Turns out a lot of stuff happened 20 & 30 years ago: the accidental anniversary issue
Celebrating milestones for the Sega Saturn, Nintendo DS and... Detective Conan?
Folks, the holiday music seal has been broken.
The festive render of a Christmas-decorated log cabin is on the TV. I've consumed an entire mug of espresso-hot chocolate hybrid and might as well have injected it straight into my bloodstreams. This caffeine high will serve as a valiant but ultimately fruitless bulwark against the tryptophan coma headed my way in approximately four hours. If I survive, I'll be on a plane to Tokyo about 24 hours later. 2024 ain't slowing down yet!
If I don't survive the Thanksgiving meal gauntlet of turkey & ribeye & stuffing & candied yams & green beans & gingerbread cake & I'm-scared-to-ask-what-else, well, it was worth it, no ragrets, etc.
It's a bit of a quiet month for major happenings, so we've got some good old fashioned emulator updates and a fan translation as our major stories this issue. Solid, salt of the earth #content, you know?
In licensed emulation Digital Eclipse is ending the year on a high note with two notable releases celebrating cultural icons Tetris and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Well, okay, Rita's Rewind is actually a new game and not a collection of old Power Rangers beat 'em ups, but Tetris Forever is the next entry in its Gold Master series, blending documentary with emulated classics:
It might be missing some of the quintessential versions of Tetris, but it's got Hatris and Tetris Battle Gaiden, and that's some good puzzlin'. The collection does not contain unlicensed 3D Tetris knockoff Blockout, published in 1989 by California Dream, but if you've never played Blockout, I say give it a whirl — this was a mainstay of my dad's DOS gaming time and I loved watching him try to wrap his head around 3D maneuvers at high speed. Heck, you can even play it in the browser! Or right here.
Thanks, Internet Archive.
I'm writing this a tad early to pick up on any emulation-focused handhelds on sale for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but I will point out that Valve's discounting LCD Steam Decks right now, and it's truly a fantastic emulation device. The OLED is a very nice upgrade, but at 25% off for the 512GB model, this puppy beats the pants off a lot of those Android retro devices. If you've been on the fence, it's a great price.
And with that, the feast beckons; see you all in two weeks (and at least two pounds heavier).
The Big Two
1. Don't call it a comeback: Saturn and DS emulators get big anniversary releases
Is it cheating to combine two big emulator updates into a single entry? If so report me to the newsletter cops because I'm doin' it!! The timing and similarities here just felt too fitting to pass up. In the last week or so, the Sega Saturn celebrated its 30th birthday and the Nintendo DS celebrated its 20th, and two of the most noteworthy emulators for each console just dropped headline-worthy updates to ring in those milestones.
First, let's talk melonDS.
This is such a notable release that melonDS is now in the release candidate stage for 1.0 after close to a decade of development. Some features that have been in the works for the emulator for ages (or wanted for ages) are finally here. Some of the highlights:
- Core code refactors that will "make it possible to run multiple instances of the emulator within one single process," enabling local multiplayer (e.g. multiple copies of the emulator running on the same system)
- LAN play - This was available in a beta build before but is now fully integrated, allowing multiplayer DS gaming on the same network
- New OpenGL renderer - The older OpenGL renderer was "prone to all sorts of problems and glitches," while the revamped one "brings together the best of both worlds: a graphical output that is very accurate, but at the same time, support for upscaling and other improvements"
- Multiple windows - You can split the DS's top/bottom windows and move 'em around separately
There are also many emulation fixes and accuracy improvements, improvements to the microphone input, support for flash cards, and more, but I think the multiplayer and separate windows are both gonna be major improvements for day-to-day play on melonDS.
melonDS developer Arisotura says to look out for nightly builds on the downloads page coming soon, as 1.0 closes in.
Moving on! Sega Saturn emulator Yaba Sanshiro, which has primarily been updated for mobile recently, just got its own big 'ol update on Windows (Sega Saturn Shiro! says the last PC update was August 2022).
The anniversary update includes a new game browser UI, better controller support, and some other under-the-hood upgrades to old code. Apparently it had some issues on roll-out, but developer miyax quickly followed up with two more releases, fixing some Vulkan issues and other crashes and adding an auto updater.
Yaba Sanshiro also now supports both Retro-bit's Saturn pad and the Saturn-styled 8BitDo M30.
It's been a good year for Yaba Sanshiro releases — the emulator launched on the iOS App Store in August, and in January the Android version got some settings tuned for low-end gaming handhelds.
Time to pick the anniversary you want to celebrate! And if neither of the above quite suit your mood, well, how about this next one?
2. PS2 Detective Conan celebrates 20 years of not aging with a fan translation
Wow, we're really keeping this anniversary theme going, huh? Japanese mystery series Case Closed has been running for 30 years straight, but I mainly know the eternally young detective for his two crossovers with Lupin III. There are a shitload of Conan games, too, from the tail end of the Game Boy era all the way up through the 3DS, with only one leaving Japan (apparently the Wii was just that popular). A few of the games have been translated over the years, though, and are well-liked, but none with the budget of Treasure of the British Empire for the PS2. Just look at it — it's threeeeee deeeee!
The translation team behind this project timed its release to the 20th anniversary of the game, and it's fully playable, covering "video subtitles, menu, dialogues, credits." (A planned optional addition of Japanese honorifics is apparently still in the works). As a nice bonus, the patch even fixes a bug in the original game that prevented a credits video from working.
I have to say, the cel shaded character designs look like quite a nice match for the anime series, and despite how dialogue heavy it is there's clearly a bit more going on here in terms of exploration and cutscene direction than in some of the Case Closed visual novels. It's now been 10 years since the last Conan game; maybe the Switch 2 will get Conan back in action.
Patching In
BigPEmu brings the Jaguar to iOS – Rich Whitehouse is still chipping away at improvements to his fearsome Atari Jaguar emulator, and this may be his biggest release since he added an amazing scripting system last year to support online multiplayer in some games and configure others for far better performance than they ever had on the original hardware. Today the marquee feature is an iOS release that, at $10, will hopefully help Rich pay the bills alongside his Patreon. The iOS release also marks the addition of touch controls to the PC version of the emulator, a unique disc format for Jaguar games, and fixes for "an incredible number of bugs." I was playing around with some of the game-specific patches for BigPemu just last week! It's awesome, even if most Jaguar games are, well, very bad. You can grab version 1.16 here.
PCSX2 game-specific fixes in recent weeks include Atelier Iris, Armored Core Nine Breaker, and Champions of Norrath and Champions: Return to Arms.
Yuzu and Ryujinx successors show signs of life – I'll write about these more in-depth in the future if they're around for long, but there's an active development version of Ryujinx on Github "intended to be a QoL uplift for existing Ryujinx users" but "not a Ryujinx revival project." I take that to mean UI improvements and fixes but no new feature development, but we'll see. And then there's Citron, billing itself as a "homebrew emulator" to theoretically ward off Nintendo's legal gaze, but seemingly running Yuzu code (and not being up front about that, which seems like probably a violation of the open source license?). Will either of these go anywhere? 🤷♂️ Let's give 'em some time.
Core Report
Thought-lost SNK game dumped and playable in MAME – This is awesome: the latest MAME release, 0.272, includes a working version of Tangram Q, an SNK puzzle game from 1983. I caught wind of it via Brandon Sheffield on Bluesky, who once went on an expedition to find the game and came up empty! Years later, it's resurfaced and finally been saved.
Super Game Boy gets super-er – The MiSTer's Super Game Boy core now supports save states! It's also gotten a few audio fixes to sound more pleasant as you play your Game Boy games in color.
CD-i MiSTer core sounds it out – The Philips CD-i core (cue screams of terror) has been making rapid progress since I first featured it in ROM, with updates this month to its audio handling. Considering didn't even have sound a couple months ago, pretty impressive! Before long The Wand of Gamelon can make a whole new generation cry.
Game Boys Analogized – This is certainly a niche of a niche, but if you use the Analogizer adapter to output video from an Analogue Pocket, there are now custom versions of the GB/GBC cores that play nice with it.
Translation Station
Playtime Paradise – Hacker BlackPaladin has appeared in ROM a few times this year with translation hacks for NES games, and well, here they go again with a minigame collection from the Famicom Disk System called Gokuraku Yuugi: Game Tengoku. Here's the breakdown from Romhack Plaza:
- Village Bingo: A bingo caller game
- Forest Roulette: A roulette wheel with animals, colors and numbers
- Set Dice: Dice roll simulator
- Family Slottle Machine: A slot machine
- Barely Blackjack: A game of blackjack
- Continuous Poker: A poker game
- Surely Neurosis: A game of memory
- Even More Speed: Speed card game
I think I'll stick with WarioWare, but would I play Gokuraku Yuugi over Mario Party Jamboree? In a heartbeat.
Good pixels
Food is the one and only thing on my mind pre- and post-Thanksgiving, so here's some PC-98 shots for your eyes to feast on. 🦃
Images via PC-98 Mega Pack
