Howdy folks!
If you're reading this issue in your email, it likely looks the same as usual. But if you're reading on the website, you may notice things are looking a bit different 'round here at ReadOnlyMemo.com. I've been coasting on a default Ghost theme for quite awhile, and finally decided to take some time to transition the site to a unique design. I hope y'all like it as much as I do!
I've been traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday, so there's still work to be done getting everything to line up nicely. I'll be doing some nipping and tucking in the weeks to come. I also need to go through the back catalog to adapt some old articles to the new style. So come back and check it out next issue and see how it's coming along.
To go along with the redesign I was also dealing with some tedious backend stuff to get my ActivityPub profile working properly; for reasons not worth diving into in too much detail, the ol' WWW was causing me grief. But I'm pretty sure it's fixed now, cause you can find me on BrowserPub!
If you already read the newsletter via email or this here website, there's not much need to follow me via the ~ social web ~. But hey, if you're big into Mastodon, you'll find me at @[email protected].
It's been an active couple weeks for the emulation scene, but I've spent too much time eating this week to hope to cover it all. We will not be talking about Palmer Luckey's N64, but here's a smattering of cool links before we head into the main event.
RHDI got a UI facelift. Content pages give more room for descriptions and the advanced search also got a major overhaul.
— Romhack.ing (@romhack.ing) 2025-11-28T06:07:35.763Z
{if $item.data.author_name} {$item.data.author_name} {else} {$item.data.author.username} {/if}
The Big Two
1. Hyped-up emulator frontend iiSu sets a milkshake duck land speed record
Hooooooo boy. There's a certain type of Shit Going Sideways where you see the initial wave of skeptical social media reactions before you even see the thing being reacted to -- and by the time you figure out what the thing even is, it's careened off the side of a cliff and picked up like 10 more layers of Yikes as it rolls to the bottom.
Anyway, meet iiSu!
We've had frontends and launchers for emulators for years now, but they've never really been my thing. While I'm a bit stuck in my ways and tend to launch all my emulators individually from their own folders, Retroarch helped popularize the move to emulation cores united by a single skinnable interface. I do love the way EmuDeck adapts a bunch of different emulators to a specific device and interface. It's not easy to pull off that sort of automation juuuust right. But compared to that, iiSu is on a whole 'nother level of ambition.
The pitch for this project, spearheaded by designer UsagiShade, is to bring back the fun of interfaces like the Nintendo 3DS's, with shortcuts to launch individual games from different emulators, as well as pin screenshots, widgets and custom items and so on and so forth. It looks nice! It also promises to bring in:
- Support for a ton of emulators, along with scraping metadata for whatever games they can run
- Navigation reminiscent of the old PSP/PS3 XMB
- A dang social network with friends lists, messaging, actively playing notifications, etc.
- A media player so you can listen to your MP3s cuz why not
- Integrated RetroAchievements and PictoVerse, a MiiVerse successor
- Integrated newsfeed
- A shop for user-generated content
- Transphobic jokes and Nazi waifus
Oopsie! That last one wasn't a planned feature, but rather some stuff that people immediately started dishing on being rampant in designer UsagiShade's Discord. The backpedals, sus apology, more dirt, retraction of apology, social media deletion, etc. etc. There's a Bluesky thread you can go tumbling down if you want in on the drama, but maybe just skip it and count yourself lucky for not cluing into iiSu in that extremely narrow window between "hmm, neat?" and "oh for fuck's sake."
Despite seeming wildly over-ambitious and immediately losing its creative lead, iiSu is supposedly continuing on from its remaining contributors. In fact, they've already got a Github set up and an initial alpha release for dual screen handhelds. Perhaps this is merely a very rough start for what will go on to become a neat emulator frontend, but I do not understand why, with such baggage, you wouldn't just walk away and salvage an idea or two from the project. The feature list above would take years to execute, and trying to do it all in one app smacks of the quintessential XKCD:
Dreaming big is great and all, but when it comes to building, maybe start with a practical foundation.
2. eXoWin9x ushers in a new era of accessibility for '90s Windows games
...and now for some good news! Some years ago, the eXo hobby group launched the excellently named eXoDOS, "an attempt to catalog, obtain, and make playable every game developed for the DOS and PC Booter platform." eXoDOS combined customized DOSBox X emulation with the Launchbox front-end to make DOS games easily playable at a click. That alone is very cool, but the project went much deeper, including personally sourced copies of games (rather than "scene rips or hacks"), customizable universal launcher settings to suit your system, network play support, a collection of user-created maps etc., a built-in updater, and CRT shaders.
Now imagine all that, but for the dawn of the 32-bit Windows era -- Windows 95 and 98.
SimCity 2000. Gabriel Knight. C&C Red Alert. MechWarrior 2. Diablo. Hundreds of games, each launchable with a click with tweaked settings, with meticulous metadata making the library easily sortable. As RetroRGB points out, this presentation essentially presents the games as if they're console game ROMs, but it took some real ingenuity to make that work.
As detailed in the announcement video below, for years the eXo team were stymied by the way creating virtual drives for each game would essentially require hundreds of individual copies of Windows, bloating the install to an unreasonable scale. A clever workaround made it possible to preserve and reapply the specific settings needed for each game every time it's launched, keeping the bundle far more space efficient.
Contributor TaraLonger "developed some incredibly clever scripts that allowed us to release this pack without packing in hundreds of gigabytes of duplicate 9x data," the eXo team says on the project website. "Then, once the methodology was proven, he spent months getting the games in this pack running. Dutchmagic was also a massive help, as he tested and worked on metadata for hundreds of these games. We owe TaraLonger and Dutchmagic gratitude for their work in using this framework to help preserve such an iconic part of our history."
Right now, the custom Launchbox bundle includes the 1994 games that launched with Windows 95 support before it was even out, plus everything from 1995 and 1996. A mere 662 games.
The plan is to grow from there to include the rest of the Windows library from the '90s up through the early 2000s. IPX network play is included, and you can see all the other players on the eXo network. One of the coolest touches is the wealth of extras --- manuals, old trailers, etc. --- available with a right-click on each game.
The full torrent — a 262 GB download — is obviously distributing a lot of games that should still be commercially available today on platforms like GOG. But the vast majority aren't of course. If you're using eXoWin9x to launch games like Myst, then spend the five or 10 bucks it'd cost to buy a legit version and put your money towards proving people care about old games. For the other 600-odd games in the collection, well... until game publishers decide to become good stewards of their own histories, the hobby scene will keep doing it for them.
Patching In
RPCS3 goes perfect muddin' – While there isn't a specific Github check-in to point to here, the RPCS3 team recently highlighted that it's marked MotorStorm as "playable" rather than in-game, meaning it's more or less performant and bug free. For a long time there were some stuttering issues holding it back, but those have been overcome! It's even playable on the Steam Deck, though with such stripped back settings I'd say maybe don't do that. The superior sequel's also Playable, though numero three is still a bit too buggy and demanding to earn the label.
Closer to Eden – Switch emulator Eden is rolling right along, with early support for firmware 21, bugfixes including stuttering in Tears of the Kingdom, "several issues with Ryujinx save data linking," and Windows on Arm support. Progress still feels a bit tentative, but I continue to be happy to see Switch emulation rise from the ashes.
Xemu handles 2D, in 3D – I don't find updates to the Xbox emulator too often to highlight here, but this one seems neat! A lengthy bug investigation for an unreleased game, Dinosaur Hunting, revealed that Xemu wasn't handling some 2D textures right because they seemed like they were 3D? Maybe? It's a little over my head, but I imagine the end result will benefit other games too: "Hardware transparently supports passing 2D textures to operations that are intended to operate on cubemaps. This change introduces a remapping function to mimic the hardware behavior in cases where the texture sampler does not match the expectations of the texture mode."
Core Report
MiSTer's Downloader speeds up yet again (and hangs up the racing stripes) – "With this 2.3 release, Downloader is now over 10x faster than 3 years ago, and 5x faster than a year ago, in a no-updates scenario," writes developer theypsilon. "Compared to the previous version 2.2.1 from a few weeks ago, this new one is over 2.5x times faster... It can now take just two seconds! After this, there are no realistic hopes of making it significantly faster. There are a few things here and there that can be tweaked to get marginal improvements but speedrunning is over guys. So time to move on to other things!"
The go-to core updating software now has four settings you can choose from that determine how it goes about scanning for and scarfing down updates. They basically boil down to how you want it to scan your existing files; the more exhausting settings are slower, but if you only want to grab the new stuff, it can hop right to it and it is fast fast fast. Now that work on speed is out of the way, theypsilon wants to work on "an integration with the firmware UI, to show whether there are updates available or not with a new icon."
A Krikzz fix for the Everdrive on Analogue 3D in record time – EverDrive owners were disappointed to find that their cartridges didn't work on the Analogue 3D, but creator Krikzz has a solution. If you have an X series cart, you'll need an original N64 to patch it, or else you've got some soldering ahead of you. On non-X carts, good news: the latest firmware will get you fixed right up.
Translation Station
Fiery Battle Dodge Danpei – A fresh 'n' fixed up translation based on an older patch for this NES Sunsoft dodgeball game. I was familiar with Kunio-kun's dodgeball, but had never seen this game before reading up on the translation patch. Turns out it's based on a manga that ran for six years, got a 47 episode anime adaptation, and had no fewer than seven video games released in 1992 and 1993! A sequel manga started up a few years ago and is also getting an anime adaptation next year. Glad to see dodgeball alive and well.
Koei's PC-98 sci-fi sim Progenitor gets a patch – A little-documented PC-98 game from Koei with some beeeeautiful pixel art and a cover by the great Noriyoshi Ohrai of Godzilla fame. Here's a good read on the game that goes into some depth about its story, similarities to other Koei sims at the time, and even its somewhat cutting edge 3D graphics. Scope out the pixel art at the end of the newsletter!
Check out Hilltop's Cardcaptor Sakura preview – Hilltop has a few projects going right now, and here's our first look at one: Cardcaptor Sakura for the WonderSwan! "I'm really proud of how this is shaping up, and it's been an extraordinary learning process for me," he says on Patreon. "The hacking video on this one is going to be a doozy. This really opens up more platforms for English patches in the future."
... man, a WonderSwan emulator for the Playdate would be cool.
Good pixels
Images via hacker/translator BNK
