After 2 decades of tinkering, MAME finally cracks the Hyper Neo Geo 64
How MAME devs finally got sound working for the 3D arcade system. Plus: PC Engine LaserActive support gets fast-tracked.
Let me test out a theory here: If you're into emulation, you're into older video games, ergo you're into old stuff of all kinds. That means you, savvy, good-taste-having reader, will love this spread of photos I took in Tokyo last week at the National Film Archive of Japan, which has a small but lovely set of exhibits from the history of Japanese film. Since you like playing Super Nintendo games this is absolutely your shit, right? Right??
Okay, I'll throw in a pic of some games to sweeten the deal.
This issue is coming a week late as I was off to Japan last week for my first-ever visit to the Tokyo Game Show, and too busy working (and working at eating sushi) to squeeze in a newsletter. And it's coming late in the day Sunday — apologies! But patience pays off!!
This issue's main story has been cookin' for a minute: last month the news landed that MAME had finally properly cracked Hyper Neo Geo 64 support, but the celebration was a little bit premature. The arcade system was playable in MAME, yes, but sound was in really shoddy shape — it wasn't yet a particularly good experience.
Over the last month or so that's been changing, and changing fast, with frequent improvements checked in by a pair of regular MAME contributors. So now is the time to talk about it, and soon (with the very next MAME release!) it will be time to actually play it. Considering there are only seven Hyper Neo Geo 64 games, well, that's a week's worth of evenings sorted.
As with every trip to Tokyo I took a few hours to stop by Akihabara this time, but its pull has certainly lessened over the years as retro prices have skyrocketed from where they were a decade ago and the selection has gotten thinner and thinner. Still, browsing the stores is a fun time and there are great finds to be found as long as you're not looking for anything too in-demand. I picked up one game: Kamiwaza, a PS2 "stealth" game where you play as a thief in feudal Japan stealing hella stuff.
As you might guess, it's more silly than stealthy.
Shout out to my shopping partner in crime, Paradise Killer's Oli Clarke Smith, for the recommendation. I've got a feature on the way in the coming weeks over at PC Gamer based on some of the games we picked up and how they speak to the "identity" of particular retro consoles. I'm hoping it'll be a fun read!
For now, let's hop into MAME; then stick around for an update on Pioneer LaserActive emulation!
The Big Two
1. The Hyper Neo Geo comes to MAME: Now with working sound!
21 years ago, David "MameHaze" Haywood started looking into what it would take to add support for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade system — then just five years past the end of its short lifespan — to MAME. "When I started looking at the system back in 2004 MAME didn't really do much 3D stuff at all, even things like the MIPS (main CPU) core were in a much rougher shape, there were no dumps of the I/O MCU at all (happened only a few years ago) and the PC I had at the time barely had enough memory to load and decode even the 2D graphics," he says.
"It was also pre-YouTube, and even in the early days of YouTube you didn't really get much in the way of good reference material. Kinda crazy to think that a lot of people who are probably interested in the emulation of the platform now as younger adults weren't even born when emulation work first started on it!"
A few weeks ago, two decades after he started looking into the system, Haywood finally promoted it to "working" status in MAME. But that move was a bit of a formality, or a bit sneaky, depending on how you look at it. Though the promotion got some buzz, it wasn't truly finished: proper sound emulation was still missing. Haywood actually hadn't worked on the core since 2023, and decided, well, people had been playing the games for long enough without sound, he might as well slap the "working" label on. It turned out to be the final push other MAME contributors needed to take a crack at tuning up the sound.
What's the Hyper Neo Geo's whole deal, anyway? Well, it makes some sense that the system would be more a curiosity for younger folks to discover than an object of intense nostalgia like some of MAME's more high-profile cores or the original Neo Geo; it was only active in arcades for two years from 1997 to 1999 during the awkward transitional period to 3D, with just seven games released for it:
- Road's Edge
- Samurai Shodown 64
- Xtreme Rally
- Beat Busters: Second Nightmare
- Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage
- Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition
- Buriki One
Here's a nice write-up of the system from Nicole Express that delves into the hardware:
None of these games have the Bloodborne-style pull to individually inspire interest in emulation, but the MAME team's all-consuming drive to reverse-engineer and archive every arcade system in existence kept it on the radar. Haywood's initial investigation into it predated even MAME's high profile support of Capcom's CPS3 boards, for instance, but once that platform was decrypted support was added quite quickly because hell yeah people wanted to play Street Fighter III. By comparison, "Hyper64 has been a 21 year on-and-off slog," he says.
It's a perfect representation one of the eternal frustrations of emulation development: People often ask why no one's working on something when they actually are. Just invisibly.
"The sheer number of times I picked up the Hyper64 driver and pumped weeks of work in it only to not be able to make any progress at all was frustrating at the best of times. Just trying to gain an understanding of it all, but ending up not making any headway at all. That's something I don't think people really appreciate when it comes to emulation, the amount of time that you have to put in which often yields no positive results at all, where all you can really conclude is it doesn't work the way you were hoping it would work."
A few years ago, Haywood finally made substantial progress: Someone dumped the I/O microcontroller, and he was able to write a CPU core to emulate it. "The inputs finally started working in a bunch of the games, which allowed me to explore them further and make video improvements," he said.
"Other components improving in MAME over the years has really helped too. When I started MAME didn't have a CPU core for the V53 either (which is a V33 CPU with variolus peripherals) and is the CPU driving the sound DSP. At some point in MAME's history the V53 support got fleshed out (for other systems) which has really come in handy now, as proper sound emulation requires that to be running properly."
When Haywood marked the platform as working, it caught the attention of another longtime MAME contributor: R. Belmont. For the last month or so, Belmont, as well as two other devs, Happy and O. Galibert, have been chipping away at making the games sound like they're supposed to.
"Haze marking them working did provide a push, and Happy had done a detailed disassembly of the sound CPU program which was quite useful," Belmont recently posted on Reddit. Belmont and Galibert have both been working on synthesizer support in MAME, and the Hyper Neo Geo 64's sound chip happens to be used it one, providing them with some convenient overlap in interest/speciality.
The current MAME release, 0.281, includes a series of rapid-fire improvements as documented by Belmont in a few videos on YouTube:
- "Very early work in progress on better audio for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 system. There is a loooong way to go, this is just some very basic fixes so far."
- "Since the first video we've got the basic sample starts and stops working the actual correct way they're supposed to and added a preliminary support for volume envelopes, which also helps the audio balance. Still a lot of work to go though."
- "More progress today! I figured out how the volume envelopes really work, and that made Buriki One's intro mostly awesome."
- "Barring any last minute adjustments, this is what HNG64 audio will sound like in MAME 0.281. Since the last video, the per-voice low pass filter was added, which cleans up some of the high frequency 'hash' audible previously and makes the sound a bit cleaner."
It was a ton of progress for a month, taking Hyper Neo Geo 64 sound support from messy and inaccurate to, at least, broadly playable without assaulting your ears. But the real refinements have been coming in just the last few days since 0.281's release in late September.
But the next build is gonna be the big one. October's upcoming MAME 0.282 release will notably fix up the audio issues in one of the the trickiest games, Xtreme Rally, while really polishing up the rest. Here's what Belmont's noted in update notes for 0.282 so far:
- "Olivier Galibert figured out how they squeezed 12 bits of dynamic range into 8 bits (presumably this is the format from Roger Linn's original MPC60 design) and replaced the biquad low-pass filter with a more likely Chamberlin one that fits the parameters better. Also there were some improvements to the filter envelope. All this results in much clearer and higher-fidelity sound."
- "This time we've figured out how looping samples actually work, fixed the final mixdown to not introduce any distortion, and fixed the filter envelope. The result? A dramatic improvement to Beast Busters Second Nightmare's intro."
- "So the previous fixes seem to have solved Samurai Shodown 64 and SS64 2, but Xtreme Rally (aka Off Beat Racer) was still extremely broken. The engine sound barely worked, sounds were missing, and some sounds would stick looping forever. This time the problem wasn't actually in the sound emulation itself; Xtreme Rally has unique code among the 7 HNG64 games that tries to push sound commands to the sound CPU as quickly as possible. This resulted in as many as 2/3rds of the commands getting dropped on the floor. I have fixed that issue so that all of the commands make it, and Xtreme Rally now sounds great."
Since Belmont made that post he dialed in a few more improvements where the wrong sounds were playing in certain instances in the game. Here's a video from Haywood showing off the vastly improved audio (though he notes "some graphical issues, such as the fog in the tunnel still need addressing eventually.")
Once MAME 0.282 releases, the Hyper Neo Geo 64 will well and truly be worthy of the "working" label. Turns out it just needed that last little push.
In a perfect encapsulation of how these sorts of collaborative projects come together, Galibert noted on Reddit that despite their contributions to the core stemming from an interest in emulating synthesizers, "amusingly, the synth itself (MPC3000) is not working at all yet." Some parts of the synthesizer remain undumped and undocumented, just as parts of the Hyper Neo Geo once were; sometimes while you're waiting for all the pieces to fall into place, it turns out one of the pieces you do have happens to fit into another puzzle entirely.
"It's just been a long slow process," Haywood said. "Things have inched forward a little bit over the years, and the surrounding code in MAME has become better / more capable, allowing for more progress to be made, step by step."
2. Can't stop Pioneering: NEC support and big LaserActive performance improvements arrive in the latest Ares nightlies
Often I end a big story, like the August issue's deep dive into the 16 years it took to emulate the Pioneer LaserActive, with the door open to a follow-up many months or years down the road. In this story, our hero — emudev Nemesis — finished work on one of two modules for the Laserdisc-based gaming console, making it possible to play Sega's Mega LD games via emulation for the first time.
Wes Fenlon
As of publication time, Nemesis was juuuust starting to take a look at the work required to do the same for the other "pak" players could slot into the LaserActive to play NEC PC Engine games, but who knew how long that would take?
Maybe we'd come back to it before the end of 2026, or maybe next year, or maybe in half a deca-
Oh. He already did it.
"NEC LDROM2 support is functioning on nightly builds of the v147 prerelease, and will be included in the next official Ares release," Nemesis recently wrote on his website. It took less than three weeks. While you can grab the nightly build anytime, when the next stable build of Ares releases, it'll be all official-like.
Considering the bulky size of the LaserActive game rips — they can take up dozens of gigabytes — some performance optimizations Nemesis has implemented in the last few days are almost as exciting as the second console support. Because now you should be able to run the images off a decent HDD without performance issues. Here's the breakdown on Github:
"This change brings speed enhancements to LaserActive games. The linear resampling coefficient precalculation reduces overall CPU overhead by approximately 30%, making slower CPUs much more likely to achieve full framerate. Additionally, frame prefetch using a background thread makes games much more tolerant of IO latency, making it possible to play games back from platter drives over SATA3.
This should be sufficient to make emulation performance acceptable on 95%+ of systems, and I don't have any further optimizations planned at this stage."
So then — LaserActive support is more or less feature complete. What can you play? What should you play? Seeing as the system's deader than dead and nobody's likely to be playing copyright cop, the Laserdisc rips are being freely uploaded and shared here. Not every game is available yet, but here's where you should probably start:
- Vajra and Vajra 2 - A pair of LaserActive-exclusive rail shooters by Data West
- Triad Stone - An FMV game in the Dragon's Lair game
- J.B. Harold - Blue Chicago Blues - As described by Nemesis, an "FMV murder mystery detective game, with a surprising amount of freedom. You have control over where to go, what actions to take, and what questions to ask. This title came on a double-sided CLV disc, giving it four times the video content of a typical single-sided CAV LaserActive title. The game also used separate video streams per field, to squeeze a whopping 4 hours of footage into one disc."
There are a couple other cool games and curiosities on the system, including more rail shooters, some prototypes of Myst, and a German TV movie that lets you swap between different perspectives — but the above should give you a taste for that sweet sweet (or fuzzy, fuzzy) '90s laser gaming.
Patching In
MiSTer's Taito F2 core pulls off a Hat Trick – Taito's 1990 game Football Champ, aka Hat Trick Hero, is now playable on the MiSTer's arcade core, as is the baseball game Ah Eikou no Koshien. The latter's surprisingly expressive for its era and looks like a lot more fun than I expect from '90s baseball games.
MiSTer's CDi core once again threatens you by functioning – In the latest unstable nightly build of the CDi core, developer Andre Zeps has committed several crimes of CDi improvement, including: "Fix dual SDRAM mode," "Add support for chroma subcarrier for clean composite video from external RGB converters," and "- Add bob deinterlacing to ascal." Go on then, but don't blame me if you start bleeding from every orifice while playing Wind of Gamelon.
Core Report
Windows builds of RPCS3 are back in business – Due to a compiler issue, RPCS3's latest builds haven't been available on Windows since back in June, but they're back and working again now. Meanwhile, contributor Whatcookie has created a surprisingly detailed breakdown of how hard it is to do nothing, efficiently.
Eden is off the Play Store, for now – Well, so much for that. After launching on Android a few weeks ago, the Switch emulator has been taken down, though you can still find builds, including for Android, on the Github. Aren't DMCA takedowns lovely?
Speedrunning-focused emulator BizHawk gets hexed – But in a good way! The source port DSDA-Doom has been integrated into BizHawk, supporting Doom, Heretic and Hexen. It also now has an integrated DOSBox-X core, as well as Opera, for the 3DO.
ShadPS4 gets more Unreal – The latest build of ShadPS4 marks a significant milestone: some Unreal Engine games for the console are now playable, and even more are bootable. Look at all these games that work!
Translation Station
Tis the season for brains... Dead of the Brain (2) – It's spooky season, which means the crew behind the translation of PC-98 adventure game Dead of the Brain is back with the sequel two years after the first! "Like the original game, this is also a point-and-click adventure involving zombies, but this time the gameplay is much simpler, but there's still a degree of brute force required," translation crew WINE says. Playing this one might be a bit tedious, but the art is :chefskiss:
Virtual-On, on PS3 – The PS3 re-release of this mecha game had English dialogue etc., but its UI was in Japanese. This translation patch changes that.
Wizardy VI, on Saturn – There are at least nine platforms you can play Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge on, from the 1990 DOS original to the Amiga and FM Towns and modern ports, but the Japanese-only Saturn port is unique, incorporating features from Wizardry 7, and now playable with the original English script. This version has "more spells, more traps, and more skills (though most of the extra skills do nothing in 6, unfortunately), and the art style too is very reminiscent of 7 ... it’s also got a much easier early game, which a lot of new players have notoriously struggled with when playing the other versions," hacker and fan Remisse told Sega Saturn Shiro.
Undercover Cops play board games on the GB – Prolific translation group Stardust Crusaders is back with a Game Boy board/card game based on the arcade game. I'm not gonna say it's one of Irem's all-timers (find me playing Ninja Baseball Bat Man instead), but it's cute!
Good pixels
It's early October which means it's basically Halloween, right? Here's a load of screenshots from the first couple hours of Dead of the Brain 2. 👻
