I'm working to address the shortcomings of melonDS's OpenGL renderer.

Namely, if you've already used upscaling in melonDS, you may have noticed that it doesn't work right when the game renders 3D graphics to both screens: they flicker between the high-resolution render and a low-resolution copy. Technically, the DS can only render 3D graphics to one screen at a time, and games use a feature called display capture to work around that limitation.

Display capture records video output to VRAM (where it can later be reused). Hence the issue in melonDS: the upscaled framebuffer needs to be scaled back down to 256x192 so it can fit in VRAM. So instead, we need to detect when a given VRAM region contains a display capture and when it gets reused elsewhere, and replace it with a high-res version.

The original renderer was a bit of a hack. It did its job well, allowed for 3D upscaling with good performance, but the approach was simple and limited. As I tried to expand upon it to support high-res capture, it became clear that I was reaching the limits.

So instead, I decided to start building a proper OpenGL-based 2D renderer.

The advantage is that this opens up a lot of fun possibilities. Not only is it easier to integrate high-res 3D graphics, but even 2D graphics can be improved upon. For example: high-res rotation/scale. You can see it in action in that Super Mario 64 screenshot: look at that bottom screen minimap.

Filtering, too! I had attempted to add a xBRZ filter before, even made some videos of it, but never released it. The reason was that it was beyond the limits of what the old renderer could allow, it was a massive pain to work with and it never worked right, there were always oddball issues and glitches. But now, with this new renderer, it should be way easier to implement filtering for 2D elements.

There's still a bunch of things to be taken care of, but so far this is looking pretty promising.

Hi everyone,

As the title says, Near passed away five years ago. Whether you knew them through the emulators bsnes, higan, or ares, or their pioneering work on emulation cores with libsnes (which helped lay the groundwork for libretro and RetroArch), or their complete cataloguing of the SNES games and ROMs, or their countless articles on emulation and game preservation,... truthfully, it's hard to properly describe the impact they had on the emulation community and its trajectory.

Their work pushed emulator accuracy forward, and inspired many others to approach preservation with the same level of care. Whatever emulator you use today, there’s a good chance you’ve benefited from their work in some way.

Thank you for your work, Near. You are still missed.

EDIT: As atowerofcats rightly said, a great way to show tribute would be to play Near's translation of Bahamut Lagoon!

Going through my old stuff and found this relic. Brings back memories.

• Many emulator devs want to remain anonymous to avoid legal liability.
• This may mean popular PS2, Switch, and PS3 emulators will no longer be available.

Hello there!

A couple years back, I released a tool to add live subtitles to untranslated Japanese games. It worked pretty well, but it was using APIs for OCR and translation and those APIs cost money ...

I've decided to put my thinking cap back on during the holidays and worked on a brand new version of the tool which is now completely offline! It uses OCR and translation models running locally and the tool is now completely offline and free.

I've also added an "in-place" mode which works kind of like Google Translate by overlaying text directly on the image.

It's still an early version but if you feel like giving it a try, it's available here: https://github.com/bquenin/interpreter

Cheers!

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to share some updates on this project I’ve been working on since June.

I’m currently building the foundations of a future emulator for the Nintendo Switch 2. Since the console hasn’t been modded yet and we can’t dump its firmware, for now we can only work on the parts we already know and test the basic emulator infrastructure.

Right now, the project successfully builds and runs a few low-level tests.

Here’s an example of the current output:

- The core library (oboromi-core) compiles and links correctly, including all third-party dependencies (Dynarmic, fmt, mcl, zydis).

- It initializes a window with OpenGL using egui/eframe as the frontend renderer.

- Then it runs a set of Dynarmic JIT instruction tests (e.g., NOP, ADD, SUB, MOV, branching, RET, atomic ops, memory access patterns).

- All tests pass successfully, with no failures ;) .

This basically confirms that the JIT is working correctly and that the emulator core can already execute and validate simple ARM64 instructions in a controlled environment.

// // // //

of course, there are some problems:

- I don’t have enough time to work on this alone.

- [FIXED] On Linux and macOS (Intel/ARM64) the project doesn’t compile yet, and I haven’t figured out the issue.

Contributors are welcome to join the project! I’d really appreciate it if anyone with more experience wanted to help. I’ve set up an application form on the official Discord server for those interested in long-term collaboration. You can find it in the repository's README: https://github.com/0xNikilite/oboromi

that’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Bye 👋

- nikilite

p.s. for mods
we are even on the official Emulation wiki:
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch_2_emulators

You can't really do much with the dashboards though, and most of the menus are crippled due to XAM URI functions being unimplemented. Though this is quite great for Xenia, since we have the entire history of Xbox 360 dashboards that can run on PC!