AYN Thor owners rejoice: Wii U emulation on Android is nigh

Hellooooo! 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.

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 Playdate

Full-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!

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.

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! 💽

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