Well everybody, unlike the issues of ROM built around interviews with brilliant people doing brilliant things in the emulation scene, I can't say this week's topic was the result of long-term planning on my part. It happened as a result of me spending yesterday thinking about what I should write about, and getting madder and madder the more I looked at the existing coverage of the newly announced Neo Geo+.
It's a cool piece of kit, no doubt. I'm not mad about that. I'm mad about what was going unsaid about SNK's owners in pretty much every bit of coverage, and I was even madder about the tired, predictable arguments from those whining about experiencing even the mildest of criticism for jumping on the thing. So that's what this issue mostly ended up being about.
If you just play some neat little games on your emulators and don't care much about the media — maybe skip on down to #2. This rant is less for you and more for the legion of retro YouTubers out there. Do they read newsletters? Who knows! I had to get it out, anyway.
On a brighter note, last month I had the privilege of being on a panel at the 2026 Game Developers Conference to talk about the emulation community's contributions to game preservation, which you can now watch online. Here it is!
Please enjoy and sorry about my posture. I did not think to just bend the obviously bendy microphone to stand upright. Guess I'll just have to do another one of these someday!
The Big Two
1. Nostalgia for the Neo Geo isn't an excuse to pretend SNK's ownership doesn't matter
The gaming industry has faced no greater evil over the past decade than the acquisition sprees of giant corporations. Under the consolidation of Microsoft and Embracer Group and beyond, game studios that should've — could've — survived were instead shut down or hollowed out because somewhere in the billion-dollar balance sheets their corporate overlords maintained, the wind shifted. They were profitable, but not enough. Or they no longer fit the strategy, possibly after being told to stop doing what they were good at to pursue said top-down strategy. Or they were doing great, actually, but it turns out the big boss went $2 billion in debt because he thought the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was going to hand him another $2 billy and when that didn't happen the cuts would run so deep anyone and everyone's head could wind up on the chopping block.
Okay, actually — all those layoffs and games canceled and careers ruined are only the second greatest evil infecting the gaming industry over the past decade. The real #1 is the guy who owns the chopping block.
The internet commenters who show up to wail about keeping politics out of their hobby should perhaps hop on a plane to Saudi Arabia and express that opinion to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the country's Public Investment Fund, purchased 96% of SNK Corporation in 2022, and recently partnered up with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to buy Electronic Arts for $55 billion. Before all that, he was best known for having a journalist killed and dismembered.
That's not a very fun thing to think about, so many of us choose not to. I don't really want to think about the fact that the company behind some of the most beautiful 2D games ever made is, in Degrees of Kevin Bacon terms, zero steps removed from an authoritarian ruler who ordered a writer he deemed a nuisance to be entrapped at a consulate, chopped up into pieces that were placed in plastic bags, and incinerated in an oven later used for a barbecue. Bummer alert!!!
Maybe those details weren't precisely bin Salman's call, but if you know anything about him — or the way Saudi Arabia has been spending its money over the past decade — you know he's all about a good cover-up.
The Kingdom's investments are about both remaking its image and diversifying its economic footprint, and so we've seen this same uncomfortable story play out in videogames, in comedy, in golf, and many other sports. And the only argument I've seen as to why none of this matters — as to why it's fine to just shrug or hold one's nose and ignore it — is that a lot of bad stuff happens in the world, actually, so there's nothing wrong with buying a reproduction Neo Geo for $249.99.
Look at this sexy thing, though.
It's got new chips, expertly reverse-engineered by members of the open source hardware scene!
New carts are reasonably priced!
If you buy it, you'll feel young again!
There are ~so many~ positives; surely enough to overlook the reality that some portion of the money spent on re-buying Metal Slug is ultimately enriching a man who has overseen "an unprecedented number of executions, including the execution of child defendants, disproportionate executions of foreign nationals, and politically motivated executions of individuals sentenced for acts related to the exercise of their right to freedom of expression" since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, a killjoy of an organization if I've ever seen one. (That number's over 2,000 btw).
Now I have to admit that like many other people, I'm guilty of participating in society. I paid taxes to the American government this year, and didn't much like doing it — the same government that's extrajudiciously blowing up people in boats, brazenly starting wars and insider trading off the chaos, and happily supporting a genocide from both sides of the aise. I live in a country that did slavery and the Trail of Tears and put its own citizens in interment camps, and I can't say I do much of anything personally to make amends for those historical wrongs. But damn does it piss me off when anyone drilposts their way into buying a new toy by waving vaguely at the concept of other bad things having happened at some point in human history.
That's baby brain shit. It's either disengenuous, or an underdeveloped teenage edgelord brain's simplistic view of morality. It's embarrassing to pretend there's not an obvious and measurable difference between supporting a company now 100% owned by a bad dude and another company like Nintendo or Capcom that he has a much smaller, non-controlling stake in. Or by deflecting with "other governments do bad things too!" when those other governments are not the ones actually profiting from the videogames.
If you're just somebody who loves videogames and always wanted to own a Neo Geo, I don't think you're automatically a bad person or whatever if you buy one of these things. I wish you would do something else with that money, but I'm not going to cuss you to your face — I'm just going to ask if you know who owns SNK these days, and hope to get you on my side by talking about how fucking stupid it was they tanked the new Fatal Fury by putting Cristiano 'I belong to Saudi Arabia' Ronaldo in it.
But if you're someone who covers videogames, as a writer or especially as a YouTuber with a younger-skewing audience, it IS your responsibility to think about this thing we'd all rather not to. And you need to tell people about it, repeatedly, because it's a noisy world out there and not everybody knows that the guy who now owns some of their childhood favorite games happens to have a lot of blood on his hands.
No, it's not as fun as just talking about the stuff you loved as a kid. But the blood at least deserves a mention, you know? And judging by my scattered survey of the endless coverage on YouTube this past week, even an off-hand mention is seemingly too much to ask for.
A lot of people have already bought a Neo Geo+, and a lot more will before it ships in November. Embracer's Lars Wingefors, re-entering this story like the Kool-Aid Man at a wake, posted that the console's sales wildly exceeded expectations and are "a clear example of how passion, cultural heritage, and business can come together." Embracer subsidiary PLAION is producing the hardware. (By the way, if you're keeping score: the comments on his LinkedIn posts include zero mentions of Mohammed bin Salman, and one pitch for how AI will enable people to make new Neo Geo games without game dev experience. Awesome.)
Anyway, I'm not stupid: There's no way to guilt trip our way to a better world, where billionaires who can snap their fingers to have someone cut up and put into plastic bags don't also stand to control Mass Effect and The Sims and every EA sports game and also a shiny new Neo Geo. But ignoring that reality sure as hell isn't going to make things better, either. It's just more comfortable.
Jamal Khashoggi was a fierce advocate for his people, and for that he was gruesomely murdered. He was murdered while trying to sign some paperwork to get married. I don't think it's too much to ask for anyone hyping up a new game console to sit with that for a minute, and think about how uncomfortable it is to be advocating for something from the man responsible, before talking about its "Unmistakable and uncompromising arcade-grade build" and "Original AV output for CRT enthusiasts."
2. The MiSTer gets Retro Achievements support for SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, N64, PS1 and more
Achievement hunters, start salivating. If the MiSTer FPGA has become your retro gaming destination of choice in recent years, with the nagging limitation of not being able to rack up Retro Achievements that prove you've got some skillz — problem sorted.
Developer odelot has been working on a MiSTer integration, and it's now available on Github for anyone who wants to swap to some in-development cores with RA support.
odelot"The upstream Main_MiSTer binary manages cores, user input, video output, and the OSD menu on the MiSTer platform. This fork adds a full RetroAchievements integration layer on top, without modifying any existing core functionality," odelot wrote on the project's Github page. Here's a demonstration of it in action.
There's also a pretty digestible breakdown of how the project works on Github:
- Init — On startup, the ARM binary maps the DDRAM mirror region, starts an HTTP worker thread, and loads credentials from
retroachievements.cfg. Login to RetroAchievements is deferred: it only fires once the FPGA mirror's magic value ("RACH") is detected and its frame counter is seen advancing. This means that loading the standard community core (which lacks the RA mirror module) silently suppresses all RA activity — no spurious login or network calls are made. - Load Game — When a ROM is selected in the MiSTer menu, the binary computes the ROM's MD5 hash and identifies the game against the RA database.
- Per-Frame Poll — Every frame (~60 Hz),
achievements_poll()checks whether the FPGA has written new data. If a new frame is available, it callsrc_client_do_frame()from the rcheevos library, which evaluates achievement conditions against the current RAM state. - Unlock / Notify — When an achievement triggers, the event handler displays an OSD notification and optionally plays a sound (
/media/fat/achievement.wav). The unlock is reported to the RA server asynchronously. - Unload / Shutdown — State is cleaned up when switching cores or shutting down.
While games are running you can press a key to see an overlay list of that game's achievements. New quality-of-life features are hitting the project fast: just yesterday odelot added a notification if you boot up while offline, and it can automatically reconnect to Retro Achievements once your MiSTer's back online.
The big question is whether this will get official recognition and integration from the MiSTer project and Retro Achievements maintainers. Given how popular both are, I'd say odds are good, but we may have to wait a few weeks or months to see odelot reach something of a 1.0 release and for other developers to weigh in on any potential integration issues.
The draw of achievements waned for me somewhere around the end of the Xbox 360 era, and at this point I view friends who still talk about "getting the Platinum" (in PlayStation trophy parlance) as an alien race. I ain't got time for all that! I've likewise never felt the pull to go out of my way to install Retro Achievements; the only kind of tracking I do of any kind I do with hip-fired movie ratings on Letterboxd. But I know they're damn popular — the RA Discord has nearly 30,000 members — and I do think they're actually a great solution for retro gaming's choice paralysis problem.
If you've ever (gasp) thrown an entire romset at an emulator or MiSTer, you've been there: scrolling through a list of hundreds of games, prone to play something for just a minute or two before bouncing to something else. We all know how unsatisfying this can be compared to the natural limitations of owning a handful of consoles or a stack of CDs; knowing you only had so many options in front of you encouraged committing to a game long enough to get better at it, or to push past a slow opening to find the fun lurking beneath the surface. It's a harder and harder problem to solve with just willpower as hundreds of new games are released every month, sales drop prices to trivial levels, and an infinite supply of addictive short form videos await us on every screen.
Anyone who uses Retro Achievements to focus what they play, to stick with a game longer than a frayed attention span otherwise would let them — I salute you. Get them cheevos on your MiSTer, stop scrolling, and find your fun.
Here's the full list of odelot's MiSTer RA cores, as of April 25:
- NES
- SNES
- Genesis, Sega CD, 32X
- Game Boy / GBC / GBA
- Nintendo 64
- PlayStation
- Neo Geo
- PC Engine
- Atari 2600
Patching In
RPCS3 now auto-configures game settings – Is RPCS3 easier to use than a real PS3 at this point? Maybe! At the very least, I don't have to confront a "you didn't turn your console off properly" warning and file integrity check every time I boot up the emulator. You can still make your own configuration tweaks, and game patches for things like unlocking framerates won't be turned on automatically but can be enabled if you want 'em. "The emulator's target for Playability is that the game must run unmodified as it does on a real console," the RPCS3 folks explain.
Cemu integrates a graphics pack downloader – Another pure convenience update, here. The Wii U emulator has long supported graphics packs for fancying up textures, and now it has a built-in window that lets you slap in the URL of a zip file and it'll grab it for you. No need to download it and then move the file and extract it and all that.
Final Burn Neo tackles the PolyGame Master 2 – I shamefully don't think I've mentioned emulator Final Burn Neo once in the history of this newsletter, but that changes today! While overshadowed by the endless system support of MAME, FBN is a cool emulator in its own right, with an intentionally more limited selection of games and systems supported meaning it's easier to get up and running and has lower system requirements to boot. It's also not just a Neo Geo emulator, with support for a number of consoles and arcade boards. But an interesting arcade addition of late caught my eye: the PGM2, a 2000s Taiwanese arcade board perhaps best known for some beat 'em ups like Oriental Legend 2 (based on Journey to the West) and Knights of Valour 2/3 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).
Oriental Legend 2 flanked by Kknights of Valour 3, via dink.
Considering how breezy that style of game is, I'd definitely rather jump into them in FBN then wrangle a MAME configuration. Feel the burn!
Core Report
MiSTer's Update All goes manual(s) – Don't panic!! The MiSTer's preeminent automatic downloading solution isn't switching over to manual operation. Version 2.8, released a couple days ago, can now pull from a database of 8,010 game manuals (those things we used to print on paper and fill with cool art and helpful tips and include in the box for free??). "MiSTer has been able to display manuals for a long time, but without people doing the heavy lifting, the feature never really took off. Well, I think that’s about to change," writes maintainer theypsilon. There are a few things to keep in mind with the feature: the initial download will be slow because it's a whopping 22 gigabytes, and also the viewer is a bit clunky and crashy until someone puts some more work into the UX.
Even more appealing to most users is the second feature added in 2.8: a CRT Video Mode Selector and Screen Position Adjustment tool "that helps you pick the best resolution to view your scripts and Update All on a CRT." It offers a bunch of resolution/video mode options that should make the script much more usable on an old tube set.
Pico-8 comes to the MiSTer – The littlest "fantasy console" still has a vibrant indie dev scene as far as I'm aware, so this is a very cute new way to play its games, especially for folks who have CRTs or displays ideally suited to 8-bit systems. "A PICO-8 fantasy console emulator for MiSTer FPGA with native video and audio output. The FPGA handles video timing and output directly, bypassing the MiSTer scaler for zero-lag CRT support," explains core developer MiSTer Organize. I'll take any opportunity to highlight how much I love the look of Pico-8 train sim Cab Ride.
Darius II core with triple screen support coming along – The absolutely sick triple screen arcade machine for horizontal shmup Darius II is getting a MiSTer core, and it seems to be coming along nicely. Still WIP, but fun to watch even so. Who's playing this on an ultrawide?
Translation Station
Tiny Bullets gets a not-so-tiny bit more playable in English – Hot off the presses! This new translation from Chapu dropped riiight as I was wrapping up this issue. Described as "a bit of a mix of Legend of Zelda and Tomb Raider," where you "jump, roll, solve clever puzzles and shoot your slingshot across 9 areas to reach the end and the final confrontation," Tiny Bullets looks kinda sick? Great art, at the very least. This one's going on the Steam Deck.
Ninja Casey, meet ninja Sasuke – Sunsoft's 1994 Shonen Ninja Sasuke, which strikes me as a less farcical Goemon action platformer, got an official English translation for the first time just a year back, and now someone's gone and made a fan translation of their own! Why? I have to imagine the localization choice with the name "Justice Ninja Casey" had something to do with it. The fan effort is called Legend of the Ninja Kid, and it's from old hands Cabal Translations who have a loooong history. Swapping Sasuke for Casey in 2025 sure was a choice.
Langrisser III returns – Langrisser is a blind spot series for me, though if you stuck a halberd to my head and demanded I tell you everything I know about it I'd at least manner to stammer out "uhhhh strategy RPGs with '90s as hell anime art???" and thus avoid summary execution, were you feeling merciful. I believe they're fondly remembered, though far less so than, say Shining Force; perhaps part of the reason for that, as highlighted by Kimimi in their take on Langrisser III, is the series not-so-successfully reinventing itself as time went on. Just look at that art, tho.
The fan translation for this entry also seems borderline cursed, considering it started in 2001 and has been picked up and then dropped again a few times since. This time it seems like it might actually stick — there's a new efffort now on Github marked at v0.4 building on those prior efforts. It's definitely unfinished, with funky line breaks and some crashing issues reported. Bookmark this one, in other words, to come back to later — and maybe cheer on new developer ralfguth to help them over the finish line.
Good pixels
Here's a fun thread on Bluesky — sorry about the embeds, email readers, but clicking on the dates to jump to the posts is worth it. It's skelly time. 🩻
YEEEEEEAH BUDDY
— jarsh (@jarsh.zone) 2026-04-25T22:24:46.984Z
Hands down!
— GeorgieBoysAXE (@georgieboysaxe.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T11:52:49.221Z
"BEATCHU AHP!"
— 𝔻𝕠𝕔𝕥𝕠𝕣 𝔹𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕖𝕣 ➡️⬇️↘️➕🌸 (@doctorbutler.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T19:12:00.109Z
— Janne Johansson (@icepic.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T16:11:26.476Z
u know i gotta choose daggerfall's skeletons, theyre so cute n angry
— Salem 🏳️⚧️ (@salem-bitch-trials.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T20:16:03.764Z
