As with most recent years, I haven’t really used the front page here for any kind of announcements, but have just been quietly updating the 2025 page at the side.
It’s been quite a breakthrough year for the emulation of Plug and Play devices after a way to handle some of the more difficult ones was found late last year. This means the majority of JAKKS Pacific games from 2004+ have now been dumped and are emulated to some degree. The earlier ones (Spongebob/Namco/Atari/Activision etc. units from 2003, as well as the fishing game) are still considered impossible with current techniques (the ROM code is on the same die as the CPU) which is a shame because those are all interesting units, but being able to handle some of the more difficult cases released after that period is still huge news and the skills have been transferable to many non-JAKKS units too.
Gaelco providing access to their archives has also turned up some gems, although as with many companies what is missing from them is as noteworthy as what is included. We got to see the long lost prototype version of World Rally, as well as some different Xor World builds, but also discovered earlier prototype versions of things like Glass where sadly the DS5002FP internal code was not preserved along with those builds, meaning they’re still unplayable as they expect different protection handling to the final games.
Sega Model 2 improvements have also been a long time coming, and while not perfect, MAME now does a much better job on many of the titles than it did prior.
There’s also the usual assortment of chess machines, and LCD games which I haven’t yet had time myself to dig through to include in the write-up, but are no less important in terms of building more complete documentation for those fields of entertainment.
Recompiler improvements (leading to better performance on ARM based devices), a new sound system (supporting more than just stereo output) and other important core changes are amongst the other big things that have been going on of late.
Everybody has been very busy!