News

Lick the Sky by eggnog is a relaxing PICO-8 arcade climber about a lizard who stared up into the sky and wanted to lick the stars. High scores are based on climbing time, flight time and time latched to shooting stars. But don’t get hung up on it. Put on some music, relax, and Lick the Sky!

Hungry Harry’s Climb is a PICO-8 game by paloblancogames. Help Harry escape the procedurally generated caves!

Battojutsu is a PICO-8 game by hierronacho. It’s a quick game inspired by Samurai Kirby. Draw your sword faster than your opponents! Push X when you see the “!” icon to attack.

Tanglewood by Big Evil Corporation will be also available for the Dreamcast and we got some news yesterday via Twitter.

Quote:

Work on the Dreamcast version continues, but will remain at a slow pace until the Mega Drive version reaches Gold. We’re planning a free demo for you to burn to disc, like we did with the Mega Drive version. More news as it happens.

Ryan Carson has progress news on Flap Happy.

Quote:

Egypt Levels in progress in FCEUX. Been restructuring the #ASM to handle multiple worlds tonight and handling the palette, tileset differences. Next up different level generation gubbins. #nesdev #gamedev

RetroArch is a modular multi-system emulator system that is designed to be fast, lightweight, and portable. Starting with v1.3.6, RetroArch users can download compatible freeware content, such as the shareware release of Doom, right from the app.

List of included libretro cores:

NES: FCEU, Nestopia, QuickNES
SNES: PocketSNES, SNES9x-Next
GBC: Gambatte, TGB Dual
GBA: Meteor, VBA
Genesis / Sega CD: Genesis Plus
Saturn: Yabause (Very slow!)
Playstation: PCSX-ReARMed
Atari 2600: Stella
Chip8/16: Maxe
Arcade: iMAME4all, MAME078, Final Burn Alpha
Mednafen cores: PCE-Fast, WSwan, PSX
Natives: NXEngine (Cave Story), PrBoom (Doom)

Changes:

– 3DS: Now correctly reports amount of CPU cores.
– 3DS: Frontend rating is now correctly implemented for both New 3DS/2DS and Old 3DS/2DS.
– 3DS: Initial networking support, HTTP requests won’t work yet.
– 3DS: Now reports memory and battery state.
– AUDIO: Added ‘Audio Resampler Quality’ setting to Audio Settings. Setting this higher will increase sound quality at the expense of sound latency and/or performance. Setting this value lower will improve sound latency/performance at the expense of sound quality. Only has an effect if the Sinc resampler is used, and you have to restart the game for changes to take effect.
– CHEEVOS: Fix unofficial achievements not being loaded.
– CHEEVOS: Show savestate menu entries when no achievements are found even if hardcore mode is enabled.
– CHEEVOS: Support Neo Geo Pocket.
– COMMON: Bugfix for issue related to ‘Windows mouse pointer visible when running MESS or MAME cores’.
– COMMON: Fix bug ‘Last item in a Playlist is ignored’.
– COMMON: New LED API. Driver implemented for Raspberry Pi, proof of concept implemented for core MAME 2003.
– COMMON: Add quick menu option to watch shader files for changes and recompile them automatically (Linux only for now).
– D3D8: Direct3D 8 can now work on systems that have Direct3D 8 installed.
– D3D9: Add menu support for MaterialUI/XMB.
– D3D10: Initial video driver implementation.
– D3D11: Initial video driver implementation.
– D3D11: SPIRV-Cross/slang shader support for D3D11.
– D3D12: Initial video driver implementation.
– DINPUT: don’t reinitialize input driver on network events / media insertion / network drive connection
– INPUT: show friendly names when available under input binds and system information
– INPUT: show the config name when available under system information
– GUI: Allow changing menu font color.
– GUI: Menu visibility options for RGUI and MaterialUI.
– GUI/MaterialUI: Works now with D3D8, D3D9 Cg, D3D11 and D3D12 drivers.
– GUI/XMB: Add Monochrome Inverted icon theme.
– GUI/XMB: Allow changing menu scale to 200%.
– GUI/XMB: Works now with D3D8, D3D9 Cg, D3D11 and D3D12 drivers. Menu shader effects currently don’t work on D3D8/D3D9 Cg.
– HAIKU: Restored port.
– KEYMAPPER: prevent a condition that caused input_menu_toggle to stop working when a RETRO_DEVICE_KEYBOARD type device is enabled
– GL: ignore hard gpu sync when fast-forwarding
– IOS10/11: Handle hardware keyboards and iCade controllers
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese-Brazilian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Spanish translation.
– NETPLAY: Add menu option to select different MITM (relay) server locations.
– OSX: Modify HID buttons detection algorithm.
– QB: Added –datarootdir.
– QB: Added –bindir and –mandir and deprecated –with-bin_dir and –with-man_dir.
– QB: Added –docdir.
– SHADERS: Allow saving of shader presets based on the parent directory (Saving one for */foo/bar/mario.sfc* would result in *shaders/presets/corename/bar.ext*). We decided it’s safer to still isolate the presets to a single core because different cores may treat video output differently.
– SHADERS: Don’t save the path to the current preset to the main config. This was causing weird behavior, instead it will try to load *currentconfig.ext* and it will save a preset with that name when select *apply shader preset*. The resulting shader will restore properly after restarting and even after core/parent/game specific presets are loaded
– SOLARIS: Initial port.
– SWITCH: Initial Nintendo Switch port, based on libtransistor SDK.
– PS3: Enable Cheevos.
– PSP: Enable threading support through pthreads.
– SHADERS: SPIRV-Cross/slang shader support for D3D11.
– SHIELD ATV: Allow the remote / gamepad takeover hack to work with the 2017 gamepad
– SUBSYSTEM: Subsystem saves now respect the save directory
– SUBSYSTEM: You can now load subsystem games from the menu (see https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/6282 for caveats)
– VULKAN: Fix swapchain recreation bug on Nvidia GPUs with Windows 10 (resolved in Windows Nvidia driver version 390.77).
– WINDOWS: Improved Unicode support (for cores/directory creation and 7zip archives).
– WINDOWS: Show progress meter on taskbar for downloads (Windows 7 and up).
– WINDOWS: WS_EX_LAYERED drastically decreases performance, so only set it when needed (transparency in windowed mode).
– WIIU: Overlay support.
– WIIU: Transparency support in menu + overlays.
– WIIU: Increased stability during core switching.
– WIIU: Shader support.
– WIIU: Menu shader effects added (shaders).
– WIIU: Add missing time/clock support. (also fixes RTC [Real Time Clock] in Gambatte)
– XBOX OG: Restored port.

There is even more progress on Tanglewood by Big Evil Corporation.

Quote:

A quick update – we’re almost at beta! Just a few more audio issues to sort out, a handful of bugs, then we’ll begin closed beta testing (Kickstarter/Megafounder backers will receive info about this first).

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 Nintendo is trying to use old games to entice us to buy their newest systems. We won’t be tempted because we’re following the twisted road of Tetris publishing rights. Sega has the answer for your power adapter needs, while the Atari name-owners continue their desperate grab for cash. We may be seeing the end of physical media for music, but we do have a new Sonic the Hedgehog boardgame in this episode of the Retro League.

Hugues Johnson got in touch with us to let us know about his Sega Genesis project Retail Clerk ’89. It is, or will eventually be, a small adventure game set in a 1989 shopping mall. It’s not nearly finished but is far enough to share progress. Be gentle and give feedback!

Dumblin Dungeon is a Gameboy multiplayer game, 2+ players. You control a Goblin that must activate buttons in a given order, and in a given timing. If you succeed, tell the next pattern to the next player, and give him the Gameboy. The first pattern is A B C D, walk on the pressure plate with your character to activate it.