The Retro League Podcast features discussion about the latest retro gaming news, re-releases, community developments and reviews of our favorite games.

This week:

This week we saw a number of people given honors or having it taken away, but we’re trying to find the line between Hair Metal and Alternative Rock. We are cautious about getting our hopes up for a Commodore 64 plug & play system, and we might have to start rating 90’s TV commercials in a scale of 1 to 5 Poochies. We’ve got a Game Boy port of some arcade classics and a winter sports game for the good old 2600 in this episode of the Retro League.

Minicraft3DS is a Nintendo 3DS homebrew port of Notch’s Ludum Dare game “Minicraft“. The goal of the game is to kill the only other sentient being in the world, making sure you’ll be alone forever.

Release notes:

Features:
(Andre111’s changes)
– Real Multiplayer! Tested and working this time around, compatible with the updates in this fork.
– Character editing! Customize your character!
– “Stability”
(ElijahZAwesome’s changes)
– Sound works without ANYTHING needed on the SD card (aside from the 3dsx if your using that obviously) now, in all builds of the game. Easy install.
– Github has each file downloadable individually, seeing as you don’t need the resources folder, also I realized that the SMDH file is embedded in the 3dsx, so that’s not needed either.

It is known that sound lingers after exiting without pressing the proper exit menu item.

The Retro Hour is your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news, views and interviews from the UK.

Content:

We go back to the earliest days of MUDs, university networks, and the Internet with Michael Lawrie. Plus, how one of the world’s most legendary hackers spied on him for a year.

https://soundcloud.com/the-retro-hour/early-internet-adventures-with-michael-lawrie-the-retro-hour-ep108

Put on a lizard and go for an adventure! Choose your lizard carefully. You can find six different ones scattered across the land, each with its own special ability.

You’ll need these abilities as you make your difficult journey through many dangerous places. Carefully hop your way to the top of an active volcano. Surf down a surging river. Swim an underwater lake. Ascend a snowy mountaintop. What kind of strange creatures will you meet? Can you unravel the mysteries of Lizard?

The digital download costs 10 US$, physical releases are planned.

You can also follow the project via Twitter.

NESmaker allows users to create cartridge based, hardware playable NES games in an intuitive, faux object oriented environment without ever having to write a single line of code.

Airaki is a brand-new puzzle battle game for the Nintendo Gameboy! Work fast to beat all 8 bosses and become the champion. You must wisely choose 1 of 3 special skills that will help you in your journey. Already mastered the battle? Link up with another Gameboy to go head-to-head for countless more hours of fun!

The game costs $15.00, excluding shipping.

NESmaker promises you to make NES Games, without coding skills required. The project at Kickstarter is already funded and goes on for another three days.

The Incredible Platformer is a fresh Android game from the Austrian developers at Impossibru. In this combination of physics machine puzzlers and traditional platformers, use the provided items to guide your player(s) safely from start to exit. This game is free, has no ingame advertising and you don’t have any ingame purchases as well and the Android version does not ask for any kind of permissions. It’s a totally 100% free game!

PicoDrive for 3DS is a port of notaz’s PicoDrive emulator by bubble2k16 to the old 3DS / 2DS. Although PicoDrive is already highly optimized for ARM processors, if ported as is, it still doesn’t run full speed for all Mega Drive games on the old 3DS / 2DS, as it’s evident in the RetroArch’s version. So this port heavily relies on the 3DS’s 2nd core to emulate the FM synthesized music for the YM2612 FM chip to achieve 60 FPS. But the 2nd core on the old 3DS is unfortunately not fast enough to generate the FM synthesized music at a full 44100Hz, so sounds are generated at 30000Hz on an Old 3DS. It sounds ok for many games, except for those that use high-pitched notes or sound samples. The screen rendering is done completely using the original PicoDrive’s ARM processor-optimized renderer.

You can play Master System, Mega Drive games and Sega CD games, and 32X games. CD games run a little slower (you should enable 1-2 frameskips) on an old 3DS, but it runs very well on a new 3DS. 32X games can only played at a reasonable speed on a New 3DS using the .CIA version of the emulator. Some dynarec instructions for 32X games will crash the emulator (Virtual Fighter, Virtual Racing Deluxe have this issue).

Retro Asylum catches up with Dean Swain, Paul Davies & Chris O’Regan as they answer another round of #askRA questions plus Dean & Paul play four Commodore 64 games picked at random in the debut of our new “Lucky Dip” feature.