emulation

97 Articles

PS1 logo on the top screen of a white DS

Running An Entire PS1 Emulator In A DS Cartridge

July 4, 2025 by 8 Comments

Gaming on a Nintendo DS can bring back great memories of long car trips from the past. But looking back, we remember wishing to play more than the DS could ever hope to handle. [fami] looks into the SuperCard DSTWO in her recent video, a solution to our past sorrows.

Able to play anything from the very games designed for the DS to emulated PS1 games, the DSTWO is more than capable of surpassing the abilities of the DS itself. More impressively, all games are run directly from the cartridge itself rather than on the DS’s hardware. While this emulated console within a handheld is impressive, it is far from simple to get running.

The DSTWO runs with an Ingenic JZ4732 as the CPU, completely different from any native architecture of the DS. Pair this with the unhelpful SDK made for the cartridge, and the aging hardware is held together by the community development behind any improvements. This is aided by the CPU similarities of another widely modded game console, the Dingoo A320.

When not having a fit, and after going through hours of troubleshooting, you might find the DSTWO running a game of SimCity 2000 or even Spyro the Dragon inside a DS. Even with the difficulties of use, the fact that these games run at all is impressive. If you want to try the DSTWO emulation yourself, check out the forums.

This is far from the only example of extreme care going into emulation. Here at Hackaday, we have covered similarly impressive projects such as this completely DIY handheld made for any retro game emulation you throw at it.

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Windows 95 On PlayStation 2 Works As Well As You Expected

June 29, 2025 by 21 Comments

When you hear “PS2” and “Windows 95,” you probably think someone forgot a slash and are talking about peripherals, but no — this hack is very much about the Sony PlayStation 2, the best-selling game console of all time. [MeraByte] walks us through the possibly ridiculous task of installing Windows 95 on the last hardware anyone at Microsoft would ever endorse in a video you can watch below.

Obviously, the MIPS-based Emotion Engine at the heart of the PS2 is not going to be able to handle x86 instructions Win95 is expecting, but that’s all solved by the magic of emulation. [MeraByte] is running a version of Bochs, an x86 emulator that has been built for PS/2 after trying and failing to install Windows (both 3.1 and 95) to an experimental DOSBox build.

As expected, it is not a smooth journey for [MeraByte], but the flailing about and troubleshooting make for entertaining viewing. Once loaded, it works surprisingly well, in that anything works at all. Unfortunately, neither the mouse nor Ultimate Doom 95 worked. We suppose that ultimately means that this hack fails since even Doom can run Doom. The mouse thing is also important, probably.

If you have a PlayStation 2, maybe skip Windows 95 and try running GoLang.  If you do have DOOM running on the PlayStation 2, send us a tip. There was never an official release for PS2, but after 26 years, someone must have done it by now. Continue reading “Windows 95 On PlayStation 2 Works As Well As You Expected” →

Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation

June 23, 2025 by 18 Comments

Unlike computer games, which smoothly and continuously evolved along with the hardware that powered them, console games have up until very recently been constrained by a generational style of development. Sure there were games that appeared on multiple platforms, and eventually newer consoles would feature backwards compatibility that allowed them to play select titles from previous generations of hardware. But in many cases, some of the best games ever made were stuck on the console they were designed for.

Now, for those following along as this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal. For gamers, it was simply a given that their favorite games from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) wouldn’t play on the Nintendo 64, any more than their Genesis games could run on their Sony PlayStation. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to see several game consoles clustered under the family TV. If you wanted to go back and play those older titles, all you had to do was switch video inputs.

But gaming, and indeed the entertainment world in general, has changed vastly over the last couple of decades. Telling somebody today that the only way they can experience The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is by dragging out some yellowed thirty-odd year old console from the attic is like telling them the only way they can see a movie is by going to the theater.

These days, the expectation is that entertainment comes to you, not the other way around — and it’s an assumption that’s unlikely to change as technology marches on. Just like our TV shows and movies now appear on whatever device is convenient to us at the time, modern gamers don’t want to be limited to their consoles, they also want to play games on their phones and VR headsets.

But that leaves us with a bit of a problem. There are some games which are too significant, either technically or culturally, to just leave in the digital dust. Like any other form of art, there are pieces that deserve to be preserved for future generations to see and experience.

For the select few games that are deemed worth the effort, decompilation promises to offer a sort of digital immortality. As several recent projects have shown, breaking a game down to its original source code can allow it to adapt to new systems and technologies for as long as the community wishes to keep them updated.

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DIY Handheld Is An Emulation Powerhouse

January 19, 2025 by 10 Comments

If you’re into handheld gaming, you’ve got a wide array of hardware options to choose from these days that are capable of running everything from console classics to full-fledged PC titles. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t enterprising gamers out there who are still building their own custom handhelds —  like the Retro Lite CM5.

For this project, [StonedEdge], [GinKage], and [notime2d8] set out to create a powerful enough handheld that could emulate games spanning the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and 3DS eras. Using a Radxa Rk3588s compute module as a base, the build navigates the design and construction of things like the carrier board, custom controllers, and the enclosure.

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The Most Inexpensive Apple Computer Possible

November 7, 2024 by 20 Comments

If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives if you want the Apple experience on the cheap. Buying their hardware a few years out of date of course is one way to avoid the bulk of the depreciation, but at the extreme end is this working Mac clone that cost just $14.

This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a “hat” for the Pi Pico from [Ron’s Computer Videos] lets the Pico’s remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There’s an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.

The emulation of the 80s-era Mac is available on a separate GitHub page for anyone wanting to take a look at that. A VGA monitor is not strictly required, but we do feel that displaying retro computer graphics on 4K OLEDs leaves a little something out of the experience of older machines like this, even if they are emulated. Although this Macintosh replica with a modern e-ink display does an excellent job of recreating the original monochrome displays of early Macs as well.

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PicoROM, A DIP-32 8-Bit ROM Emulator

November 5, 2024 by 13 Comments

As we all know, when developing software for any platform or simply hacking a bit of code to probe how something works, the ability to deploy code rapidly is a huge help. [Martin Donlon], aka [wickerwaka], is well known in retro gaming and arcade hardware reverse engineering circles and had the usual issues figuring out how an arcade CPU board worked while developing a MiSTer core. Some interesting ASICs needed quite a bit of poking, and changing the contents of socketed ERPOMs is a labour-intensive process. The solution was PicoROM, a nicely designed ROM emulator in a handy DIP-32 form factor.

As the title suggests, PicoROM is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040. It emulates an 8-bit ROM up to 2MBits in size with speeds up to 100ns. Since it uses the RP2040, USB connectivity is simple, enabling rapid uploading of new images to one (or more) PicoROMs in mere seconds. A vertically orientated USB-C connector allows multiple PicoROMs to be cabled to the host without interfering with neighbouring hardware. The firmware running on core 1 passes data from the internal 264K SRAM, using the PIO block as a bus interface to the target. A neat firmware feature is the addition of a mechanism to use a ROM region as a bidirectional control channel, which the software running on the target can use to communicate back to the host computer. This allows remote triggering of actions and the reporting of responses. Responses which may not be physically observable externally. [Martin] is using this feature extensively to help probe the functionality of some special function chips on the target boards, which is still a slow process but helped massively by reducing that critical software iteration time. The PCB was designed with KiCAD. The project files for which can be found here.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the RP2040 used for ROM emulation; here’s a pile of wires that does the same job. It just isn’t as pretty. Of course, if you really must use EPROMs, then you could give this sweet programmer a look over.

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An RP2040-based PC-FX Development Cartridge

November 2, 2024 by 3 Comments

[David Shadoff] has a clear soft spot for the NEC console systems and has been collecting many tools and data about them. When developing with these old systems, having a way to upload code quickly is a real bonus, hence the creation of the PC-FX Dev Cart. Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040, the custom cartridge PCB has everything needed to run software uploadable via a USB-C connection.

While the PC-FX is a CDROM-based system, it does sport a so-called FX-BMP or backup memory port cartridge slot, which games can use to save state and perform other special functions. Under certain circumstances, the PC-FX can be instructed to boot from this memory space, and this cartridge project is intended to enable this. Having a quick way to upload and execute code is very useful when exploring how these old systems work, developing new applications, or improving the accuracy of system emulators. The original FX-BMP cartridge has little more inside than a supercapacitor-backed SRAM and a custom interfacing IC, and of course, it would be quite a hassle to use this to develop custom code.

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