Dan Mons

PC Engine palette improvements – the amazing people behind the technology

One day, all the CRTs and all the original consoles will be gone, and I’ll be eternally grateful for the efforts of those who preserved it all. This story began for me with a tweet. David Shadoff posted that the RGB palette on the popular multi-system emulator Mednafen for the PC Engine module (released as […]

Dan Mons

Strong National Museum of Play obtains Super Mario Bros 3 for PC disk

ArsTechnica reports that the Strong National Museum of Play have obtained a floppy disk containing id Software’s original Super Mario Bros 3 PC demo. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/museum-obtains-rare-demo-of-id-softwares-super-mario-bros-3-pc-port/ Andrew Borman, the museum’s Digital Games Curator, mentioned that the disk was a part of a larger donation set given to the museum by an unnamed software developer.  The developer […]

Dan Mons

Raspberry Pi MAME benchmarks

Before I dive into the title subject, a small rant if I may. First and foremost, I’m a video game collector.  My personal collection of consoles, including duplicates, multiple hardware revisions and cross-region models (I live in a PAL territory, but also buy hardware from overseas) spans well over 80 consoles.  My physical game collection […]

Dan Mons

mGBA to Dolphin (GameCube) emulator connectivity

Prominent open source emulators mGBA (for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance) and Dolphin (for the Nintendo GameCube) have announced substantial code updates in their connectivity between the two systems, simulating the GameCube GameBoy Advance Link cable setup, allowing interaction between the two emulated systems identical to how the original hardware works.  Supported games feature extra content […]

Dan Mons

MDFourier Amiga port started

MDFourier author Artemio has summarised the busy March 240p Test Suite and MDFourier updates via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-monoscope-49474110 And within is an excellent nugget of information for Commodore Amiga fans – the very popular personal computer line that debuted worldwide in 1985 is getting a port of the excellent MDFourier audio comparison tool. The initial model, […]

Dan Mons

PlayStation preservation ups and downs

Mixed news in the realm of game preservation this week.  Starting on a less positive note, website TheGamer reports that the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable (PSP) stores may go offline July 2, and the PlayStation Vita store will go offline August 27: https://www.thegamer.com/ps3-vita-psp-stores-permanently-closed/ This means that legally purchased digital titles and DLC may not […]

Dan Mons

PlayStation 1 “tonyhax” soft-mod released

For a number of years there has been a small amount of research into PlayStation 1 games that created save files where certain text field length checks were not performed (say, when custom naming a character or other save information), and could potentially result in a buffer overflow attack (a common security attack that allows […]