The Playstation 5's time is coming.
And by that I don't just mean there will finally be some good PS5 games, hyuck hyuck — though in the nearly six years since the console came out, Sony's overinvestment in live service games sure has led to a remarkably thin slate of compelling exclusives. But still, y'know. Demon's Souls. Saros. That Naughty Dog game, eventually. That's a few games!
With PlayStation's PC port initiative now called off, it's up to fans to roll up their sleeves and ensure the remaining PS5 exclusives are one day playable on PC. Via emulation, of course.
This week we're taking a look at not one, but twoooo PS5 emulators, both of which have been getting some buzz this past week. Also buzzing is the Nintendo 64... I think? Or maybe it's just that I've been talking about it an awful lot. For example:
Wes Fenlon
And speaking of recent topics: Last week my friend Will Smith had me back on the Tech Pod to chat about a whole bunch of stuff right up my alley. The episode is about a 60/40 split between recompilation/decompilation news (with a heavy emphasis on the N64) and recent happenings in the MiSTer space, including a very slick-sounding tool he turned me onto that will convert saves between the MiSTer and Retroarch so you can keep progress synchronized across both software and hardware emulation. Super cool!
If you read the most recent ROM and the PC Gamer article above you'll know a good bit of what I'm talking about in the episode, but we go into quite a bit of detail on each topic, so hopefully you'll still enjoy listening. I had a great time as always.
Anyway, back on topic: Our second big story this issue is a new N64 fan translation for an RPG, with a good bit of insight from both its hacker and its translator. Aha, we were on topic the whole time!! Let's get into it.
The Big Two
1. Yep, PS5 emulation is happening
There's something in the air, and if you catch it, you, too could find yourself afflicted with the Disease of Programming a PlayStation 5 emulator. Based on recent evidence, I believe Disease of Programming a PlayStation 5 emulator is sweeping the populace.
Here's one of the afflicted now:
KytyPS5
And look! It's spreading.
sharpemu
In my head the PS5 is far too new and powerful a console to be emulated, but gee, it sure is six years old, huh? Some consoles have been well on their way to quality emulation by this point in their lives, if not years earlier.
So let's see what's cooking in PS5emu land, eh?
SharpEmu, which has been on GitHub since back in March, can currently "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle kernel-related functionality," but is still certainly a ways off from PS5 games being fully playable. Its Discord is an absolute hive of activity, though, and has been growing by hundreds of members per day since it first started making waves. Tons of developers are jumping in to help, dummies who ask where to pirate PS5 games are told to kick rocks, and screenshots of new games that boot (and then probably crash) are coming in by the hour.
It's exciting times, as long as you don't expect it to magically start playing Demon's Souls from the jump.
KytyPS5 initially popped up on GitHub last month, though it's based on an earlier PS4/PS5 emulator, Kyty, that was last in development back in 2022. (Patient zero!?) So KytyPS5 is early, but with some foundation to build on. It started as a closed source project, but has just relaunched in the last few days as open source instead. "KytyPS5 can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines. No external low-level emulation modules are currently required," it says.
So what's the difference between the two? One's written in C++ and the other in C# (that'd be SharpEmu, obvs). Beyond that?
"This isn't a competition. Both emulators have their own strengths," SharpEmu's lead developer posted in Discord earlier this week. "They're not automatically better because they run more games, and we're not automatically better because we may produce more accurate graphics in some cases. We're simply focused on different goals. Also, we're developing in the open source, so everything we do is public. I have a lot of respect for the kytyPS5 team, we're in touch by email quite regularly."
I haven't gotten in touch with the lead devs for either project yet, and it's still probably a bit early to dive into the major hurdles standing between them and playing PS5 games with reasonable performance and accuracy; just booting games right now is an accomplishment.
You may also see SharpEmu and KytyPS5 referred to as a comppatibility layer rather than an emulator. What's the difference? Here's a pretty simple breakdown from Modern Vintage Gamer:
The short version: since the PS5 is an x86 system much like a PC, the primary task here is translating system calls and APIs unique to the PS5 into ones Windows (or Linux, etc) can understand. ShadPS4, WINE and Proton are also compatibility layers. Without the need to reverse-engineer a CPU and a pile of other mysterious chips, does this mean we'll see these PS5 emulators make the same rapid progress as ShadPS4?
No idea! But I do think we're about to see a major push around the launch of GTA6, much like Breath of the Wild drove Wii U emulation nearly a decade ago.
2. Zool? Zool. Zool! (It's an RPG)
"Blasted cursed project if there ever was one," says hacker Zoinkity. "All prior experience worked against it."
Meet Zool: Majyū Charmer Legend, proof that the Nintendo 64 really did have RPGs, even if they didn't always get translated into English. Now one of them has been thanks to the collaboration of longtime hacker Zoinkity and translation partner Whowasphone404, who did not use AI to localize this monster training RPG. Look out, Pokémon: there are 168 Majyū to tempt to your side with a magical flute in this game.
Over email Zoinkity told me a bit about the hacking process; after some initial tedious experimentation, he ended up building Debug World, where they could test out everything in the game as they translated it. It was a two-year effort to translate the game's 59,000 words.
Zool's developer Pandora Box "came up with a *lot* of unique solutions to common problems," Zoinkity said, because they had "near-zero 3D experience and none on N64." The code is structured in strange ways that make finding (and checking) its text difficult:
"It's not nearly as unique as, say, Shadowgate 64, but basic things like moving between rooms is a hassle because there *are no rooms*. The maze areas are one large map with ~9 areas on it and they teleport you from one part to another. If you need to check collection text 1) is displayed correctly and 2) that things in dressers aren't under beds, you need to know where they are...in a completely undocumented game (even in Japan). To do that you have to figure out where the entry room is, then which teleporters lead where, then which room shape on the map it's pointing to, then where the trigger in that room is, and what event flags they assigned to 'being in this room' so they could sort out which teleporters to activate. For the labs where there's a few dozen reuses of the same lab, yeah, that's a huge hassle.
The game's own debug info is actually useless. Calculated memory sizes are only accurate when they load a block of code. There are no memory allocations! They also used a lot of 'magic' addresses, where they just chose a round number (like 80200000 or 80300000). You can tell that as more things were needed they stuck them in and around existing things, not in any prearranged order or basic ordering like top-to-bottom. It's a mess internally, so when text overflowed the display list buffer (also magic addresses) basically the whole block's memory usage had to be mapped out. It was enough of a problem with the bestiary descriptions they were thrown out and replaced with images."
Zoinkity got a taste for "hacking" N64 games, specifically GoldenEye, with a Gameshark back in the day; 20 years ago he helped create the GoldenEye Setup Editor, and he's been hacking ever since.
I've actually featured Zoinkity's work with Whowasphone404 in ROM in the past, back in 2024, with a shmup called Dezaemon. And while Zoinkity isn't one to toot his own horn too much, Whowasphone404, who started collaborating on translations a couple years ago, is happy to do it for him. "I think Zoinkity deserves some more recognition in the hacking scene," he told me. "We both love the N64 and are fascinated with the small Japanese library, so we got on like a house on fire."
Over on Gamefaqs, Whowasphone posted some more details about their hard work on the patch:
"Zoinkity went to extraordinary lengths to both fix bugs in the original game code and include quality of life improvements for the few people who will probably want to play this in 2026," he wrote. That included adding save slots and upping the default walking speed.
Zool, itself, is not some gem that Japanese players have known about for years that we've been missing out on. It's also not a Pokémon clone, despite the creature collecting; Whowasphone, who lives in Japan, says that copies of the game are rare and with the completion of this patch there's now more information about the game online in English than there is in Japanese.
He's been translating since 2020, after starting with horror visual novels (specifically one for the N64), which meant that in the end the volume of text to translate for Zool didn't seem too bad. But it was still loads of work to refine. "Some parts were translated out of order and then rewritten once I had discovered what the relationships between characters were supposed to be at those points," he said.
"I think the story of the game is its strongest point," he wrote on Gamefaqs. "There are not many N64 games concerned with the plight of orphans trying to make their own way in the world... there are many musings about what constitutes a family and how having 'parents' does not necessarily mean that you belong to a 'family.' The scenario writer, Natsuko Hayakawa (早川 奈津子), uses the fantasy setting to explore some dark themes, such as violence against children, animal cruelty, animal experimentation, alcoholism, psychoactive drugs, blood sports, the intentional destruction of nature, and murder. Which is not to say that Zool is a dark game by any means, but that the story is slightly more mature than the cover of the game would suggest.
So that's Zool!
Dr. Gerstmann, if you're reading this: I know your scientific study of every Nintendo 64 game is limited to North American releases... but there are only about 20 Japanese Nintendo 64 games with fan translations on Romhack.ing, which would make for a pretty reasonable addendum to the exercise.
Surely a game called Zool, featuring a magic flute, developed by a studio called Pandora Box, deserves a rigorous application of game science.
Patching In
Azahar 2126 draws near, with Android parties – The 3DS emulator's next update is still a release candidate as of this writing, but the full release seems imminent, and it's bringing on board a few nice features: Android now has multiplayer rooms with "Public room browsing, private room creation, private room joining and chat," while a new "Simulate 3DS GPU Timings" feature "improves emulation accuracy by more closely mirroring the behaviour of real hardware" and should benefit Luigi's Mansion 2. It's still experimental, though, so off by default. Loads more improvements at the link. Also, there's a Switch fork now!
GunCons now work in the Japanese Virtua Cop 2 on PS2 – The calibration was off before. Now it's not! Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter also got a highly specific fix.
DuckStation polishes RetroAchievement support – Quite a few commits in the most recent release for the PS1 emulator deal with RetroAchievements. Most visibly, there's now a menu option to refresh the achievement database based on what's in your game list.
Vita3K gets support for VCIs – The Vita emulator now supports VCI (Vita Cartridge Image) files, which work for 1:1 cart backups. A year-and-a-half feature request, now closed!
Core Report
Namco System 11 lands on the MiSTer – Not every game for the system is playable yet, but Tekken and Tekken 2 are, with most of the rest currently booting. This is, however, one of several new MiSTer projects I've seen pop up in recent weeks that are AI-driven ports of existing MAME cores, and I'm not sure how that's ultimately going to shake out — or how effectively they'll actually make the most of the FPGA hardware. How it's feeling out here these days:
MiSTer Companion has its own site, has improved like craaaayzeeee – I first used the MiSTer Companion desktop app just a few months ago, and then looked at a screenshot of it last week and did a double-take. It looked totally different! Had I been using a hella outdated version somehow? Not when I downloaded it – the app has just gone through a hurricane of updates since it came out. The UI's quite friendly, and you can use it to install the Zaparoo Frontend, run update_all, scrape artwork, manage saves, and a ton of other stuff. Highly recommended.
MiSTer... Lisa? – There's now an Apple Lisa core for the MiSTer for all you '80s computer lovers out there.
Translation Station
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 Professional gets the serious treatment – This enhanced version of Joker 2 was the final Dragon Quest game on the DS, and a whole dang crew got together to see it finally available in English and with extra features, including a built-in randomizer and some security bypassing so it can run on R4s cards. Also, this: "Joker 2 Professional began an unfortunate trend of locking cool and desirable monsters behind wi-fi events, trading from previous games, or otherwise being unobtainable. But utilising Ceris' toolkit, it is now possible to inject new synthesis recipes into the game! Darko, with assistance from Hoodinibobeenie and Anthcny have created new optional recipes for all previously unobtainable monsters."
I regret to inform you Bomberman Land is compromised – While a more high-profile Dreamcast JRPG translation has kicked up the latest round of "trying to expain to people who just want to play with their toys why letting AI do the translation is bad," a cursory look at a video for the new patch of PS1's Bomberman Land was enough to steer me away. If it's not AI, it's written like an early '90s translation from a Japanese speaker equipped with nothing but a J2E dictionary, a prayer, and space for about six double-byte words per text box. It is CLUNKY, and is seemingly the hacker/translator's first and only release, with no history I can trace online.
Shame, becuase I swear to god there are infinity weird and interesting Bomberman games out there I've somehow still never seen. Well, infinity minus one now I guess.
Front Mission 2 patched in all its PS1 glory – The Front Mission remakes have been a bit of a mess, while the mecha diehards have long awaited a way to play FM2 on the PlayStation in English. And now there is one! With a few caveats. A group called the Front Mission Translation Project did most of the work to translate the game, but never quite finished it; hacker Numkl has now taken it over the finish line, saying it's "90% done and fully playable from start to finish" with just some graphics and UI bits left to polish off.
Machine translation did play a role in getting the patch released, though: "All the dialogue was sourced from the Front Mission 5 Team’s translation included with the original patch. However, some descriptions and system text were translated using Google Translate and edited with the help of a dictionary. These will be replaced with human translations in later versions of the patch." Numkl said on Reddit that they either plan to find someone who will do the last bits of translation, or sourcing them from the recent official translation from the Front Mission 2 remake. They've already pushed out several hotfixes since their first release on June 30.
Tama: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth translated by wiredcrackpot – The readme for this new hack from Segagaga's Exxistance makes no mention of AI use, and its translator, wiredcrackpot, has been behind a load of Saturn and Dreamcast projects, so
Good pixels
I'm outta gas (and fresh screenshots) this issue, so enjoy a few Bluesky faves! (Sorry for the way they embed on email. Maybe that'll be good, someday?)
What do you mean I MISSED last week ‘s #ScanlineSunday ? 😱 Ganbare Goemon がんばれゴエモン Super Famicom Sony BVM A20 CRT 🟥🟩🟦
— Turom (@turom.me) July 12, 2026 at 1:13 AM
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Quiz Daisōsasen / #NeoGeo via MiSTer Component / Toshiba BOMBA 21" CRT TV #CRT #photography #pixelart #retrogames #scanlineSunday
— CRT ART Books (@crtartbooks.bsky.social) July 5, 2026 at 12:27 PM
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NINJA GAIDEN TECMO 1988 NES
— DOKI DOKI CRT PIXEL (@crtpixel.bsky.social) July 14, 2026 at 9:48 AM
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juggernaut, screenshot, playstation (1998) www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Wd...
— videogame history (@vghistory.bsky.social) July 18, 2026 at 9:27 PM
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