Newsletter

The summer grab bag issue

Defcon level: Game Boy. Medabots mastered. Majora HD'd. Wario meets Apple.

Wes Fenlon

Aug 11, 2024 — 13 min read

One of the treats of writing this newsletter every two weeks is finding myself somewhere unusual when The Time To Post arrives. So far, that's included Japan, Portugal, on the shinkansen, on a bus, at least a dozen places I've already forgotten about and now sitting near a piano in an airport while a stately grandpa absolutely crushes some Disney and ragtime tunes. My dude plays a mean When you wish upon a star... and it's putting a real spring in my restless toe-tapping.

Instead of a feature for one of our Big Two, I was feeling some summer restlessness and put together a grab-bag of cool little nuggets as the main event this issue. Hopefully they'll serve as a more pleasant distraction from the biggest news in the scene these last two weeks, the sunsetting of Romhacking.net. After some 20 years, it seems like the definitive central repository for hacks and translations will no longer be such very soon, and there's currently no obvious replacement for it waiting in the wings.

It seems possible that replacement will be Romhacks.org, but there's some scene drama around that site I'm not really up on myself. Its founder/administrator just dropped out which could maybe be good for its long-term viability as a Romhacking.net heir? Or could be worse? I honestly don't know and feel like it's going to be a messy, fractured few months or maybe years as Discords and individual Githubs and small sites host their own stuff. There certainly can be downsides to centralization, and I'm always happy to see fan translators host their projects on Github where they can place more detailed readmes, etc. than on RHDN. But it's also undeniably great to have a singular database to search for a given game to see all the various patches for it. While RHDN's existing materials aren't going anywhere for the time being, I hope we see a successor appear for the future.

And if we don't, well, I'll just be working harder to find new translations and hacks to feature here in ROM!

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Our second of the Big Two this week has perhaps the narrowest audience of any bit of news I've yet featured in this newsletter: Apple Vision Pro owners who love the Virtual Boy. For all 2.3 of you (estimated) among my subscribers, get ready for a treat!

Finally, one more check-in on the biggest running hardware story of the year: according to Taki Udon, there's at least a few more days to wait before he knows when to expect his budget MiSTer boards to begin shipping. It's possible we get a date on August 15th. Near the end of the month seems plausible? The other clone board from QMTech, meanwhile, seems like it passes muster quality-wise, but isn't compatible with most existing MiSTer add-on hardware due to a different layout. A viable option for anyone buying into the MiSTer ecosystem for the first time, then, as long as you know what does and doesn't work.

Now then, who's ready for a smorgasbord?

The Big Two

1. The summer grab bag: Game Boy badges, HD 64, and more

Who needs a single big story when we can go grazing? Let's snack on some fun little morsels, shall we?

Defcon hacking conference uses custom emulation handhelds (or real Game Boys) as a badge – "For DEF CON 32, I wanted to create a badge that was as open, accessible and customizable as possible, while telling the story of why we hold this ethos dear," writes artist Mar Williams. "The theme this year is Engage, the challenge to get involved and take back the web & our spaces from enshittification." To that end, a wunderteam built a working handheld using a brand new Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller and built a custom Game Boy ROM using GB Studio. Which you can run on the custom badge hardware...

Or on a real Game Boy!

Since I first wrote this bit of the newsletter there's apparently been some controversy around who made the badge and who got paid for it, which is a bummer. It remains a rad project either way.

RT64 HD Textures are getting close – Modder Dario has been working on RT64 for quite awhile, the modern graphics renderer being used in N64 Recompiled (as featured in ROM!) The release of the latest version isn't final quite yet, but it showcases what can now be done with HD textures and is looking very nice indeed. And you can check it out in beta if you're bold.

"A lot of effort went into this feature that should solve most of the common frustrations," Dario wrote on Twitter. "DDS files with GPU compression, mipmaps with anisotropic filtering, textures streamed on demand without causing stutters while cleaning up unused textures if the user's low on VRAM. Another highlight is the inclusion of re-spirv, a new SPIR-V optimizer we made with Wiseguy to decrease shader compilation times. This means that on systems that use Vulkan for rendering (Steam Deck), ubershaders can compile up to 600 times faster."

Very good news for anyone running N64 Recompiled on a Steam Deck! HD textures, here we come. Here's a Twitter video of the textures in action in Major's Mask.

I recently finished the first version of HD Texture Support for RT64. Nerrel released an updated version of his texture pack and made this short video of it on Recomp.

If you're interested in trying out the feature ahead of the release of 1.2, check out the links in the replies. pic.twitter.com/u9sDbIgvcx
— Darío (@dariosamo) August 8, 2024

MAME masters the XaviX (or at least apprentices) – I'm gonna be honest, I don't think I've ever heard of the XaviX, which was basically Wii Sports as a cheapo console? But it also had a card game based on the manga Duel Masters? Apparently yes and no — this new addition to MAME is actually from a plug-and-play system built on the same hardware, which used a base station to scan real physical cards. Well, it's in MAME now! Partially. More to come. But this tweet thread from David Haywood runs through the basics of this pretty interesting bit of obscure tech.

Not playable as the card scanner isn't emulated at all, but TeamEurope dumped Duel Masters, running on XaviX hardware. It uses the '2000' type instructions (so is the 2nd generation of the base XaviX chip, but not SuperXaviX) pic.twitter.com/iM3gEDmPQp
— David Haywood (@MameHaze) August 3, 2024

Check out this cool Game Boy Color adventure game – Zephyr's Pass looks real cute! It's out August 28. Enjoy this very '90s trailer.

2. Virtual Boy becomes a virtual man on Apple Vision Pro

After months of work, developer Adam Gastineau has done it: he's released a Virtual Boy emulator for Apple's ludicrous VR headset. Adjusted for inflation, the 1995 Virtual Boy would cost about $370 new today. The Apple Vision Pro goes for $3500 baseline, so with the addition of a free emulator you're only paying 10x the price to play the mostly bad games of Nintendo's most infamous failure on new hardware. You know what I call that? A freakin' bargain!!

You may have detected that I do not rate the Virtual Boy particularly highly as a game-playing experience. But let's not get distracted from the fact that Adam has made a hell of a cool thing here. The Virtual Boy was an awkward hunk of plastic with a limited and disappointing library of games, but it was obviously way ahead of its time in what it was trying to do. 30 years later, we've got the screen technology to do immersive, pitch black 3D so so much better. It is, at least, a new way to appreciate Wario Land for the genuinely good game that it is.

I can't imagine too many people who read ROM have been able to afford an Apple Vision Pro or even want one at this stage (I certainly do not, myself). But that technology's going to get cheaper and more practical, and eventually we'll see more devices taking advantage of that sharp-as-hell 3660 × 3200 per-eye micro-OLED screen. The VirtualFriend emulator is open source, meaning its code will hopefully remain usable forever, a document of how to reimplement the Virtual Boy in true virtual reality. It could realistically be the way to experience Virtual Boy games 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, maybe in a future museum exhibit, when the original hardware has succumbed to rarity and disrepair.

The difference in resolution is truly nuts, by the way. The Virtual Boy had to render two 384 x 224 frames, or about 172,000 pixels. The Apple Vision Pro is rocking 23 million.

"It's been a long journey to get here," Gastineau wrote on Twitter. "I've been working on VirtualFriend since the second week of December. I had to port the Rust language to Vision and figure out many new things on this new platform. Many long periods of struggling to find insidious emulation bugs."

You can also play the emulator on iOS — iPhone or iPad — without a headset that costs more than two months rent, if you'd just like to mess around with it. Gastineau said on Twitter he'd like to eventually add support for the ol' red/blue 3D glasses to simulate the 3D depth on a flat screen, so maybe by Halloween you'll be able to put on your best teal, triangle-covered shirt and go to a party as "'90s guy who won't shut up about virtual reality cause it's basically like being in Tron, man."

VirtualFriend has support for controllers, touchscreen input or a keyboard, and Gastineau added he'd like to roll out SteamVR support too at some point, which would be nice for those with more affordable VR headsets. I particularly like the sound of an added feature to change the Virtual Boy's classic red and black color palette, either with a preset or custom color. The red is vintage '90s VR vibes, of course, but it can get pretty hard on the eyes after awhile. Doesn't fuchsia sound nice?

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VirtualFriend is free on the App Store, but if you want to support Gastineau, who's also done FPGA emulation cores including Game & Watch and Tamagotchi for the Analogue Pocket, you can tip him on Github.

Patching In

RPCS3's touch of zen – The PS3 emulator is heavily CPU dependent, not too surprising for a piece of software that has to replicate the Cell processor. Even though AMD's latest Zen 5 processors are only just available, the latest builds of RPCS3 have been updated to recognize the architecture and run accordingly. Wonder how far off we are from realistically running the vast majority of PS3 games at a stable 60 fps...

DuckStation cleans up Breath of Fire III, Duke Nukem, Resident Evil 3, Rat Attack – A few game-specific fixes in the latest built of PS1 emulator DuckStation. We've got de-jittered sprited in BoF III, fixed upscaled rendering in multiple Duke Nukem games, cleaned up yet more jitter in Resident Evil 3, and fixed "affine texture mapping" on floors in Rat Attack. I know, I know, nobody cares about those first two, but can you imagine playing this masterpiece with messed up floor textures? God forbid. (Jeff Gerstmann once scored it a 2.7/10, btw).

RPCS3 now lets you set your region – Double RPCS3 entries this issue! Quite a specific feature, here, but RPCS3 now lets you set your country code, which actually can affect access to certain game DLC, region-locked content, etc. Some games also behave slightly differently based on this setting. Saints Row: The Third, for example, swaps between metric and imperial measurements depending on your country. Gran Turismo HD will show your region in track high scores. A small but very nice touch.

PCSX2 adds support for... a USB Zip disk drive?? – What in the holy hell. The PS2 emulator now supports PS2 middleware called Picture Paradise, which was promoted as letting you put your own face into games. Part of the trick with the emulation here is convincing PCSX2's virtual console that files on your computer are actually coming from a Zip disk drive that was, like Picture Paradise, hyped up back in 2000 and used by, I don't know, basically nothing? In a 2001 IGN article the PCSX2 devs linked to, Iomega was apparently promoting being able to load custom Unreal Tournament maps onto the PS2 version of the game using a zip disk. If you wanna mess around with PictureParadise, see if you can track down any of these: Vib-Ripple, PrintFan with popegg, PictureParadise Club, PictureParadise Club Vol. 2, Colorio: Hagaki Print, Gekibo 2, RPG Maker II, Golf Paradise DX, Monster Rancher 3.

Core Report

Fearless Pinocchio and Super Kids, now MAME'd – The latest MAME build adds support for two ticket-based games from Taiwanese arcade developer IGS, which have some quite nice art for being some very mechanically simple one button action games. I'm quite into this extremely aggro Pinocchio.

Sega Saturn MiSTer core improves Panzer Dragoon sound and more – The latest commits to the Saturn core from developer Sergiy Dvodnenko include sound system changes that affect Panzer Dragoon and Bug! among others, potentially. An accompanying fix affects the game Keio Flying Squadron 2.

Translation Station

Medarot 3 for the Game Boy Color is both disassembled and translated – Medarot, aka Medabots, was a popular late '90s / early '00s anime/game series, but it's still around in Japan, with new games popping up on the 3DS and Switch in the last decade. Very few games in the series have left Japan, even, but you can add one more now (or, technically, two, as this was a Pokémon situation with dual versions and they've both been translated!). Check it out if you're in the mood for a Harvest Moon-era Natsume GBC RPG.

Kowloon's Gate update – Cargodin and EsperKnight, the lovely duo behind Linda Cube Again (and involved in Ancient Roman!), are working on their next deal, a cult fave that HG101 has written about in depth. It's definitely going to be a tough one to translate, so I imagine it'll be a bit till we see the finished game. But it do be happening. As do...

Shiren the Wanderer: Monsters of Moonlight Village – Perhaps a good time to be a Shiren fan, what with the latest game in the series coming out recently and translator Tom's translation for this Game Boy entry progressing thanks to its hacker. Maximalist and minimalist Shiren possible in the same year?