Back in 1996, PC Gamer gave Renegade II: Return to Jacob’s Star 71% … and then the game never came out.

I wrote about the tiniest article about this cancelled DOS space sim, the one mission you can still play in your browser, and the search for a more complete copy. I keep wondering what happened to the build the magazine reviewed. If anyone remembers seeing a preview or playing a demo back then, I’d love to hear about it! As would so many others.

There’s dozens of us!

So glad I could help!

I hope you enjoy sinking back into it after such a long time :)

Today’s NeoCities article is just little feature about fheroes2, the free, open-source project rebuilding the engine behind Heroes of Might and Magic II.

Its latest update adds optional health bars, smarter opponents and gentler behaviour on easier difficulties, but I liked the smaller things the community has spent years fixing, from missing pieces of town artwork to clearer battle information.

My article also touches a little on how some contributors got involved and how this 1996 PC game has found its way onto Android, Vita and Switch. Thought it might interest anyone who enjoys seeing old games cared for, or fancies exploring Heroes II for the first time!

*miss 48K!

Thanks!

These kind of oddball gaming stories are what keep me sane to write, so this is a lovely comment to read :)

Just a little article about a odd (but fun) emulation project. Supratim Sanyal has got 18 Nintendo Game & Watch games, including Donkey Kong and Oil Panic, running on a ZX Spectrum 48K.

The Spectrum emulates the chip inside the handhelds, so it’s running the original game code while drawing those familiar LCD segments on a TV. My favorite bit of it is that Sanyal also made a new Game & Watch-style maze game called Munchy, which you can try without supplying any Nintendo ROMs (well, if you have the admittedly niche hardware that is)

Thats really kind of you to say!

I know for a fact that Russ will cover streaming PC games in his review. He was at a wedding over the weekend and is only just filming his impressions video now, so his full review is still a little ways off. But we’ve chatted about it, he’ll be reviewing that very thing.

I’ve just published my not-quite-a-review, not-quite-an-impressions-piece, but something closer to a good old-fashioned feature article about the AYN Odin 3 Portal, which is a retro handheld designed to emulate old games (but can also emulate PC games very well). I wanted to approach this one a little differently from your typical handheld review.

I interviewed several developers behind the software people are most likely to use on hardware this powerful, including jpolo (ARMSX3), Camille LaVey (Eden), Utkarsh (GameNative) and Json (DroidDeck). Their insights into the Dragonwing Q8, the challenges of modern emulation and where things are heading form a big part of the article, alongside my own testing of everything from PS2 and GameCube to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC gaming.

It’s also a rather long read, much closer to those enormous feature articles gaming websites used to publish years ago. I’ve always loved that sort of writing, and I suspect it’ll appeal to a certain kind of retro gaming enthusiast who enjoys digging into the technology and the people behind it. Or I hope so, anyway. It is a long read.

As for the Portal itself? I think it’s about as close to the perfect larger Android gaming handheld as you can get, provided you can afford it. The OLED is gorgeous, the controls are wonderful, performance is extraordinary, and that infamous high-pitched fan whine from the Odin 3 is completely gone. Not everything runs perfectly, especially some demanding PS3 games, but gaming on this thing has been an absolute pleasure.

Hope you enjoy the read!

I’ve been chatting with Lazorne, IceNine, Xargon and Lahrs from the RetroDECK team again, and I’ve put together a fairly lengthy feature about their upcoming 0.11.0 update, which is without a doubt their biggest yet (although I do say that each time!).

For anyone unfamiliar with it, RetroDECK is a self-contained retro gaming platform for the Steam Deck and other Linux devices. It brings emulators, game engines and other tools together into one convenient package, taking so much of the hassle out of installing, configuring and maintaining everything. It has always been my recommendation for the Steam Deck, though obviously it isn’t locked to just the Deck.

Version 0.11.0 is a pretty enormous step forward. The team has announced 23 new components, including Xbox 360 emulation through Xenia Edge, support for lesser-known computers such as the FM Towns and SAM Coupé, classic game engines, interactive fiction through Gargoyle, and even Mudlet for accessing old text-based multiplayer worlds. There’s also a substantial overhaul of RetroDECK’s underlying architecture, making it easier for the devs to integrate and maintain all these different components, while keeping things straightforward for users.

But what I found most interesting while interviewing the team was just how much of this work is driven by their personal experiences and passion for preservation. We talked about old gaming communities that are somehow still alive, forgotten hardware, the importance of making obscure systems accessible, and even Xargon’s previously unannounced project to preserve and emulate the 2-XL talking robot from the 1970s.

I think projects like RetroDECK have an increasingly important role to play in game preservation. It’s not just about making old games playable on modern hardware, but helping people discover systems, communities and experiences they might never have known existed. And the easier those things are to access, the better their chances of finding new audiences.

It’s a long read, admittedly, but I really wanted to give the developers room to tell their stories rather than simply run through a list of new features. Hope someone here enjoys this :)

Oops, I might have messed up the display icon for the article, I’ve since fixed it, but what you’re seeing here is the thumbnail for Xanadu, not Shining Wind X!. This is a great example of me not being an expert at websites and still learning how to use NeoCities! Fixed now though :)

This morning’s little article is about Shining Wind X, a kinda obscure Sega RPG from 2008 that was released exclusively for Japanese mobile phones and has recently been recovered by preservationist YuviApp. It’s a follow-up to the PS2 game Shining Wind, but takes a different angle: turn-based tactical combat, and it’s one of those games I think plenty of Sega fans might never have known existed.

What I find super interesting is how much gaming history is effectively trapped in Japan’s oddball old mobile phone ecosystem. There were some pretty ambitious games released for these devices, like spin-offs from major franchises, and many of them became inaccessible when the original download services shut down.

I tend to think about preservation in terms of old cartridges and discs, but there’s this entire library of mobile games that could easily disappear without people putting in the effort to recover them. I thought this was a lovely little example of why that work matters, and really enjoyed learning more about it!

This is for my NeoCities site experiment, not my usual site!

For anyone unfamiliar with it, DroidDeck is a relatively new, open-source Android application that lets you run Valve’s actual Steam client, along with PC games from your Steam library, on supported Android phones and handhelds. Rather than just launching individual Windows games through something like Winlator, it brings much of the familiar Steam Deck experience to Android, including Steam’s interface, Proton compatibility, controller integration and more. It does all this without needing to root your device or replace Android with another operating system. It’s still experimental, but the progress has been pretty amazing so far.

So I’ve been chatting with the people behind DroidDeck over the last couple of weeks, and I’ve finally put together what turned into a pretty lengthy feature about the project, its history, and the people making it happen.

I interviewed The412Banner, Max, xXJSONDeruloXx, Kimchi and Astro Sky, digging into everything from their earliest experiences with gaming and development to how their separate experiments with Linux, Gamescope and Steam eventually came together. What started as a way of getting the actual Steam client running on Android has grown into something way more ambitious, and I really wanted to tell the story of how that happened rather than just write another overview of what the software can do.

We also got into the technical challenges, the ridiculous pace of development (it updated and changed a few times while I was writing this!), their approach to AI-assisted coding and automated testing, the importance of open source, and where they hope to take DroidDeck in the future. There are some personal stories in there too, particularly about the early breakthroughs and the excitement of finally seeing things work. It’s a long read, admittedly, but I wanted to give everyone involved the space to tell their side of the story. I’m really grateful to all five for taking the time to answer my many, many questions, and I hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about the people behind a project that’s quickly become one of the more interesting developments in Android handheld gaming!

And just to be transparent, since I know it’s a subject people have strong feelings about, DroidDeck does make use of AI-assisted development.

We discuss that openly in the article, including how the developers use AI tools, automated testing and code reviews as part of their workflow.

I hope you still enjoyed the read, even if it ended up being completely different to what your pre-caffeine brain saw!!!

Some of the ports we’re seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I’ve definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of ‘port-slop’, with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I’m not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we’re reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I’ve been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

I’ve been looking into a lovely little preservation project involving EverQuest Online Adventures, the PlayStation 2 MMORPG that shut down way back in 2012.

Developer Ahmad Hassan (B-Ted) has been working on something called EQAI: an effort to bring the game’s original 2003 character models back into its later Frontiers version. It turns out this is way more complicated than simply swapping a few files, involving all sorts of reverse engineering of the PS2’s graphics and memory systems.

It’s still a work in progress, but I find something really appealing about people putting this much time and effort into preserving the little details of online worlds that disappeared years ago. So I’ve written a short piece about the project and the wider community working to keep this forgotten corner of gaming history alive :)

Absolutely!

But it really is still sad to see it confirmed

Really sad to hear that BioWare is closing its doors after 31 years. I can’t say it’s entirely surprising given how difficult the last decade has been for the studio, but it’s still a shame to see another enormously influential name disappear from the industry. This was the developer behind Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, among so many others. What an incredible run of games they had :(

I’ve written a little piece looking back at BioWare’s history, some of my favorite games from their glory days, and how depressing it’s becoming to see so many studios shutting down. Whatever you think of BioWare’s more recent output, I think gaming is a little poorer without them.

Clearly the news has been covered and re-covered, so this is just a brief look over their work.

Not that you need to, but if you ever want a wonderfully sleek, small and metal vertical handheld, not unlike the Miyoo Mini (I own a V2 Mini myself), look into the TRIMUI Brick Hammer!

There’s a recomp of Wind Waker HD for Wii U, but I tried the same (regular version) game in Cemu and it played beautifully!

But the emulator itself is quite immature compared to the other systems in emulation, so it is very much a game-by-game basis

I think to me my dream was the Duo bit with the in-line triggers. At least before I got to using it. After all of this is said and done, the Duo is just a beautiful handheld.

Duo Plus or Duo, I really don’t think you’ll be disappointed for the price this runs at.

The best part for you is that the 3DS commands a good price these days!

Well here’s my Retroid Pocket Duo review! Retroid, the company, has released their higher-end Android-running retro handheld. AMOLED displays in a dual-screen form factor which can handle emulating Nintendo DS and 3DS games, and some more above that.

As part of it, I’ve been chatting with the developers behind Eden, Eden Duo, SeedlessDS and Cocoon about their work, the challenges of dual-screen gaming on Android, and where they see things going from here. I’ve incorporated their perspectives throughout the review, alongside my usual hands-on testing and thoughts about the hardware itself.

I’ve also spent plenty of time testing everything from Nintendo DS and 3DS through to PSP, GameCube, PS2, Switch and PC gaming, seeing where the Duo does well and where the limitations start becoming apparent. There are some fun things I found when reviewing, and a few things I’d still change. Above all, though, Retroid has once again managed to make a handheld that feels nicely playful (something I love about their handhelds), and ‘Nintendo-like’, and I’ve had an absolute blast reviewing it.

As ever, this is a written article (and a very long one at that!), so if you’re a fan of older gaming-style sites and features that aren’t videos, this might be your kind of read. Hope some of you enjoy this!