New ROM hacks!
- The Saturn version of Castlevania: Sympyhony of the Night was recently fan translated to English! It also added a bunch of bug fixes. You can find this pre-patched in the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Downloads. I also added 30 screenshots from it.
- I added the awesome and new Chrono Trigger+ hack! This adds a ton of cut content back into the game. It allows access to previously unexplorable areas, fixes bugs, and offers some options to remove the linearity from the game. There are more Easter eggs and quality of life improvements. More stuff carries over like names, money, fair prizes, and cats. Additionally, the 1999 era is fully explorable, offering tons of stuff to do.
- Have you ever felt like some parts of Secret of Mana were a little rushed? Well, the new and exciting Secret of Mana Plus hack intends to correct it by adding new content to the original game. This first version of the hack is dedicated to expanding the Moon, Gold, and Wind Palaces. These new quests offer new monsters, new bosses, new cutscenes, and secrets.
Updates to Anime Classics:
- Last year, I was forced to take down all of my retro anime videos that I had up for streaming :( In their place, I added links to Internet Archive and Nyaa. To help everyone navigate getting anime from those sites, I typed up a detailed help article: How to watch or download anime (for free!). I also covered how to use torrents, play anime with VLC, set up a local streaming server, and use video converters. I poured love into this article; it took me a couple of weeks to type it up and perfect it.
- I captured Bluray quality screenshots from Record of the Lodoss War and Ninja Scroll. Additionally, I re-captured the Chrono Trigger shots and Final Fantasy 7 Last Order shots with the newer, better quality videos.
I'm sure you heard about Nintendo suing the top Switch emulator, Yuzu. I made some emulator updates per the news:
- I updated the help article, Recommended Video Game Emulators for Windows. With Yuzu gone, Ryujinx is now the #1 Switch emulator. And with Citra gone, the second-best emulator, Panda3DS, is now #1 for 3DS. FYI, Citra was by the same team behind Yuzu.
- The authors of “DraStic DS” on Android (the #1 DS emulator) got nervous. They recently changed DraStic DS from being a pay emulator to 100% free. They want to avoid Nintendo's Eye of Sauron. However, they added they plan to eventually remove it from the Play Store. Download it now while it's still up! My Intro to Android emulation article and Android emulators page were updated per the news.
And other site updates:
- I updated the Final Fantasy Tactics Official Art page with HUNDREDS of new art pictures. This consists of art for characters, job classes, summon Espers, and monsters. I also added War of the Lions posters, in-game battle maps, store shots, in-game scenes, and more!
- It's unfortunate that Square Enix made me take down their roms in 2022. However, Internet Archive has been a saving grace for me as an alternative to link people to finding their roms. Even better, I recently found that they put up massive archives of pre-patched ROMs. Here's one of them: SNES SFC RPG pack. I added links to this page in my Final Fantasy 5, Seiken Densetsu 3, Live A Live, and Front Mission pages (those are all the pre-patched fan translated roms they made me take down).
- I found out that 'old' TurboGrafx16/PC Engine roms don't work with modern emulators. Hence, I updated all of my TG16/PCE roms with modern versions in RPG Lunch Break. As a bonus, I added the English pre-patched version of “Die Hard.”