Atari pulled the plug on the release of Marble Madness II almost exactly 31 years ago after the follow up to their hit game failed to perform well in location tests.
For decades the only way to play this now sought after rarity has been on one of a handful of known surviving units when it was exhibited by a private collector at annual events.
That has all changed after the ROM mysteriously appeared on The Internet Archive and was subsequently emulated by MAME developer David Haywood.
Ars Technica provides background information on this story, and talks with a number of the digital archaeologists involved. They discuss the events that unfolded, speculate as to why the game may have failed, and look at what it means to the community.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/9819
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/after-30-years-the-world-can-now-play-the-lost-marble-madness-ii/
Source
Running Retroarch has long been possible on the PS4, but it’s been done through unofficial ports so far. That was until now, as the Retroarch team have added the PS4 ports to their official github today, thanks to the work of frangar, bigboss, and fjtrujy among others. PS4 support on Retroarch, what’s that? O_o Just to be crystal clear, we’re talking here about the possibility to run the Retroarch emulator suite on PS4, not the other way around! Retroarch does not let you play PS4 games on your PC yet (but there are other emulators in progress for that: Spine and Kyty). Again, it’s something that’s been possible for a while, but not “officially” supported by the Retroarch team until now. |
https://wololo.net/2022/05/24/emulation-ps4-officially-added-to-supported-platforms-in-retroarch/
I recently sat down with Bob from RetroRGB.com for an interview podcast for the first time since returning to the community.
Check it out here: https://www.retrorgb.com/interview-with-zophar.html
ROM Properties 1.9 has been released:
- Github
- Releases
"This shell extension adds a few nice features to file browsers for managing video game ROM and disc images. It is available for the Windows platform and it is open source software under the GNU GPL license."
Flycast Dojo version 0.4.52 had been released:
- Git
"Flycast Dojo is a fork of Flycast, a multiplatform Sega Dreamcast, Naomi and Atomiswave emulator. Intended for netplay and quality of life improvements for training & online tournament play"
MacFCEU v0.9b1 is available for download:
- URL
"MacFCEU is an updated Mac OS Classic/Carbon-specific port of FCE Ultra 0.98.13, the Nintendo Entertainment System/FamilyComputer emulator, and beyond. This emulator is meant for older Macs, pre-OS X."
DeSmuME has been updated to version 0.9.13.
- Homepage
- SourceForge Code
DeSmuME is a Nintendo DS emulator. DeSmuME supports DS homebrew nds roms and demo programs, including a handful of wireless multi-boot nds roms. It is available for the Windows 32 and 64 bits platform. It is open source under the GNU GPL V2 license.
ROMSorter R5 had been released:
- Github
"Detect and rename ROMs and other games. Requires .NET 6. current release for ROMSorteris Win-x64 only. Librarian is available for all platforms."
Z64K 2.0 is available for download:
- URL
"Z64K is a pixel exact emulation of the Commodore 128,Commodore 64, VIC 20 and Atari 2600 written in Java. It should run on any platform with an updated java runtime environment installed."
Amiberry version 5.2 had been released
- URL
"Amiberry is an optimized Amiga emulator, for ARM-based boards (like the Raspberry Pi, ASUS Tinkerboard, Odroid XU4, etc). The core emulation comes from WinUAE, but stripped down somewhat in order to achieve good performance in underpowered boards."
Gopher2600 version 0.18.0 had been released:
- URL
"Gopher2600 is an emulator for the Atari 2600 written in the Go language.
The accuracy of the emulation is very high and there are no known outstanding problems with the 6507, TIA and RIOT chip emulation. Emulation of the ARM chip is limited to the Thumb subset of instructions but it does include reasonably accurate cycle counting and performance monitoring."
WinVICE r42376 had been released:
- Releases
- Github
WinVICE is a windows port of the VICE emulator. VICE (Versatile Commodore Emulator) is an emulator for the Commodore 8-bit computer range.
pfeMame 2.21.7 is available for download:
- URL
"pfeMame is a front end for the Multiple Arcade Game Emulator (MAME) written in Python. It is cross platform (tested on Linux - Ubuntu and Windows XP)"
Wine version 7.9 for Linux has been released:
URL: https://www.winehq.org/
Here it is the official announcement:
URL: https://www.winehq.org/news/
"Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & BSD.
It is open source software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.
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