I'm back! From outer space! Also known as Los Angeles, the city of Summer Game Fest (not too shabby) and Oaxacan Mexican food (very good). There might not be a lot of the latter, but I did eat some, and it was deeeeelish. Thanks for your patience as I took a week off from the regular publishing schedule to eat mole and play a whole buncha brand new games. Now we're back to the old stuff!
I thought the extra week was going to buy me time to make this issue all about the MiSTer FPGA Console Mode UI, which is about to enter into a more public, coverage-worthy beta. But alas, as I write this late Saturday night it hasn't arrved, so I had to scramble a bit to switch topics this issue. Hopefully soon I can offer up a meaty breakdown of that beginner-friendly UI experience.
I'm eager to cover it — mostly because as a MiSTer dabbler who's still more inclined to software emulation, I want to use it myself!
On the topic of hardware not-emulation, if you haven't seen this project from developer Bucket Mouse to wholesale replace the Game Boy Advance's PCB, it's a hell of an undertaking. If the original horizontal form factor is still your favorite version of the handheld but you always hated the system's prissy audio quality, well, behold:
Bucket Mouse
Pretty good birthday present!
As I mentioned a few issues back, I recently had the delightful opportunity to join Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi on the Video Game History Hour to talk about ROM a little bit, and the exciting activity in decompilations and recompilations a whole lot. There was a bit of a delay in publishing, but it finally went live on May 27. If you haven't heard it yet, et voila:
Robin Kunimune
Or just pull it up in your podcast app. Or don't listen to it at all. Live your life! And look forward to reading about Console Mode as soon as I have a chance to write about it. For this week, we're instead looking at a cool, arcade-focused fork of PCSX2, a game I love, and a healthy dose of patch notes.
The Big Two
1. PCSX2x6 splits off to emulate Namco arcade's Time Crisis 3, Wangan Midnight and more
Perhaps it's a sign of maturity that in recent months, both Dolphin and PCSX2 have seen forks focusing on their respective consoles' spin-off platforms. For Dolphin that was the Triforce arcade, as covered in ROM back in February. And now for PCSX2 there's a new emulator fork, PCSX2x6, focused on Namco's two PS2-based arcade systems from the 2000s: the 246 & 256.
There were quite a few games on these two systems, not all of which saw console ports. Years of Taiko no Tatsujin drumming games; Time Crisis 3; multiple Gundam games; a Space Adventure Cobra light gun shooter; some card battlers, like the one featured in my Triforce issue; Wangan Midnight; some Zoids games; the list continues. Lots of cool stuff —
Hold on, is that a game called SAMURAI SURF X???
Tragically, not a single video of this samurai surfing game appears to exist on YouTube. But if a dump exists out there and I can play it with, like, a Tony Hawk Ride controller or something... 🏄
Anyway! Back on topic. This isn't the very first time these arcade systems have been playable; my understanding is there's been at least some support in Teknoparrot and the PS2 emulator Play! before now. But neither is as polished an experience, or as broadly compatible, as PCSX2x6 promises. 40% of the arcade games are currently playable according to the compatibility tracker, and updates are flowing in quickly. Plus you get the other benefits of PCSX2: upscaling, a refined UI, and so on and so forth.
Until now playing these System 246/256 games was a true "for sickos only" ordeal, if they were supported at all; we're now well on the way to it being not much more work than emulating any ol' PS2 game. We're not at dead simple just yet, though — there are currently config files you have to tweak, BIOS files to assemble, and guides are still being refined. But if you can't wait to jump on a Space Adventure Cobra light gun game ASAP, I don't blame you — and the means to do so are now out there.
So why is this a fork, and not integrated into PCSXS2? Based on comments on Github, at least part of the reason is steering clear of the security bypasssing that had to be done to make the Namco 246/256 playable. That's probably a 'better safe than sorry' decision when it comes to the DMCA, even if Bandai Namco's not likely to get too aggro over a few of its long-unavailable console games becoming playable.
I'll be keeping my eye on the project as it matures, but more importantly, someone please @ me immediately if you find Samurai Surf X floating around out there somewhere.
2. I'm emulating Metal Arms: Glitch in the System this summer and so should you
A couple years ago in June I suggested that everyone should play Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, and honestly, that rec still stands. Go do that!! But if for some reason you aren't feeling big blue skies and endless roads, I'll recommend another game I've been thinking about replaying for years, and have finally dipped back into: Metal Arms: Glitch in the System.
This early 2000s third-person shooter was so good, Blizzard acquired the developer and put them to work making StarCraft: Ghost. Then it canceled StarCraft: Ghost. They should've just let them keep making Starcraft: Ghost, but anyway — Metal Arms is one of the great, underappreciated third-party games of the GameCube/PS2/Xbox era. It's got:
- Robots, exploding constantly
- An old timey newsreel explaining robot society
- Voices from the Simpsons, Animaniacs, and a buncha other cartoons
- Moar guns than Ratchet & Clank!? (idk I didn't actually count them but there are a lot)
- Surprisingly good third-person shooting with those guns
- Vehicles!
- Quite a bit of environmental destruction
- Basic 3D platforming and stuff to find all over the place
- Washers are their money
- Robots, farting (worst part)
Metal Arms spends the first 10 minutes tricking you into thinking it's cutesy as two of your companions escort you through the tutorial mission. Five seconds into the next level, they get blown to hell. At that point it's up to you to put approximately 100,000 bullets into a bunch of other bad bots.
This game is definitely in the Ratchet & Clank mold, and maybe doesn't quite measure up to Insomniac's best. But it's similarly creative, frenetic, and has a well-realized, cartoony setting that I quite enjoyed when I played it back in the day. I never finished it — I think I played about halfway through with a friend over a weekend, and then we never picked it up again — but I remember being pleasantly surprised every single stage by how good it was. Upgrades! Secrets! Dan Castellaneta and Rob Paulsen doing voices! You could ask for more, but... why?
I've just played through the first few levels in Xbox emulator Xemu, but if you were to pick up an old copy and give it a shot, I'd recommend the GameCube game in Dolphin, since the emulator is so much more polished. Or the PS2 version in PCSX2, because it's cheap, even if it doesn't look quite as good as the other two.
It's a damn shame there's been no legit way to play this game for the last 20 years. If Microsoft had set about remastering Metal Arms and re-releasing it on modern systems as soon as it bought Activision Blizzard, I bet it'd have at least another billy or two in the bank right now. Don't ask how.
Metal Arms ain't Halo or Resident Evil 4, but I'd put it up there close to Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath in terms of inventive weapon design, and it's got a nice challenging bite to it. A sequel really would've ripped, but it's the kind of straightforward action game I think is quite easy to appreciate in 2026. It's not doing anything wildly inventive, but it's also not flagrantly following a template, either.
It has some quirks to its controls, to its arsenal, to its upgrade system. Glitch is his own bot, and a perfect buddy for a dip back into early 2000s action design next time you're not quite sure what you feel like playing.
Patching In
Gourand stuff – Don't you want to emulate a specific PC-FX video card? – The PC-FX has featured in our fan translation coverage here at ROM, but this is really something else. Programmer gameblabla has forked the Mednafen emulator to support an obscure Hudson video card that basically let you stick the guts of the PC-FX into a DOS PC. "I've been waiting for years (almost 20 years in fact) for someone to emulate the PC-FXGA or more specifically the HuC6273 but it never happened. So I took on the task to add HuC6273 emulation to my mednafen fork, pcfxemu," they wrote on Reddit.
"Unlike the standard PC-FX, it has a 3D accelerator, the HuC6273, that can do gouraud shading, texture mapping, sprites, among other things. From what i understand, this accelerator was initially meant for the actual PC-FX itself but development got delayed so the chip was scrapped and eventually appeared in the PC-FXGA that was released later." All two games released for the hardware, N-Nyuu and Same Game FX, are now playable!
Dragon Quest VIII is still getting fixes in PCSX2, all these years later.
ShadPS4 v0.16.0 is "the largest update to date" – Quite a claim from the PS4 emulator! v0.16 apparently contains "major improvements across emulation accuracy, graphics, audio, input handling, user experience, platform support, and developer infrastructure" which sounds like all the things? There's now a big picture interface, a new audio backend, local multiplayer support, and built-in screenshotting, plus big improvements to the graphics systems, core emulation systems and trophies. Great stuff.
Cemu adds an LLM policy to its readme – "We ask that all code submitted is written and understood by a human. You can use AI for planning, designing, reviewing and for asking questions about the codebase, but the code itself needs to be written by you. As a small exception you can use intellisense-style AI code autocompletion for pure boilerplate code as long as it's only a small part of your submission. To further clarify, when we ask for 'human written' that excludes letting an AI write the code and then paraphrasing it. In other words, we are asking for human effort."
I'd be perfectly fine if the reasoning for this policy was a blunt cuz we said so, but it's much more even-handed than that:
"We have relatively low reviewing capacity and requiring human-written code increases the quality and trustworthyness of submitted pull requests. There are also general concerns with AI usage in emulation: LLMs tend to make up solutions that work on the surface but are generally not accurate in the emulation sense. There is evidence that LLMs have been trained on leaked proprietary SDKs and we cannot verify the origin of the knowledge. This is especially a problem for core emulation logic."
Core Report
At long last, the MiSTer gets CPS3 support* – The Jotego Patreon faithful get a major treat this weekend, as the MiSTer core developer has at long last launched a beta for Capcom's famous System 3 arcade board. This initial release supports Street Fighter 3: New Generation and Red Earth.
A bevy of MiSTer one-offs: Trio the Punch, Sky Smasher, Boogie Wings, D-Con, and Blood Bros – Developer rmonic has released free cores of 1990 Data East beat 'em up Trio the Punch and Nihon Systems shooter Sky Smashers, while subscribers can access pre-release builds of the latter three. Meanwhile, MiSTer scene mainstay srg320 just dropped a Psikyo SH2 core, which is still quite early — for audio in particular — but that opens up support for a bunch of shmups, including Gunbird 2 and Strikers 1945 II. That's a lotta arcade games to try even if you don't have access to the CPS3 core!
SNES core now supports trackers and multiworldin' – I don't know how many speedrunners and fans of "multiworld" randomizers like Archipelago are playing on the MiSTer as opposed to a more convenient PC, but this is welcome news for those very specific folks: there's now an interface that will let you connect the MiSTer to a PC to support that stuff. Your MiSTer SNES games can now interface with speedrunning timers and randomizer trackers thanks to this proxy tool.
A summer shower of core fixes – MiSTer maintainer sorgelig cataloged a dadgum flood of updates from many contributors, including fixes for the 3DO, CD-i, SNES, Commodore 64, Master System, X68000, and many more. Outside core-specific stuff, there's also a forced VRR mode, fixed lookahead scrolling, and real-time updates about the video signal in the menu. A freezing issue related to new HDMI hot plug support has also been nipped in the bud.
Translation Station
Kowloon's Gate is here! – Check out the last issue of ROM for an in-depth interview with Hilltop, Cargodin, and dk, who all worked incredibly hard on this fan translation. If you need proof of that, check out the 67 page "introductory guide" the team put together with notes on the translation, a lore FAQ, dozens of links to reference material, an encyclopedia of in-game terms, items, and concepts, and more.
Real Robots Final Attack finally attacks!! – Aeon Genesis hacker Gideon Zhi shares that he has files from the start of this fan translation project that date back to 2006, despite the 3D fighting game's relative simplicity. Sometimes these things just have to simmer, y'know? He writes: "It features several robot characters licensed from different TV shows — Z Gundam, G Gundam, Gundam X, Metal Armor Dragonar, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Aura Battler Dunbine, and Combat Mecha Xabungle — along with the SRX team robots (R-1, R-2, R-3) brought over from the Super Robot Wars series and an original final boss. Mechanically it plays similarly to Sega's Virtual-On, but with controls designed more directly for console play. In addition to an eight-stage campaign it features player-vs-player versus and system link modes, as well as a handful of codes to unlock play as the SRX and boss units and a semi-functional first-person mode."
Rushing Beat Shura: The Eternal Conflict barrels ahead – This sequel to the beat 'em up better known (to me) as Rival Turf was released in the US as The Peace Keepers but "was substantially altered (renamed characters, reworked story and dialogue, and content changes)," explains this fan translation's readme. Longtime hardware and game hacker Dackr writes that Eternal Conflict "follows the **Japanese** version's intent (transliterated from katakana), not the Peace Keepers renames. There are a couple localization choices some may see as controversial, but are minimal." And some notes on the effort that went into the hack itself: "The original font had no Latin alphabet suited to English text, so the translation ships the same font that was used in PeaceKeepers – a 8×16 Latin font and a tightened text renderer that fits ~32 characters per line, plus a 24-bit text pointer engine so English lines aren't limited to the cramped Japanese string budget."
Good pixels
Let's go with a real grab bag this issue. First, check out the progress on the ReXGlue recomp of Blue Dragon, straight from the Discord 👀
And a lil' old Japanese PC RPG pixel magic:
Images via PC-98 Mega Pack
And, finally, a Kowloon's Gate image post that made me laugh. 💽
ChloeCade
