dramatic... or not nearly dramatic enough! Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In **Azahar comes to RetroArch** – While it's still a pre-release alpha, once the next version of Azahar is public it will also exist as a libretro core, supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Version 2125 has a bunch of other fixes and improvements onboard, too, including a new integer scaling option, improved CPU usage with Artic Base, and solving an issue with shared Vulkan shader cache files. **PPPSSPP v1.2 adds portrait UI, multiplayer "relay" servers and more** – The PSP emulator's first major update in some time delivers the goods, as promised. First up is the multiplayer feature, which seems like quite a big deal if you're playing PSP games online in the year of our dark lord 2026. "A new innovation in the PSP adhoc multiplayer space — they make it far easier to configure, since you no longer have to mess with opening ports in your firewall etc." writes developer Henrik Rydgård. "These are now automatically used for popular servers, and for other servers you can choose whether to try to use them or not." iOS now has screen rotation support, and the portrait UI is custom tailored instead of getting awkwardly squished. A new "smooth" audio feature "greatly reduces glitches when there are slowdowns in games," and the emulator supports the DualShock and DualSense on Windows out of the box. Hit this page for the full notes and game-specific fixes (like Outrun 2006 now being slowdown free!). **PCSX2 gets smarter about fonts** – Fonts! I love fonts, and things to do with them. So I wasn't bored one bit reading these patch notes from a PCSX2 update that improves the emulator's handling of non-latin characters, and saves 25MB of space in the Windows version by not having to ship a font used specifically for emojis. Sometimes emulation isn't about the games at all! * * * ## Core Report **The MiSTer PS1 core studies up on CDs** – Always nice to see the beloved PS1 core get better! Some updates/fixes from creator fpgazumspass and developer kuba-j include: * Track savestate slot status and allow loading only valid states/slots * Crime Crackers – freezes after intro, fixed in-game music * Dave Mirra and Thrasher Presents Skate and Destroy – long stutters during gameplay * MiruMiru PlayStation Vol.1 Disc 2 – broken graphics fixed (also fixes freezes on other MiruMiru demo discs) * Parasite Eve II (NTSC-U) – freeze after Dryfield boss fight fixed * Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense (NTSC-U) – black screen when selecting vehicle fixed **Taki Udon's MiSTer FPGA UI enters beta testing** – The software Taki's been working on for the SuperStation is nearly ready! While it's not publicly available yet, it's currently in beta testing via Discord, which hopefully means a 1.0 release isn't too far off. It's going to be fascinating to see how widespread adoption ends up being as an alternative to the default MiSTer UI. > Console Mode is going into open beta testing for SuperStation/MiSTER Pi owners. If you are interested, head over to Discord. We have a special role and channel for feedback: discord.gg/t3ZywMBvh > > — Taki Udon (@takiudon.bsky.social) 2026-03-03T09:40:56.120Z **Downloader 2.4 ain't faster, but it is easer** – Speaking of software, the MiSTer's Downloader tool is back with a meaty update; it now supports files up to "a few GB" in size, updates to cores won't automatically delete the old ones if the download fails, and most importantly, configuring downloads is getting better with "Drop-in database files" that "Allow users to install new databases by just dropping files onto the SD. No more need to open and edit a file like hackers, just good old drag and drop." * * * ## Translation Station **The Simple 2000 Series' Tairyou Jigoku goes through the looking glass** – This Alice-inspired PS2 horror game, part of the budget Simple Series line, had a Spanish translation a few years back, which has now gotten a "re-working" into English. What does that mean? I'm not exactly sure to be honest. The English looks okay in this playthrough, although you can tell the text spacing hasn't been adjusted for how it displayed Japanese. Still, a cool gaming curio to see in English, as highlighted in this video a couple years ago: **Lupin III: The Sage of Pyramid gets tomb raiding** – As highlighted by the writers at Sega Saturn Shiro, this early 3D action game where you run around a pyramid as gangly Lupin bears a passing resemblance to Tomb Raider. As a lover of all (well, most) things Lupin, I'm happy to see this one in English, though also a bit wary — as Shiro highlights, its hacker/translator uses AI in their process (though they also highlight when using it is a bad idea!). Sticking to the awkward grammar of "Sage of Pyramid" in English is a bit of a red flag though. That's how it was written on the title screen in the Japanese version, but the point of a translation is to adjust such things appropriately in another language, yeah? As you can see from a full playthrough vid, Sage of Pyramid is pretty light on text/dialogue, so at least you're not losing out on _the essence_ of the game if the translation is spotty in places. **Genesis tactics game Vixen 357 is getting an official English release** – Well this is very cool! Retro publisher Shinyuden is putting out a physical edition of this Langrisser-alike, which has some very nice looking anime portraits in it. An official English release of a '90s mecha strategy game in 2026 is a treat. **Valkyria Chronicles 3 translated, but more** – A game people were famously excited to see get a fan translation more than a decade ago, but it wasn't quite finished. This project fully retranslates the game, plus hits some stuff that was never done in the original fan effort, like the DLC and in-game encyclopedia and newspapers. Check out this list for everything the new patch includes! "The translation itself is pretty much entirely by me alone. I guess I should note in 2026 that this is a 'manual' translation, not AIsloption," the creator wrote on Reddit. **A Doraemon adventure-platformer? Sure, why not** – I assume without looking it up that there are approximately one million Doraemon games, as there are one million Doraemon movies, and this one looks to mostly be walking around town talking to people in between platforming stages. But if you dig the android cat, here you go! (Okay I looked it up and there are SO MANY) * * * ## Good pixels And now, for a smattering of amusing screenshots from the Lucas Learning line. Images via Mobygames ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Plus: The latest Nintendo Switch emulation DMCA Whac-a-mole.

readonlymemo.comAfter 17 years, Dolphin can finally emulate the Triforce arcade — except this one obscure, ambitious card gameHappy Sunday (or day that you're reading this), gamers! It's a Nintendo-heavy issue this week, with a catch up on the latest Switch scene drama (don't panic) and a much more fun look at the work going into bringing to life the short-lived and little-used Triforce arcade system from the early 2000s. Which is actually more a Sega jam than a Nintendo one, but we'll get into all that. It's been an exciting couple weeks for emulation-adjacent stories. Here's one that caught my eye I'm happy to share, after featuring keitai preservation in an earlier issue of **_ROM_**: <i>Rockman EXE: Phantom of Network</i> Gets Unofficial, Native PC PortProtodude I haven't dug into this project enough to be familiar with the details or how it differs from the **decompilation and recompilation projects** I'm keeping track of, but the end result for interested players is about the same: You can now play a good version of this once-lost Mega Man game! That's really cool, especially as keitai emulation is still in its infancy. Here's another fun but small story: **Secret of Mana: Reborn v2.5** is out now, a new version of a long-in-the-works retranslation / romhack. This version is significant, however, because "for the first time, fans can explore two previously unreleased areas that were cut before the game’s initial release. This is your chance to go where no Secret of Mana player has gone in over 30 years!" Meanwhile, speaking of recompilations — this Xbox 360-focused project, partially built off the work that went into Sonic Unleashed Recompiled, just appeared out of the blue: GitHub - rexglue/rexglue-sdk: Xbox 360 Recompilation Runtime and ToolkitXbox 360 Recompilation Runtime and Toolkit. Contribute to rexglue/rexglue-sdk development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubrexglue While it's still WIP and there are no polish ports as of yet, the developers are already putting it to work with the likes of Blue Dragon. So that's pretty awesome. We might not be _that_ far away from the exclusive gems of the Xbox 360 library being playable on PC with native, fanmade ports. Wonders never cease. 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ _****a small tip****_ __to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. After mastering the Triforce, one game still remains out of reach: The Key of Avalon The biggest story in emulation this month has already been told in incredible detail on the Dolphin emulator blog: Rise of the Triforce. It's a fantastic read, delving into Sega's arcade history and its partnership with Nintendo and Namco to build a short-lived arcade platform out of the guts of the GameCube. If you know the platform, it's likely due to one of two games: either F-Zero AX, the arcade equivalent to the home console F-Zero GX, or Mario Kart Arcade GP. In total there were only nine Triforce games, which helps explain why this system hasn't been a high priority emulation target for many years. Rise of the TriforceDuring the rapid technological advancements of the early 1990s, the video game industry was on the cusp of a massive addition - another dimension. With console shenanigans like the Super FX chip giving players a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games released for home consoles were nothing compared to what arcade developers were capable of doing. By employing gigantic budgets and cutting-edge hardware, the arcade gave players a chance to see the future, today. But the future eventually arrived with the launch of the 5th generation of consoles. All of a sudden, the revolutionary 3D hardware features that were once exclusive to arcades were now available in home consoles. Without next-generation hype pushing players into the arcade, powerful but expensive arcade machines were no longer sustainable to develop. The industry adjusted by moving toward more cost effective solutions, with many turning to the inexpensive, already proven 3D-capable hardware available in 5th gen home consoles. Rather than turning around the decline of the arcade, the cheaper hardware may have helped accelerate it. There were fewer unique experiences to pull players into the arcade, and previous hit exclusives were now seeing high quality home console ports that allowed them to be enjoyed without munching quarters. When the 6th generation arrived with the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2, many arcade stalwarts waved the white flag and started to shift their arcade divisions to home console projects, with mixed success. Sega was among those hit hardest by this era. They produced some of the greatest arcade thrills of the 1990s and enjoyed massive success in the home console market with the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. But a string of mistakes and miscalculations combined with the slumping arcade industry sent them to the brink of bankruptcy. By 2002, the Dreamcast had been soundly defeated by the launch of the PlayStation 2, and Sega began porting some of their hits to their former rivals’ hardware just to stay afloat. The home market was lost, but the languishing arcade scene presented Sega with an opportunity. They still had legendary arcade development teams, and if Sega could leverage them to produce a wave of arcade hits, they would be in a position to dominate a new era of arcades when most others were changing gears. There was just one problem: Sega didn’t have the resources that they once did. If they were going to do this, they needed some help. And so they did something that would have been considered unthinkable just five years prior. Sega teamed up with Nintendo to develop a GameCube-based arcade platform. Bolstering their ranks was Namco, another coin-op stalwart with tons of arcade veterans. Three companies, one mission: Triforce.Dolphin EmulatorMayImilae "Unfortunately, when it comes to emulation, arcade hardware is a very, very different challenge than emulating a home console," the Dolphin team explain in the blog above. "Even though each game is powered by a Triforce, all of the hardware around it can be unique for each game and even behave differently on different revisions of the same game! An arcade cabinet only needs to be compatible with the specific game inside of it. Because of that, unlike GameCube/Wii emulation, where fixing one game can sometimes fix dozens of others, each individual revision of an arcade game needs to be treated as its own challenge. "Those problems didn't stop people from trying to build Triforce emulation on top of Dolphin in the past, though! Over 17 years ago, Dolphin gained the ability to emulate parts of the Triforce Baseboard. It wasn't enough to boot any Triforce games, but it was a start. However, that was the last time anything Triforce-related hit our mainline builds. Aside from code clean up efforts, the fledgling Baseboard emulation was left untouched until it was removed in the summer of 2016 to avoid misleading users into thinking that mainline Dolphin targeted Triforce hardware. Just because Triforce emulation wasn't progressing in the main builds doesn't mean it wasn't being pursued, though. Instead, efforts were moved to a dedicated Triforce branch, where developers could do whatever they wanted to improve Triforce emulation." To make a long story short (though I highly recommend you go read the long version), that Triforce branch was abandoned after two years of semi-successful work... but there was someone out there who still very much wanted to make it happen. Here's the blog again: "This is the culmination of over a decade of work. While were focused on advancing GameCube and Wii emulation, **crediar** doubled down and continued maintaining his own fork specifically for Triforce emulation. We were aware of this fork, but given the fact that we knew little about how the Triforce worked and had bad memories of the old, hacky Triforce branch, it mostly flew under our radar. "Everything changed mid-2025 when crediar contacted us about potentially making a pull request to get his Triforce emulation code into our official builds... In the end, what won us over was the quality of emulation. The games ran beautifully, and apart from missing touchscreen support for The Key of Avalon, each game was playable. The hacky, messy Triforce emulation we remembered was gone, and something much better had taken its place." Dolphin can now emulate every game released for the Triforce arcade platform — _except for one_ (and its sequel). That one, The Key of Avalon, is a truly strange beast from Sega's studio Hitmaker, with four sit-down arcade cabinets each outfitted with a touchscreen clustered around a big screen which communicated with all of them for multiplayer card game action. Players battled each other with creatures scanned in from decks of cards — between the original version of Avalon, several updates, and Key of Avalon 2, there were about 300 cards to collect, with the typical range of rarities. Here's a video of it from Triforce emulation wizard crediar himself: Wait, so how is there video of it? Well, Key of Avalon is _somewhat_ playable in Dolphin, but not fully. "The Mario Kart GP games share the same networking functions as Key Of Avalon games so it was kinda working already because the functions were already there," crediar told me. Even the basic setup to test Key of Avalon is involved — you need four instances of Dolphin and a game server running simultaneously to simulate the arcade setup. "What I thought to be the hardest part, the cards, turned out easier than I thought as most games have a test menu were you can just test stuff and that makes it simpler to implement things," Crediar said. "But the card stuff was also far from easy to add as we had no device, so it is always guesswork what the game expects." Key of Avalon flyer via Sega Retro The big roadblock for emulating Key of Avalon is the touchscreen that players used to control their cards: "The main problem with this compared to almost any special device like the playing cards or the IC cards there is no test for it in test menu, nor is any command unhandled, the game also shows no errors about it, so we currently have no idea how it works." Crediar has made a frankly ridiculous amount of progress with Key of Avalon without access to an original arcade machine setup _or_ documentation. Reverse-engineering much of the Triforce's esoteric hardware came down to "looking at the game’s assembly [code] and seeing which commands it sends and what responses it expects." "What would be very useful is the manual for the game’s client hardware," Crediar said. "These manuals are extremely detailed. F-Zero AX even includes a full wiring diagram of the system, and every part of the hardware is explained. Having an actual cabinet would also help, but that seems unlikely unless someone randomly comes forward." Fully emulated Key of Avalon feels like more a matter of "when" than if — Crediar told me he's confident it's possible even if no one ever gets ahold of a full cabinet setup. "I made quite a bit of progress in the last few days regarding the touchscreen," he told me Saturday. "We found code that parses a packet related to it. Now we just need to figure out how to trigger the read, or in the worst case we can poke the values in RAM for now." Key of Avalon flyer via Sega Retro Keep an eye on the Dolphin blog for updates — with any luck, a few months from now you may be able to play what I feel fairly confident in calling one of the most obscure, inaccessible collectible card games ever made thanks to emulation. ...would it be crazy to buy some cards? * * * ### 2. Another year, another Nintendo DMCA spree on Switch emulators As reported by Android Authority last week, Nintendo finally turned its gaze back to Switch emulators after many months of relative peace and quiet, "sending DMCA notices to literally every Nintendo Switch emulator and fork that’s currently hosted on GitHub." The complaint targeted both active projects like Eden, Kenji-NX and Citron as well as inactive ones like Sudachi — while a far cry from the dramatic shutdowns of Yuzu and Ryujinx, it's still a bummer and an unpleasant reminder that the DMCA can be used to knock open source projects offline without proof that they're actually infringing on anything. "We believe that the affected projects were targeted for their binary distribution on GitHub," one of the developers of Ryujinx fork Ryubing posted on Discord. "Our projects continue to be licensed under the MIT license and hosted on our GitLab." Several Switch emudevs, including some of Ryubing's, are undaunted by Nintendo's DMCA shotgun blast. "The only thing targeted was our GitHub releases page," Eden's developers explained in a Discord update of their on February 13. "Not the source code, not our Actions workflow, nothing on our self-hosted Git instance, not even our development PR/Master/Nightly builds. ... Our development will continue as always!" Others understandably reacted differently. Citron shut down its Discord, official cite, and presence on both GitHub and Gitlab — though according to a post on Reddit, the real reason for that was scene drama rather than Nintendo's action. _That's_ a thorny brush I have no intention of wading into, but I do expect it means that we'll see yet another fork pop up of Citron's continuation of Yuzu eventually. So yes, it's been a messy old week, but the end result — aside from a reminder that Nintendo will occassionally take aim at what it can under US copyright law — hasn't amounted to much. Switch emulation developers got wise to the risks when they took up the mantle from Yuzu and Ryujinx, and hosting code somewhere other than GitHub prevents this sort of drive by takedown from doing anything but removing a convenient mirror. In other words, another brief scare, a side of scene drama, and then the emulation continuing on as before? Same as it ever was. Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In **bsnes-netplay supports 5-player multitap play for the true Super Bomberman experience** – Okay, first off, you should go and buy Konami's new Super Bomberman collection if you're a Bomberhead, to show support for the company rounding up seven games in one bundle including their various regional versions, localized versions of Super Bomberman 4/5, and Steam Remote Play together support on PC. As official releases go, this is a rad one. But you know the hobby scene's always got a special trick up its sleeve, and the netplay-specialized fork of bsnes just got updated with multitap support for five players over the internet, opening the door to easy online play in quite a few other games. > Hey everyone! New BSNES-Netplay update is here! After a lot of hard work, multitap support is finally here, meaning netplay sessions now support up to 5 active players! Release link down below. > > — Heat (@heatdev.bsky.social) 2026-02-15T15:01:20.803Z Bomberman's cool and all, but who's up for 5-player SNES Lord of the Rings? **RPCS3 sings its way closer than ever to full compatibility** – In the past, the PS3 emulator could support some, but not all, SingStar games. Why? Because while early ones used the PS3's "cellMic" API, while later ones switched to "direct USB access," RPCS3's Twitter account explained. A new commit allows you to use a standard USB PC mic in the emulator, while another fixes issues with video decoding in some SingStar games. That makes 39 more games playable, leaving just 62 games bootable but not yet playable in RPCS3, most of them for the PlayStation Move. **Yaba Sanshiro 1.19.3 arrives with a new Android UI** – This is a big update for the Saturn emulator, including but not limited to: * "Complete UI overhaul: Modern design following Material Design 3 guidelines * Added standalone Backup Manager * Backup data sharing feature * Optimized button layout for small screen devices" **DREAMM 4.0 is nearly here, with beta builds in testing** – Aaron Giles' LucasArts-focused emulator is close to its first release since October 2024. 4.0 includes a whole ton of new features, but the most attention-grabbing are the additional games it'll support: "All eight released Lucas Learning games, six new late-90s Star Wars titles, two new licensed games: Star Wars Monopoly and Willow." Can't wait! * * * ## Core Report **Taito's Sea Fighter calls Poseidon MiSTer** – Developer Anton Gale has updated the System SJ MiSTer core to support the 1984 sidescroller Sea Fighter Poseidon. Perhaps not a classic, but hey, surf's up. **MiSTer's Update All adds CRT support****** – "It's no secret that running Update All (or Downloader) without extra configuration gives you no output on CRT screens. You could always 'fix' this by tweaking some MiSTer.ini options, but the results were pretty mixed," writes maintainer theypsilon. "Well, that's no longer the case. I've redesigned the UI and menu layouts to adapt to the terminal width, and adjusted many places to avoid overflowing text. It's proper responsive behavior, not a hack." Update All's new v2.5 also includes a PC launcher for arcade systems and better theme support. **The MiSTer's N64 gets a little more turbo** – Over in the MiSTer Discord server, user Corn has uploaded an experimental overclocked version of the N64 core that ekes out even more speed than past efforts, which will mean a few more frames in those notoriously slowdown-prone games. It's a nice counter to the Analogue 3D's out of the box overclocking feature, though as you'd expect from overclocking a system that wasn't built to be overclocked, it's not going to work in every game. Users have reported crashes in Diddy Kong and Beetle Adventure Racing so far. * * * ## Translation Station **Bangai-O explodes with not one, but two new translations** – As featured last issue, the group Roboverse has been working on a fresh translation for the N64 release of Treasure's Bangai-O... and now it's out! But bizarrely, another translation appeared too, just a day later, from solo hacker/translator deadsnare. Hopefully no one involved in either project feels like they've had their thunder snatched — while it's rare to see two translations drop at the same time, comparing them _does_ offer the opportunity to see different approaches to localization. Whichever one you go with, I have a feeling it'll be a big improvement over the official English translation Bangai-O got on the Dreamcast back in the day. Bangai-O translation by deadsnare (first/left) and Roboverse. deadsnare is also currently working on hacking the Saturn version of visual novel Yu-No. **Little Master 2: Knight of Lightning** - A tactics RPG sequel for the original Game Boy, the first of which got a translation back in 2018. Here's an extremely thorough article on it, but if you want the short version, this strategy game's characters include Dracula, a minotaur, and a giant chicken. Good. A much quicker overview of the sequel, below: * * * ## Good pixels Zombies are on the brain with Resident Evil Reqiuem nearly here, so I dug up some screenshots from REmake on the GameCube, captured in Dolphin more than a decade ago. Still a gorgeous game. 💽 ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Two recent topics revisited with a bit more depth.

readonlymemo.comThe follow-up: Taki Udon on the SuperStation Dock, and more Quest 64 RecompHey folks, I'm coming at you from a hotel in the midst of a head cold and wedding travel, so this is going to be a bit more of a truncated issue than usual. Luckily my hands are working a bit better than my voice, but I'm still going for the speedrun right now. I've got another big interview planned for the near future, but not much time to assemble it in February, so look forward to this mysterious topic _soonᵀᴹ._ This week, enjoy the last bit of my chat with Taki Udon, this part focused on the SuperStation's dock, and the work that went into getting real-time CD performance working on the MiSTer. Plus, a secondary quickie interview with Rain, the developer behind the recently featured Quest 64 Recomp. Basically this issue is like one of those clip show episodes that's got new material, but it's not _fresh_ fresh, y'know. Since this is on the shorter side, a quick housekeeping reminder: you can follow a list of emulation developers, official profiles and fan translators that I made on Bluesky! Emulation Scene by @wes.readonlymemo.comEmulation & Fan Translation programmers, creators, and news sources. 💽 Maintained by @wes.readonlymemo.com.Bluesky Social I'm also maintaining a page tracking decompilation / recompilation projects, with monthly updates! Decompilation projects and N64 Recompiled PC ports (Jan 2026)A guide to the playable and upcoming retro game decomps and recompilations, updated monthly.Read Only MemoWes Fenlon That'll do it for this intro, let's get to it! 💸 __If you enjoy__ _****ROM****_ __, I'd love it if you'd consider__ _****a small tip****_ __to help me cover my monthly costs. (Follow the link and click 'change amount' to whatever you want).__ * * * ## The Big Two ### 1. Taki Udon dishes out a few more details on the SuperStation Dock _When Taki Udon was getting ready to announce the SuperStation and start taking pre-orders, the SuperDock — which can play games straight from a disc — wasn't part of the plan. We spoke about how the last-minute addition became one of the toughest engineering challenges for the SuperStation, in terms of both hardware and software. Here's that section of the interview, edited for clarity._ **The dock feels like something new and different for FPGA, to me. The fact that you have this dock that's actually able to play PS1 discs and has other stuff attached to it. Walk me through your intentions with the dock and what it's taken to get it to the point it's working effectively.** Even just the December before the launch [in January 2025], it's just the SuperStation. There's no dock. And in my mind, if I did a dock, it'd just be to get more USB, because we only had three USB [ports]. And I maybe wanted to have an internal [solid state] drive. Then people were like 'we want a CD. We want a CD.' I'm thinking about it, and I'm thinking, 'it should definitely be able to read CDs.' CDs are not difficult at all. But if you took the conventional wisdom at the time, people are like 'oh, there's no way you can read CDs on MiSTer, it's not going to work, every CD drive is a little different.' Blah blah blah. If those people worked for me and they were the ones I went to for advice, I would not do the SuperDock, because I would just think that it's impossible. But [they weren't]. So when we sold the SuperStation, I put the dock there for a $5 deposit, and it was a $5 deposit because it was not guaranteed. But if you give me this deposit, I will know if it's worth my time to try to make it work. Then a lot of people paid the $5 deposit, so I felt comfortable sinking an unknown amount of time trying to get it to work. I hired a bunch of engineers to work on that and to work on the UI, which some people also said was impossible to do. The UI started first. I was like, 'it should not be impossible to do a UI on this. It's a computer!' I've released handhelds that are weaker than the processor that's in the MiSTer, and have a UI that's much better, with graphics and everything. 'It can't be done, it can't be done.' Well, we're naive enough to try, I guess. And then we did it. Around the summer we finally got some proof of concepts of being able to read discs. Reading PS1 was possible. It works. Can Sega CD work? Yes it can — it's even easier than PlayStation 1. Performance is amazing. Can it do Sega Saturn? Yes, it's even better than PlayStation 1. Can it do PC CD? Yes! All of these things were way more performant in that early stage than PlayStation 1 was, so no matter what, the myth that it can't read CDs was just a myth. It's a hobbyist project. When people are like 'oh, we want the UI to look good,' yeah, it's easy to _say_ those things, but if you don't have an engineer that's going to actually spend the time to work on it, with no ROI at all, then they're not going to do it unless they're personally invested in it. And [so far] none of them are, because they like the way the UI looks. But there's a majority of people who probably want the UI to be better, and they want to be able to access legacy media without having to buy consoles that are super expensive. Once we had the dock CD working, we just needed to iterate. How can we make the experience better? How can we remove the friction from MiSTer? How can we make this integrated into our main UI? How can we give users an option to never need to use the MiSTer UI at all? How can we auto-boot into our UI? How can we recognize that discs have already been dumped, and should the user load it from the backed up storage because that'll be faster, or should they have the freedom of being able to still boot it from the CD? > Region free PS1 = ❤️ > > Japanese PS1 games are super cheap. pic.twitter.com/r6sQ17Mw6r > > — Taki Udon (@TakiUdon_) January 4, 2026 We got it to the point that the hardware is fully proven. So the $5 deposit changed to the full price of the dock. We opened up the mold for the dock. If I had more money, a lot of things would've been going [into production] at the same time, but there's a lot of risk in this stuff. If I had opened the mold for the dock from the beginning like I did for the SuperStation, I would have to eat that entire dock cost if the dock couldn't work _and_ I'd have to refund the $5 deposit. A refund of the $5 deposit is not a big deal — that's $5 plus maybe 3% extra for refunding the original payment processing fee. But the mold, that's a lot. And paying for people to work on it in the office, that's a huge cost. There's no failure path forward. So we opened the mold for the dock, and it's [now] a month or two behind SuperStation. **What goes into changing a mold before production?** The mold [for SuperStation] has been modified a lot of times to accomodate changes that we've done to the motherboard, but since all of these things were mixing at the same time [throughout the design phase], it was easy. Now if I want to change something for the mold, it's not easy. We have a new revision, which is 1.3. 1.3 has one change where the connector that goes to the dock is a board-to-board PCB connection. So when you have it on top of your motheboard, you just press it down like a Lego brick, and it's connected. Right now, on the ones that we are shipping, there's a flat panel cable that connects to the cartridge connector that we have that connects to the dock, and then the other end of that cable connects to the motherboard. So you always have to connect one cable to the motherboard and one to a secondary PCB, and that secondary PCB connects the motherboard to the SuperDock. As of 1.3, you'll just take a secondary PCB and just put it into place by pushing down. It saves you a lot of steps, and I think it looks much better. But the problem with that is, that requires a mold change, because it doesn't fit fully flush with the connector. Even [three weeks ago] we were playing around with 'how can we make this fit without changing the mold?' > EDM https://t.co/6z10Oz15wx pic.twitter.com/zbl4X0iubb > > — Taki Udon (@TakiUdon_) September 22, 2025 Changes from 1.2.1 to 1.23 were mostly internal, about how we improve the efficiency of assembly. Now, when you assemble the motherboard, you can just drop it right into the pocket that it sits in in the bottom shell. But for 1.2's motherboard, you had to tilt it back, so that the back ports are down and the front of the PCB is pointing up to your face, then you put that side in and the front goes down. Once you put it in there it's locked into place. You can't easily get it out. That motion — I said 'well, if you multiply that by X amount of units, that's a lot of time.' It should really just be 'drop it in and screw it in.' And if the user needs to take it out, it should be easy for them. There's no reason we need to lock it down, so that's not a great design. So we had to modify the mold for the device, which is expensive. * * * ### 2. A quick Quest 64 Recompiled follow-up After featuring the WIP Quest 64 in **_ROM_** a couple issues back, I had a quick chat with developer Rain, who put v0.1 up on Github. "Currently, the port does not correctly support widescreen or higher refresh rates, however surprisingly they do mostly work out of the box. I would like to have the visual bugs completely fixed for both widescreen and higher refresh rates, fix the hackyness of the current controller pak support, and get mod support working before it's an official v1.0," Rain told me. The Github will also only build for Windows currently (Mac and Linux support to come). Rain learned to code primarily to go glitch hunting in Paper Mario. "I only knew MIPS assembly and the scripting language of Paper Mario for awhile, but then two people from the ZeldaRET Discord started up a Paper Mario decomp, which I then contributed to in order to learn C," he said. "From there I created my own decomp projects of Chameleon Twist 1 & 2, as well as Mario Parties 1-3. For Quest 64, Mallos (the original creator of the Quest 64 decomp project) was having issues with the build system in their decomp project so i offered to lend a hand which eventually lead to me contributing a bit to the project as well. Many years later, Wiseguy releases the N64 Recomp program and i was looking at games that I had contributed to decompilations for to try and recomp, and I came across Quest 64. Well I actually got it working in less than a day, but the N64ModernRuntime library didn't have controller pak support so you couldn't save. Sonicdcer who has also created a few recomps mentioned they had a fork that mostly worked for the controller pak, so I used that fork and with one other patch to the game, I had saving working." Rain confirmed that he got the Japanese version of Quest 64, Eltale Monsters, working with N64 Recompiled as well, so that will eventually get a release, too. Rain also wants to release recomps of the Chameleon Twists and those N64 Mario Parties, though the latter require an addition to the N64 Recompiled process first. "There's a lot of similar things for each recomp, but setting up the decomp project (which you need so you can generate an ELF the recomp can parse) and actually mapping out the code is its own specialized process for each game. So working on these recomps definitely helps, but there's always unique hurdles," he said. "I think we are going to write some kind of tutorial/general basis for getting one up and running soon, though I'm not sure how soon that will actually be." Other folks are welcome to contribute to the Quest 64 Recomp, too, if they're enthusiastic about seeing Brian's adventures fully polished up sooner rather than later. Subscribe to ROM! * * * ## Patching In **Citron "Pathfinder" refines Steam Deck UI, integrated mod downloads****** – This "significant milestone" release is truly packed with stuff. There's a new global save directory "making backup and migration significantly easier" and save files are compatible with other emulators. An integrated mod manager includes automatic installation of downloaded mods to correct directories" and has pride of place in the right-click context menu. You can save and share per-game configuration files to prove you have the best BotW settings. "Comprehensive restructuring of all UI elements for Steam Deck compatibility" includes an overhaul to the overlay and a bunch of bug fixes. There's a ton more to dig into in the update, too. **DuckStation gets fullscreen button swapping** – The fullscreen UI in the PlayStation emulator now includes an option to swap your X/O concern/cancel buttons. Important! **Azahar backtracks on .3ds extension, allows it** – "We previously made this change as a clear motion to distance ourselves from the mass piracy that lead to the closure of Yuzu and Citra, however, we have now determined that this change is causing more harm than good," say the developers. "Given that the removal of the .3ds extension was originally an act of project philosophy rather than a technical change, we don't want this decision to overshadow the very real leaps which have been made in Azahar over the last year. Because of this, we have decided that it's for the best of everyone that we revert the change." * * * ## Core Report **Analogue 3D v1.2.0 rolls out fixes** – Analogue's N64 got a patch last week fixing some issues with HDMI CEC as well as the FPGA emulation itself. There's now support for the Switch Online N64 controller. It also got a few new library features, including tracking playtime and a "date added" label for games. A beta "force progressive output" option "removes interlacing and provides superior image quality over de-interlacing by delivering the full original image every frame. This modifies the video core to output the full framebuffer instead of the CRT interlaced image — a feature unavailable on the original system — while keeping video post-processing true to the original." **MAME 0.285 goes to the moon****–** The first MAME release of the year adds what I believe is the first emulation of Nichibutsu's Moon Raker, a 1980 shooter. There's a bit of history in this thread. * * * ## Translation Station **Chobits for PS2 goes English** – There are (surprisingly?) only a couple Chobits games, and this one now has a 1.0, mostly complete translation! Except, womp womp, it's "predominately AI translated with manual edits." Slight frowny face to that fact. Some UI elements are also still in Japanese, but the videos have been subbed in English. **Tales of Phantasia: Cross Edition for PSP gets a comprehensive translation patch** – Tales of Phantasia has long been available in English, first with the SNES fan translation and then with the official GBA release, but not this PSP version! There are also a bunch of tweaks in this patch, including a skit prompt, some balance changes, and quality of life changes like "Curio's Mirror and Scout Orb now carry over in New Game+ if you select the option to carry over items." I love the SNES version of Phantasia, but never played this version. Cool that every edition of the game is now playable in English. **WIP updates! Super Robot Wars 64, The Curse of Ogaeritō, and Moero! Justice Gakuen Translation Project:** Chapu (@chaputranslations.bsky.social)This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.Bluesky Social > billymonks just released the first iteration of their English translation patch of the "Nekketsu Nikki" mode in the Japanese version of Project Justice (Moero! Justice Gakuen) on the SEGA Dreamcast.https://t.co/dKh41iaezr pic.twitter.com/HkuH4xHSla > > — Derek Pascarella (ateam) (@DerekPascarella) February 4, 2026 * * * ## Good pixels Let's close with some quick Bluesky posts. Click through for the pics! > 📺 Final Fantasy IX // PlayStation // JVC AV-27D201 via component > > — Aidan Moher (@aidanmoher.com) 2026-01-18T06:44:31.817Z > 🕹️ Battle Unit 🎮 Sharp X68000 (via MiSTer) 📺 🟥🟩🟦 Commodore 1084 #️⃣ #ScanlineSunday > > — Jeffrey Mays (@jeffreymays.bsky.social) 2026-02-02T03:24:42.683Z > Assault Suits Valken SNES 2-chip S-Video Sony KV-27V42 #ScanlineSunday > > — Evan Arnett (@evanarnett.bsky.social) 2026-02-02T01:18:17.551Z > Here are a few others I took of the startup. (I'll give you guys a nice pixel-based game next time, I swear!) > > — Chronis (@chronis.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T13:44:49.150Z > We have Samurai Shodown at home this #ScanlineSunday in Golden Axe: The Duel for Sega Saturn 🪓 Generations passed since Gillius Thunderhead defeated Death Adder by using the Golden Axe. Now his descendant is among the many warriors fighting each other to control the Golden Axe in this 2D Fighter > > — Sick Combos (@sickcombos.bsky.social) 2026-01-19T02:58:22.243Z ## Sign up for Read Only Memo Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware. Heck, it's free Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Just two days after our interview about DEmul improving support for Sega Hikaru arcade emulation, developer MetalliC has uploaded a new test build adding some useful features: - Aspect ratio correction - Rotation - Window resizing - Start in fullscreen mode

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