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According to YouTuber Geekerwan, Qualcomm plans to enhance its official GPU drivers to better support PC game emulation on Android devices. Testing on a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 phone reportedly showed Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong running properly in DirectX12 mode via a translation layer, and Qualcomm is said to be considering native DirectX12 driver support as well.
A developer has made Apple's abandoned Copland operating system runnable inside a web browser, using an enhanced version of the DingusPPC PowerMac emulator compiled to WebAssembly. The build shown is the final D11E4 version, and users can boot it, interact with its desktop, and launch included applications like GXSlidemaster and Eric's Solitaire directly from a webpage.
Developers of the open-source PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 identified a workaround for a bug in Nvidia's GPU drivers that was limiting performance. Testing on Red Dead Redemption's Blackwater boat scene showed frame rate gains of 20% on an RTX 3080 setup and 25% on an RTX 5090 setup, while Gran Turismo 5 saw up to 37% faster performance and lower VRAM usage. AMD GPUs were unaffected, suggesting the issue is specific to Nvidia's drivers.
FunnyPlaying has released the FPGB Mini, a handheld barely bigger than a Game Boy cartridge that uses FPGA hardware to emulate Game Boy games with near-perfect accuracy. It supports both physical cartridges and ROMs via microSD, features a 2.98-inch 800x720 IPS screen, and runs on an 1800 mAh battery for four to six hours of play. The standard price is $89, though early units sold for $69.
A technical deep dive explains why translating x86 software to run on ARM chips runs into a persistent obstacle: x86's strict Total Store Ordering (TSO) memory model clashes with ARM's much more relaxed memory consistency rules. The piece walks through why this mismatch affects essentially every emulated multi-threaded application and outlines the various workarounds engineers use, noting some cases where no clean fix exists.
Suyu, a successor to the Yuzu emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence, released what its developers called a final version featuring a new recompiler mode that translates Switch game code directly into native x86-64 binaries for faster PC performance. Days after the team archived the project's repository and halted development, a new group forked the code under a fresh version scheme to keep the emulator alive. Separately, another developer built Wine-NX, a tool that runs older Windows PC games on Switch hardware.
Volunteer programmers have completed a 100% decompilation of Super Smash Bros Melee, according to the decomp.dev database, meaning the GameCube game's original code has been fully reverse-engineered. It joins other decompiled titles like Twilight Princess, Pikmin, and Animal Crossing, giving developers a legal path to build unofficial ports without using Nintendo's copyrighted code.
A comparison of the two leading retro emulators finds that Dolphin, which handles GameCube games, is generally considered more accurate and easier to run than PCSX2, the PS2 emulator, despite PCSX2 covering a slightly larger percentage of its console's library. Both are free, open-source tools available on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Dolphin also supporting Android, and neither requires top-end graphics hardware to run games at 4K/60fps.
Developers using the KytyPS5 emulator have gotten the PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V to run on PC at 40 to 60 frames per second, though the game crashes shortly after the opening mission when police appear. The demo ran on a high-end PC with a Ryzen 7 9950X3D CPU and RX 7900 XT GPU, marking a major leap from just weeks earlier when the game wouldn't even pass its splash screen.
The developer behind the MartyPC emulator commissioned a 5.6-gigapixel die photograph of an NEC V20 CPU (fabricated by second-source manufacturer Sharp) to extract its microcode. The goal is to replace MartyPC's existing V20 emulation core, which was essentially a modified 8088 core rather than a true cycle-accurate model, with one based on the chip's actual internal logic.
Programmer John Carmack raised a question about whether children who start coding early with tools like Scratch go on to have fulfilling technical careers. He described his own approach with his child, using a Unix-like emulated system as a gatekeeper, requiring the child to complete challenges to unlock rewards such as a favorite music video. Carmack mentioned using a Raspberry Pi-based keyboard computer connected to his TV with low latency and his own SSH keys as part of this setup.
AYN announced via Discord that it will increase prices across all three configurations of its Odin 3 Android gaming handheld beginning September 1. The base 8GB/128GB model rises from $349 to $369, the 12GB/256GB Pro goes from $449 to $469, and the 16GB/512GB Max climbs from $499 to $529. This marks the third price increase for the device in 2025, following hikes in March and June.