🎮 Android Xbox emulator hakuX hit version 1.2.0 after a complete rebuild, swapping its old QEMU backend for a JIT compiler that brings Halo: Combat Evolved and Forza Motorsport to handhelds at full speed.

You don't need a dumped Xbox BIOS file, just the APK from developer rfandango and your own game dumps. Qualcomm Snapdragon devices run it best, provided you swap in custom Turnip drivers to keep Halo 2 from smearing visually.

The 1.2 release also adds System Link for Wi-Fi and VPN multiplayer, plus fixes for room crashes in Silent Hill 2.

🔗 videocardz.com

#emulation #xbox #android

🕹️ VMPuppy turns your phone screen into a live Dreamcast VMU over Wi-Fi when you're playing on Flycast 2.7+ or Hollycast.

It displays the mini LCD while docked, or you can eject it on your phone to play VMU minigames using touch controls on your save data. Hollycast even notices when you pull the card out like real hardware, while Flycast only checks when the game starts.

You just need Python 3.8 on your PC and the american_v1.05.bin BIOS file to play while ejected.

🔗 GitHub

#emulation #dreamcast #hardware

💾 Developer Aaron Ardiri has uploaded his massive personal Palm OS archive to the web, releasing old source code, documentation, and dev tools from the early mobile era.

The collection even includes the dev kit for the canceled Palm Foleo companion laptop. If you used to spend hours squeezing custom applications into two megabytes of RAM, it's all out in the open now.

🔗 Hackaday Retrocomputing

#palmos #preservation #archive

🕹️ Developer AnkushKun has released sh23ds, a native C reconstruction of Silent Hill 2 that runs the PC Director's Cut directly on 3DS hardware without emulation.

It incorporates fixes from the Enhanced Edition project, putting the gameplay on the top screen while maps, memos, and inventory sit on the touch screen. Everything works, including all 17 areas, 6 endings, and the Born From a Wish scenario.

You need your own copy of the 2002 PC files converted through a web tool. New 3DS models run full fog and character shadows, while original consoles drop shadows to keep 30 FPS.

🔗 GBAtemp

#silenthill #port #homebrew

🎮 Doom creator John Romero has found a new publisher for Romero Games’ next shooter after Xbox canceled the project last year during mass layoffs.

The studio owned all the IP, art, and code, so they redesigned the game for a much smaller team (from ~110 people down to 5, now around 15). It reuses a lot of the previous assets, characters, weapons, and code for a head start. Romero confirmed the deal in a VGC interview but can’t name the publisher or give an announce date yet.

🔗 Polygon / VGC
#johnromero #romerogames #fps #xbox

📼 FairyTale's 1992 Japanese PC-98 horror adventure Dead of the Brain: Day of the Living Dead just landed on Steam, GOG, and the FAKKU Store with its first official English translation.

Publisher FAKKU released it under their PC-98 Preservation Project. You get upscaled pixel art, the original FM music, and handy options like hover hints, visible QTE hitboxes, and instant scene restarts on game over. There's even an optional free patch to restore adult content from FairyTale's notorious pivot away from eroge.

🔗 Time Extension

#pc98 #translation #preservation

🕹️ Melted Electronics has launched the Glitch Boy, a hardware NES emulator and chiptune synth built to corrupt game memory in real time using onboard dials, MIDI, CV, or live audio inputs without crashing the system.

Creator Martino Maranzana built it as both a standalone handheld and a Eurorack module. You load your NES ROMs onto a microSD card and feed composite video out to a monitor. Line-level audio input lets music trigger the visual glitches, saving you the trouble of tilting your cartridges by hand.

The open-source firmware is hosted on GitHub if you want to map your own custom controls.

🔗 Time Extension

#emulation #nes #hardware

🚀 SMGCommunity has reached 100% decompilation on 2007's Super Mario Galaxy, and community group Luma's Workshop is using that code to build a native PC port named AstroCore.

Running native code instead of leaning on Wii emulation means targeting higher graphics rendering and better performance. You'll need your own dumped copy of the game to extract the assets for building it. Once cleanup wraps up, the team is moving straight on to Super Mario Galaxy 2.

🔗 GBAtemp

#decomp #port

💾 Developer TheRasteri got a Flash game running natively on an original 1981 IBM PC, 8088 CPU and all.

CGA graphics cards were never built for 2000s web animation, so the port hacks the display controller chip in assembly to squeeze a custom 160x86 pixel window out of standard text mode. The entire state machine was written in C using Open Watcom V2 and tested across a stack of vintage DOS rigs.

Because if anything deserved custom hardware hacks on a 4.77 MHz processor, it was a Flash game full of toilet humor. 💩

🔗 Hackaday Retrocomputing

#port #dos