I believe 2025 will be judged on how much of the potential the project has been building up is realized. On a personal level I feel it could be a very slow year, but we will see.
Improvements to Namco arcade hardware
Driver’s Eyes was an early 90s Namco 3D racer built on Winning Run that came before it, but expanded to drive 3 different screens using 3 PCB stacks within the cabinet. Previously the communication chip responsible for allowing these stacks to talk to each other was not emulated, but in 2025 that changed, allowing proper emulation of the title with all 3 screens running.
Improvements to Playstation based hardware
The weaknesses of MAME’s Playstation emulation can easily be seen when trying to run the library from the home console, but a number of those issues were also showing up when it came to the more limited cases of arcade games using Playstation based hardware. One of the most asked about of those cases was Primal Rage II. Some fixes to the SPU (sound hardware) handling and a few IDE ones (specific to the arcade hardware which used a Hard Drive ratehr than a CD) brought that up to working state in 2025; ironically before the original Primal Rage can even be considered fully working.
The aformentioned SPU fixes also fixed a long standing bug with Strider 2, which would previously crash if both buttons were pressed when walking. That one also gained proper working state.
Bloody Roar 2 also benefited from these changes, and now runs the attract FMV without freezing during it, meaning you can leave the game running the demo cycle without issue, which previously wasn’t possible.
Some Taito G-Net games also benefitted from these improvements. While it’s always been possible to boot Space Invaders Anniversary with some CPU overclock/underclock workarounds it has never booted properly by default in MAME, so has always been considered a ‘NOT WORKING’ title. The changes made allow it to boot without any trickery
It’s likely a number of games for the home system were also improved by the same changes, but at the time of writing there’s no comprehensive list of those.
More Plug & Play
The new dumping techniques developed at the very end of 2024 saw their use spill over into 2025, with a number of other devices being dumped and emulated. Let’s! TV Play Kawashima Ryuuta Kyouju Kanshuu – Nou to Karata o Kitaeru Taikan Zunou Family Mattore, an entry in the Kawashima ‘Brain Training’ series usually found on Nintendo handhelds but in this case in the form of a Plug and Play was one of the first in 2025 to be added. It’s all in Japanese, and runs on SunPlus tech.
EA Sports Classics is often mistaken for a ‘Megadrive on a Chip’ system, but is actually ports of 2 EA Sports Games to SunPlus SPG110 hardware which is an entirely different platform. Currently FIFA works reasonably well, but NHL has some logic bugs with collisions.
While EA Sports ran on older SPG110 tech, some of the JAKKS games used newer tech. Known by GPAC500, but based on the GPL162xx chipset this newer gen tech still has some emulation issues, but new dumps will definitely help move things forward. One game dumped using that tech was “The Amazing Spider-Man and The Masked Menace”. You can play the game somewhat, but there are many graphical errors and no sound at the time of writing.
Another GPL162xx based game to be dumped in 2025 was Power Rangers to the Rescue. While still considered ‘Not Working’ and lacking sound this makes less use of the new GPL162xx features, suggesting maybe it was first developed for the older tech before being moved over to this platform. It is playable, but until the overall emulation of the platform is more trusted will retain the flag.
Disney Pixar Classics runs on the better understood SunPlus SPG24x based hardware and features games themed around Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Monsters Inc. This one is fully playable.
Webdiver Gladion W-05 DX is a XaviX based system which in physical form is a transforming robot. The robot has 2 different forms, which the game software is able to detect and play a different mini-game based on. The first game is a mech shooting game, while the 2nd form is a train-like vehicle where you have to dodge obstacles. There is also some (still unemulated) functionality for connecting other robots in the series to get different weapons in the shooting game.
SuperXaviX hardware emulation continued to move forward in 2025, with new ROM dumps, and improvements to the emulation allowing them to show more correct graphics and/or not just crash, even if many still have no controls
The Super Sentai (Power Rangers) themed game is an example of a SuperXaviX game which used previously emulated video modes, but now shows a full attract demo cycle.
Ryo Ishikawa Excite Golf is a 2010 sequel to the original Excite Golf, and this time runs on SuperXaviX hardware, again showing the progress being made, but also highlighting some remaining issues. Controls aren’t emulated at the time of writing though.
Minna no Tetris from Epoch runs on SunPlus SPG24x hardware, which is unusual for Epoch as the majority of their output of the era used XaviX technology. The game itself doesn’t disappoint though and lives up to the high standards you see with the majority of Epoch Plug and Plays. A variety of game modes and difficulty settings as well as VS modes against either another player or a CPU opponent make this a solid experience. Despite the Japanese menus it’s easy to figure out and a big step up from the Tetris licensed games Radica put to market outside of Japan.
A trio of ‘Interactive Coloring Book’ devices from Techno Source is up next. These run on VT168 hardware and all have the same features, just with images taken from different Disney IPs. There’s one for Cars, another for Toy Story and a final one for Disney Princesses.
Regional releases are often interesting, and in the world of Plug and Plays that’s no exception. Sonokong released a version of Popira, subtitled ‘Finger Sports’ for the Korean market, and as well as presentation changes compared to the Japanese release, there are some new songs, and others moved around to easier / more difficult patterns. While it still has a cart slot like the Japanese version, the Japanese cartridges aren’t full compatible.
