News Roundup: May 11 - June 14

mossy_11 on Sunday, 15 June 2014. Posted in News

Sixtyforce lives! After many years of development and a trickle of releases, Gerrit Goossen's Nintendo 64 emulator has hit the big 1.0 milestone. Additions include improved controller configuration and support, a new timing mode, new low-level graphics processing, and more, while there are also a bunch of bugfixes. See the release notes for full details. And remember to pay for a licence if you'd like to see better Nintendo 64 emulation on the Mac.


Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator Dolphin has shed its 32-bit support — although that shouldn't have much of an impact on us Mac users. Development highlights from May include a wide-reaching fix for indirect texture coordinate computation, fixed external frame buffer width/height handling, improved DVD seek timing, and a change to frsqrte and fres calculations (they were too precise) that fixes scores of problems. The latest dev build at the time of writing is 4.0-1859, with the most recent stable release dating back to 4.0.2 from the start of the year.


Macintosh II A/UX emulator Shoebill has been updated to version 0.0.3. This release adds support for PRAM and full-screen mode, plus you can now restart/shutdown the virtual machine without it crashing, and Shoebill uses less CPU when A/UX's scheduler idles. Get it from the Shoebill GitHub page, and follow the discussion on E-Maculation.


Game Boy emulator DMGBoy got a major update in May. Version 2.0 adds Game Boy Color compatibility and a GUI debugger, as well as a nifty 3D model of the original Game Boy that you can play your games on (see video below). You can also now resize the window in real time, with no change in aspect ratio. On my Mac it was throwing up wxWidgets errors on run, but it seems to work just fine if you suppress these. Get it from the DMGBoy Google Code page.

Continue reading for more a series of minor emulator updates, including new Mednafen, Bizhawk, and Bochs builds.


Java-based PSP emulator JPCSP marches on with development, and the automated builds keep flooding in every week. Recent changes include improvements in ProOnline support, support for HD remaster games in the external software renderer, and some bug fixes. You can get builds via the JPCSP website or EmuNewz.


Open-source x86 virtualisation tool VirtualBox's latest maintenance release (4.3.12) fixes an occasional Guru Meditation, improves 3D support in Ubuntu 14.04, and a number of other things. Check out the changelog for details.


IA-32/x86 PC emulator Bochs has been updated to version 2.6.5. This release improves CPU emulation speed by 5-10%, implements new instructions and two new CPU models, fixes some critical CPU emulation correctness issues, adds built-in slirp support, and more. See the full list of changes here. You can download it from the SourceForge project page.


Arcade emulator Raine has been updated to version 0.63.5, with the only noted changes being sound command support in King of Fighters 2000, two new Neo Geo games, and a fix for a bug that occurred when loading a game from a bin/cue image with a sector size of 2352 — although those weren't the only changes, as pointed out on the Raine news board. Doesn't look like there's a Mac binary yet, though.


Multi-system emulator Mednafen has been updated to 0.9.35.1. This release improves the accuracy of the GPU framebuffer rectangle copy command on a PlayStation 1 and fixes a graphical glitch in Einhander. 0.9.35 hit at the end of May, bringing EEPROM emulation for iNES mapper 16, improvements to GPU emulation accuracy on the PS1, greatly improved WonderSwan noise sound channel emulation accuracy, and more. See the 0.9.35 and 0.9.35.1 announcement posts for more information. No signs of a Mac build yet, but you can play with the source code.


Mednafen frountend and launcer app NekoLauncher Mednafen now stands at version 0.9.34.1, to correspond with the latest Mednafen settings and options.


Xnp2, an NEC PC-9801 series emulator, has been updated with minor configuration changes. Learn more/get it here. (Japanese language warning.)


Multi-console emulator Bizhawk has been updated to version 1.7.0. Highlights include a new, faster NES core, Wonderswan support, and Game Boy/Game Boy Color support. See the BizHawk forum thread for more details.


Multi-console emulator/emulator framework OpenEmu has been updated to version 1.0.3. This release fixes issues with PS4 and Wii U controllers, improves grid view performance, fixes screenshot distortion, and more. See the release notes for the full list.


Got any news tips? Let us know on the forum.

Comments (2)

  • Thundar

    Thundar

    18 June 2014 at 18:42 |
    You forgot an OpenEmu update to 1.0.3
    • mossy_11

      mossy_11

      21 June 2014 at 08:52 |
      Fixed. Not sure how I forgot it — I even updated my OpenEmu install not long before I wrote the roundup.

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