Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

The Atari 7800 source code for Asteroids and Centipede ended up in a dumpster in 1996. Actual disks, behind the company's Sunnyvale building, waiting to disappear with the trash. The reason we can still look through some of those files is that someone went in after them at 3 a.m. There are glamorous ways to spend a night in the video-game business. Recovering Atari ST diskettes from a filthy dumpster probably doesn't… Read more

Sonic CD's first boss has a name that looks as though somebody forgot to replace a part number: EGG-HVC-001. Then you look up Nintendo's original Famicom and find its model number: HVC-001. Oh, Sega. Even the paperwork? That's a wonderfully petty little discovery for anyone who remembers choosing sides in the console wars. You could argue about Mario and Sonic all afternoon, then boot up Sonic CD and unknowingly spend your first… Read more

The Amiga’s startup hand was holding something that looked roughly like a Workbench disk. Roughly was the problem. Bernd Schmidt’s emulator had produced a badly distorted version of the familiar picture, and there was still work to do before anyone could call this an Amiga they would want to use. Schmidt fixed his blitter code, and the picture improved. Later, Workbench booted from a floppy image with a convincing color display and… Read more

The first hand on Bernd Schmidt’s emulated Amiga screen was badly misshapen. It was supposed to be holding a Workbench disk, but his early blitter code still had bugs. Fixing those brought the picture closer to the familiar startup screen, and the next job was getting the rest of the machine to behave. Schmidt wanted to keep using Amiga software as he moved toward PCs, including the music from Turrican. Some Usenet… Read more

In Ultima VII, a red face fills the screen and offers to become your new friend. The Guardian has an excellent voice, terrible intentions, and rather more confidence than anyone should want in a traveling companion. Then you step into Britannia, start asking questions, and discover that the people already living there have plenty of problems of their own. It is a wonderful world to get distracted in. You arrive with a… Read more

The PS5 asks to update, and for once you leave the button alone. If you’ve been following the homebrew scene, you know why that little prompt can turn into a surprisingly difficult decision. Install the latest software for the usual games and services, or leave the console where it is and see what the developers come up with? There’s a new reason that question is coming up for owners on 14.00 and… Read more

Aladdin springs over a guard, Ristar reaches halfway across the screen, and Yoshi walks through a landscape that looks as though somebody left the crayons out. Put these games beside one another and the variety is wonderful. Sixteen-bit hardware could produce a convincing cartoon, a dense fantasy painting, or a comic page that wanted to punch you back. Some of the best moments only make sense in motion. Thunder Force IV sends… Read more

Courteney Cox and David Arquette arrived at Los Angeles Center Studios on October 16, 2008, for the Fallout 3 launch party. The arrival photographs are still in WireImage's archive. Bethesda was celebrating its trip into the Capital Wasteland with a guest list that looked considerably more glamorous than the people you'd meet outside Megaton. There was another connection, too, at least according to Bethesda's own reported trivia: Cox had briefly worked there… Read more

The first hand on Bernd Schmidt’s emulated Amiga screen was badly misshapen. It was supposed to be holding a Workbench disk, but his early blitter code still had bugs. Fixing those brought the picture closer to the familiar startup screen, and the next job was getting the rest of the machine to behave. Schmidt wanted to keep using Amiga software as he moved toward PCs, including the music from Turrican. Some Usenet… Read more

At 2 a.m., Spencer Nilsen, David Young, and the singers of Pastiche were sitting in a circle on the studio floor, working out lyrics and harmonies for “Sonic Boom.” Nobody was complaining about the hour. Good ideas stayed, weaker ones went, and the song that would greet North American Sonic CD players was coming together between jokes. Nilsen arrived at Sega with years of recording experience and very little experience playing games.… Read more

Before 42Bastian Schick and Lars Baumstark had official Lynx documentation, they had a damaged handheld, a dumped copy of Gauntlet, and a homemade SRAM cartridge. Changing the game usually left it frozen. Then one modification worked, and they had a clue: part of each cartridge sector was escaping the checksum. 42Bastian wrote a disassembler, then a small 65C02 simulator, while Lars worked on the hardware. Their experiments grew into a Lynx with… Read more

Robert Holmes was in line for the Monorail at Disneyland with his daughter when he heard the Gabriel Knight theme as someone’s ringtone. Music written for a Sierra adventure had turned up in somebody else’s day, well outside the game. He still sounds a little surprised that people remember it at all. Before Sierra, Holmes had worked in studios, live music, and postproduction in Los Angeles. A lunch with Mark Seibert brought… Read more

In 1994, Carl Forhan found out on Usenet that Atari had made a color handheld and a new console. He had grown up playing his dad’s 2600, but the Lynx and Jaguar had arrived without him noticing. A cheap Lynx bundle and a used Jaguar gave him a way back in. Then another Usenet post mentioned a cartridge that could load programs into Lynx RAM. Soon he had a cartridge from Germany,… Read more

October 12 to 19, 2026. The Saturn and original Xbox have the biggest news this week. Ymir moved beyond its SDL renderer, then quickly fixed a Windows ARM launch crash. xemu delivered a numbered release with audio and timing repairs that touch several games. The four monitored categories carried 184 notices, although many were daily builds of the same project.Saturn and Xbox releasesYmir 0.4.0 changes the picture, then 0.4.1 fixes a launch… Read more

That stack of PS2 cases beside the television has a new reason to come off the shelf. Swordpdf’s PS5SX2, a homebrew port of PCSX2, now offers a way to insert a supported PS2 DVD into a jailbroken PlayStation 5, copy the game to storage and launch it through the emulator. The disc supplies the game data, while the PS5 runs the resulting copy. This is a community project for modified consoles, not… Read more

October 5–12, 2026. The week’s clearest emulator releases were a Dolphin hotfix, a substantial SameBoy update, and a new FCEUX version. Igir also expanded the way collections can be named and sorted. Across the four monitored categories, we found 166 notices; most of the console entries were successive development snapshots. The full dated log groups them below.Console and handheld releasesDolphin 2609a fixes the first 2609 releaseDolphin labels 2609a a hotfix for its… Read more

September 28–October 5, 2026. This week brought a substantial shadPS4 release, a fresh DOSBox-X build, and a coordinated set of Gear emulator updates. There are 162 notices, many of them successive development snapshots of the same project. The dated log below groups every notice; the analysis here covers changes confirmed by project releases or source repositories. The releases that matter shadPS4 0.19.0 moves PS4 compatibility forward shadPS4 0.19.0 is a tagged release,… Read more

Week of September 21–28, 2026. This is Retro Replay’s first weekly emulator briefing: one place to follow meaningful releases, nightly builds, arcade work, classic PC changes, and library tools. We reviewed this week’s release notices, then checked the highlighted changes against project release notes and source repositories. A dated build in the log below is a development snapshot, not necessarily a stable release. The week at a glance The four feeds carried… Read more

There was a time when taking a serious retro game collection with you meant carrying a dedicated handheld, several cartridges, a mess of cables, and probably a case big enough to qualify as luggage. Android has changed that completely. A decent modern phone can now handle everything from the Game Boy, NES, and Sega Genesis to the PlayStation, Dreamcast, PSP, GameCube, and — with the right hardware and a little patience —… Read more

Sketch Turner lands a punch, a bright yellow “Pow!!” bursts beside his fist, and the next fight waits on the other side of a comic panel. He has to climb or jump across the page to reach it. Comix Zone takes its premise seriously enough to make the gutters between the pictures part of the adventure. It is still a wonderful thing to watch. Sega's 1995 Genesis brawler has another reputation, though.… Read more

Twenty-five years ago, Rockstar gave us an entire city to explore, a criminal empire to build, and more ways to get into trouble than we knew what to do with. And video games would never be quite the same again. On 22 October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on the PlayStation 2, taking the franchise out of its familiar top-down perspective and dropping players into a fully realized, three-dimensional Liberty City.… Read more

Some heroes are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. And then there’s Sir Daniel Fortesque, who managed to become a legend despite getting killed almost immediately in his first big battle. On 21 October* 1998, MediEvil arrived on the original PlayStation in North America, introducing gamers to one of the most unlikely heroes of the 32-bit era: a one-eyed, jawless, undead knight with a reputation he hadn’t actually earned. I… Read more

Some sequels give you more of the same. Others take everything you loved about the original and turn it into something truly special. For me, Fable II was the latter. On 21 October 2008, Lionhead Studios released Fable II for the Xbox 360, returning players to the fantasy world of Albion for another adventure filled with magic, monsters, moral choices, and that wonderfully peculiar British sense of humor. The original Fable was… Read more

The cabin alarm goes off while you are halfway around Camp Crystal Lake. Children are in trouble, your counselor is already hurt, and another zombie has picked a wonderfully inconvenient moment to climb out of the ground. This is where Friday the 13th becomes interesting. Jason is frightening, but getting to him can be just as stressful. The 1989 NES game has spent decades absorbing jokes about its purple killer, awkward controls,… Read more

Seventeen years ago, Gearbox introduced us to a planet full of murderous psychopaths, terrifying monsters, more guns than anyone could possibly need, and one of the most annoying robots in video game history. And I couldn’t wait to get there. On 20 October 2009, Borderlands arrived in North America for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with the PC version following on 26 October. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games,… Read more

Dr. Eggman is a feminist. That's the assessment of the North American Sonic Heroes manual, which introduces him as “a romanticist, a feminist, and a self-professed gentleman.” Quite a character reference for a man whose usual response to a setback is to build a larger robot. The mustache says supervillain. The biography says he would like a moment to discuss how unfairly the mustache has been portrayed. The actual English biography from… Read more

Nintendo has announced the boldest, most innovative move in gaming history: charging you up to two hundred dollars for the privilege of replaying a pair of Wii games you already own. Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are officially coming to the Switch 2, and the bundle clocks in at a cool $150, edging toward $200 once you factor in collector’s editions, amiibo, and whatever random plastic accessory they force… Read more

An Innocent Gesture with a Dark Twist For more than two decades, fans of Super Mario World believed Mario was simply pointing forward when Yoshi stuck out his tongue. It looked playful and harmless. Mario gave the signal, Yoshi obeyed, and the duo worked together as partners. That illusion shattered in 2017, when Nintendo veteran Shigefumi Hino, the designer who created Yoshi, revealed that the original concept was very different. According to… Read more

Every Controller I Have Smashed In Rage, Ranked By The Quality Of The Meltdown There are difficult games, and then there are the ones that melt your brain until the only solution is to weaponize the nearest controller. We tell ourselves it’s just a game, but anyone who has stared down Alma in Ninja Gaiden Black, crawled across spikes in Celeste, or been betrayed by the blue shell in Mario Kart Wii… Read more

A Consistent Cutoff Leonardo DiCaprio has built a reputation for consistency in his personal life, and it appears that this rule now extends to his gaming habits. According to sources close to the Hollywood actor, he has officially stopped playing Final Fantasy IX after the game reached its 25th anniversary. Released in 2000 for the original PlayStation, Final Fantasy IX is widely regarded as one of the greatest entries in Square Enix’s… Read more

A Garage Sale Becomes a Legal Battlefield What began as a quiet Saturday morning in Saratoga, New York quickly escalated into what some neighbors now refer to as “the day Nintendo declared war on suburbia.” Local resident Robby Thompson held a simple garage sale in his driveway, offering old household items, clothing, and a box of retro video games. One of those games happened to be a sealed copy of Super Mario… Read more

Sketch Turner lands a punch, a bright yellow “Pow!!” bursts beside his fist, and the next fight waits on the other side of a comic panel. He has to climb or jump across the page to reach it. Comix Zone takes its premise seriously enough to make the gutters between the pictures part of the adventure. It is still a wonderful thing to watch. Sega's 1995 Genesis brawler has another reputation, though.… Read more

There is no hurry at first. Ecco swims through clear water, noses toward the other dolphins, and throws himself into the air because it is a lovely day and the game lets him. Then he jumps high enough. The sea begins to turn, his family disappears into the sky, and the pleasant little dolphin game becomes something else entirely. That opening has been catching people off guard since 1992. Ecco the Dolphin… Read more

At 2 a.m., Spencer Nilsen, David Young, and the singers of Pastiche were sitting in a circle on the studio floor, working out lyrics and harmonies for “Sonic Boom.” Nobody was complaining about the hour. Good ideas stayed, weaker ones went, and the song that would greet North American Sonic CD players was coming together between jokes. Nilsen arrived at Sega with years of recording experience and very little experience playing games.… Read more

Before 42Bastian Schick and Lars Baumstark had official Lynx documentation, they had a damaged handheld, a dumped copy of Gauntlet, and a homemade SRAM cartridge. Changing the game usually left it frozen. Then one modification worked, and they had a clue: part of each cartridge sector was escaping the checksum. 42Bastian wrote a disassembler, then a small 65C02 simulator, while Lars worked on the hardware. Their experiments grew into a Lynx with… Read more