(currently a placeholder page for 2026 progress)
After a busy 2025, where there were a large number of new dumps, but not necessarily new emulation, I think we’ll start to see a slowdown in 2026. As we saw with Jammin’ in 2025, the lengths people are having to go to in order to find previously undumped arcade games are reaching the point of extreme; while there are hundreds of known undumped arcade titles it’s possible many of those were never released, or no longer exist at all if they were. Likewise the majority of the Plug and Play devices for which there is a know dumping method have now been dumped, and even in other fields there are only a finite number of systems.
Much of the 2025 update consisted of progress that was the result of new dumps, sprinkled with a handful of important progress on systems already in MAME, and while I titled that write-up as “Time to make the most of potential” the focus on that being necessary will be even stronger in 2026.
The year started with a number of improvements to the Atari Jaguar emulation. MAME’s existing code was built mainly around the needs of the CoJag arcade games (and even then was lacking in some places) The changes allow some games to run, and have much better visuals, but at the time of writing there are still many stability issues. Atari Jaguar emulation has always been difficult to get right, especially when you can’t hide away a bunch of per-game hacks in a closed source project. Any progress is promising, but there’s still a long, long way to go at the time of writing this.
Nichibutsu’s Moon Raker is one of their less common games ‘Moon’ games and was eclipsed by the popularity of Moon Cresta. It runs on earlier tech, similar to Space Invaders, and plays very differently to either. Sadly only the main ROM board was found, the board for the Starfield generator, which is unique to the game and contains a ROM for the star layout, was missing, so the game lacks a starfield, and also audio for the time being.
Atari released a game called Relief Pitcher in 1992, however the concept was originally tried 6 years earlier on their System 1 platform. The 1986 game, while built around similar ideas, is an entirely different game, with the released game being more like a sequel to it. Presentation on this one is much more cartoony, fitting with Atari’s other output at the time, while the 1992 release used more realistic looking graphics which was the way Atari were taking things after the success of Pit Fighter.
Waku Waku Jumbo is another one of the Sega “Kiddie Rides” in the Waku Waku series. This one has you flying a jumbo jet across a bunch of landscapes.
