News

Daily news on emulation, console hacking and homebrew, ROM hacks, PC recompiles, indie developers, app stores and game programming, distilled from several sources and linked to the originals.

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster Gets New Story Trailer Ahead of 2027 Release 1 Nov 2026
  The new story trailer for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster reveals more about its Skaven assassin, alongside fresh glimpses of the upcoming stealth platformer's gameplay.
• 3dSen PC 2.0 overhauls the voxel NES emulator, with a new render mode, Run Ahead and native Apple Silicon 1 Nov 2026
  Geod Studio calls it its biggest overhaul yet: a new interface, smoother sculpted voxels, lower input delay and a better native build for Steam Deck.
• Super Metroid runs natively on the Game Boy Advance at 60fps, with no emulator involved 1 Nov 2026
  A new port compiles the SNES game's decompiled C for the GBA's ARM CPU. You build the cartridge from your own ROM, and a few effects had to be approximated.
• Goo Deer 2.0 adds four-player online co-op to its horror gas station 31 Oct 2026
  The free update has crews sharing one store and one wallet, adds a shoplifter and 24 new languages, and the game is 34% off on Steam until 14 November.
• Fake PS5 emulators on GitHub are stealing passwords, NordVPN warns 31 Oct 2026
  Lookalike repositories pose as AnyPS5 and KyTyPS5, switch off Defender's scanning for themselves, then delete their own tracks. Check who owns the page before you download.
• GXVK translates 3Dfx Glide to Vulkan on Linux, and its first alpha already runs Diablo II 31 Oct 2026
  A new DXVK fork gives Wine a way to run games written for 3Dfx Voodoo cards. It is an early, one-person prototype, and plenty still breaks.
• Save File 0 is a first-person horror game running on a real Game Boy Color 31 Oct 2026
  Ki10 Games revealed its native GBC raycaster on Halloween. Two saves share one office, one of them is wrong, and the thing inside it cannot be killed.
• Level-5's DS puzzle game Sloane & MacHale's Mystery Stories gets a fan translation into English 30 Oct 2026
  Jake F's free patch covers all 80 stories of the 2009 lateral-thinking game that never left Japan. It was made with AI help and has only been tested on melonDS so far.
• SGBC is an FPGA box in development that puts Game Boy, Color and Advance cartridges on a TV over HDMI 30 Oct 2026
  An independent project promises 1080p output, integer scaling, a link port, SNES controller support and cartridge-to-microSD backups. There is no price or date yet.
• Eternal Hunters takes its native SNES action RPG to Kickstarter, with a prototype demo 30 Oct 2026
  Ultima Team set its Kickstarter for 30 October and a public prototype demo alongside it, for a two-player action RPG built for the Super Nintendo itself.
• Outcast Tales, a tactical RPG about a badly matched wasteland crew, is out on Steam for free with no DLC planned 29 Oct 2026
  Hardlane Studio's Outcast Tales left its demo behind on 26 October as a full release on Windows and Linux. It costs nothing, and the team says there will be no DLC or supporter packs.
• Divine Frequency, the Doom-engine horror shooter delayed by its writer's death, is out in Early Access 29 Oct 2026
  Abraxaes has released Divine Frequency in Early Access on Steam for Windows, with two of its three chapters and about 70 per cent of the planned game. The team expects to stay in Early Access for around a year.
• Aloft Sails to PS5 Alongside Full Release in Early 2027 28 Oct 2026
  The cooperative survival game will leave Early Access alongside its full 1.0 release, bringing new content and stories to PS5 players in early 2027.
• Azahar drops support for Anbernic handhelds over the forks shown in RG DDS adverts 28 Oct 2026
  The 3DS emulator team says Anbernic promoted the RG DDS with AzaharPlus, an unofficial fork, so it will not investigate bugs from any Anbernic device.
• Luanti's ContentDB was breached between 22 and 26 October: change your password if you reused it 28 Oct 2026
  An attacker reached ContentDB's servers, emails, hashed passwords and uploads. The mod site for Luanti, formerly Minetest, is offline for a week or more.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Returning to its Roots? 27 Oct 2026
  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is performing well with critics, averaging out at an 86 so far on Metacritic.
• The Mortuary Assistant studio shadow drops Playable Archive, a free horror game from a cancelled project 27 Oct 2026
  DarkStone Digital and DreadXP released Playable Archive on Steam for free on 26 October. It is a 30 to 60 minute horror piece with no saves, polished up from a game that was meant to be the studio's next big release.
• Ecstatica and Ecstatica II, the 90s horror adventures built from ellipsoids, are back on Steam and GOG 27 Oct 2026
  SNEG has re-released Andrew Spencer's 1994 survival-horror adventure and its 1997 sequel for Windows, with switchable DOS, Windows 95 and high-resolution graphics modes, controller support and a CPU-only renderer.
• Sonic Hacking Contest 2026 is open, with 58 entries and voting until 1 November 26 Oct 2026
  The yearly fan contest for Sonic ROM hacks and mods has dropped its judged and unjudged labels and sorted entries into ROM Hack, Modern 2D and 3D. Voting runs until 8am BST on 1 November.
• Berserk Boy studio announces Waveling Island, a pixel-art creature collector with real-time battles 26 Oct 2026
  BerserkBoy Games' next game makes you a castaway who catches, trains and fights creatures called Wavelings, then builds a home with what you find. It is headed to PC and Xbox.
• Kid Icarus DX 1.0 finishes a full Game Boy Color colourisation of Of Myths and Monsters 25 Oct 2026
  Version 1.0 of pikamus's fan patch, released on 23 October 2026, colours every stage, enemy and fortress of Pit's 1991 Game Boy game and adds optional NES music and a title screen Options menu.
• Bottles creator Mirko Brombin shows Raven, a way to run Windows programs on Linux without Wine 25 Oct 2026
  Raven runs a Windows program's code in a supervised process and answers its system calls from a runtime outside it. It is MIT licensed, very early, and its first benchmarks used software rendering only.
• GB Maker and GBC Maker can export HTML5, Windows and Linux builds with no branding or royalties 25 Oct 2026
  ArturDuleba's Game Boy and Game Boy Color creation tools gained browser, EXE and AppImage exports on 24 October 2026, alongside the ROM export they already had. Makers keep full rights to sell what they build.
• Linux 7.4 gets a driver for Nintendo Switch 2 controllers, written for Valve 24 Oct 2026
  The Linux 7.4 HID merge adds a first driver for the Joy-Con 2, Pro Controller 2 and GameCube controllers for Switch 2, written by Vicki Pfau on behalf of Valve. Bluetooth pairing comes later.
• Factorio 2.1 goes stable with mixed rockets, Space Age without Quality and a native ARM64 Linux build 24 Oct 2026
  Wube Software marked Factorio 2.1 stable on 23 October, in the week Space Age turned two. It is a polish update, and it brings the game natively to ARM64 Linux, Steam Frame included.
• Gaming World is easier to use with a keyboard or a screen reader now, and here are the numbers 24 Oct 2026
  Critical accessibility problems on Gaming World went from 792 to 9. A skip link, labelled controls, visible focus and readable colours, plus what is still wrong.
• Capcom says 11.7 million Capcom ID records were accessed in a breach, and 196 passwords were changed 23 Oct 2026
  Capcom detected the intrusion on 19 October. Email addresses and login data were taken, 196 accounts had their passwords changed, and 19 Japanese store accounts exposed home addresses.
• Fortnite is back on the App Store in Australia after a court orders Apple to open up iOS 23 Oct 2026
  Fortnite is back on Australian iPhones after Justice Jonathan Beach on 22 October ordered Apple to allow rival app stores and payments there by March 2027. Apple says it will appeal.
• Dead or Alive 3 now has two native PC recompilations, and Android and Switch ports built on one of them 23 Oct 2026
  Two separate projects turned Tecmo's 2001 Xbox fighter into native PC code this month, and one of them already has an Android alpha and a Switch port in progress.
• GameMaker drops licence fee for its next-generation runtime from 2027 23 Oct 2026
  GameMaker will let developers sell commercial games made with its new GMRT runtime without buying a Professional licence from January 2027, as it competes with Unity, Unreal and Godot.
• What has changed on Gaming World since we moved servers 23 Oct 2026
  A new homepage, a Discord server, a separate corner for the owner's own projects and a list of smaller fixes, plus the Lighthouse numbers from before and after, including the one that went down.
• Mesa patch lets ageing AMD Polaris GPUs keep up with newer Steam Play games 23 Oct 2026
  A one-line Mesa RADV change turns on Vulkan FP16 support by default for AMD's GCN 3 and 4 GPUs, fixing broken effects in newer Windows games run through Steam Play.
• A wonderful cat life lets you play its black cat Rodin for free, today only 23 Oct 2026
  manekineco games put a free browser short about Rodin as a kitten on itch.io and UnityRoom for 22 and 23 October only. It takes three to five minutes and needs no account.
• Come and hang out with us on the Gaming World Discord 22 Oct 2026
  The server made the move with the rest of the site and is up and running. New reviews, previews, features and news land there on their own, and the moderators are around. Here is how to get in.
• Fan patch gives Sega Saturn’s Pocket Fighter its missing English script 22 Oct 2026
  A new romhack translates the Japan-only Saturn version of Capcom’s Pocket Fighter into English, rebuilding it as the Western release it never got.
• Gaming World has moved house, and the new place is a lot bigger 22 Oct 2026
  On 21 October the whole site packed up in Finland and moved to a far more powerful machine in New Jersey. It took about two minutes, and most of you are now a lot closer to us.
• Next Fest Twitch data shows 382 games took 95% of stream hours 22 Oct 2026
  A Twitch count from Steam Next Fest finds that a small fraction of demos absorbed almost all viewing time, while hundreds of others got a streamer or two at most.
• DREADMOOR, a first-person fishing game set in a flooded world, enters Early Access on 9 November at $19.99 22 Oct 2026
  Dream Dock's trawler game, where you fish, scavenge and fight mutated creatures across the Submerged Lands, launches in Early Access with one major region and a 6 to 12 month plan. A demo is out now.
• Software jailbreak reportedly breaks open Switch 2 firmware 23.0.1 22 Oct 2026
  A developer says they have built the first public software-only jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2, opening the door to homebrew, game modding and save dumping via a flaw in the Switch 1's SmileBASIC.
• Retroid puts mainline Linux 7.3 kernels for the Pocket 6, Pocket Nova and Pocket Duo on GitHub 22 Oct 2026
  Kernel, audio topology and UCM branches bring the three handhelds up on Linux 7.3 with screens, controls, Wi-Fi, GPU and audio working. It is a base for firmware builders, not an OS to flash.
• Songbird Productions announces 360-degree shmup for the Atari Jaguar in 2027 21 Oct 2026
  Songbird Productions has unveiled Star Streak, an Asteroids-style arcade shooter for the 32-bit Atari Jaguar, due in 2027.
• Xbox puts a price on cloud gaming by the hour: 10 hours for $3.99 in an Insider test 21 Oct 2026
  Microsoft started selling cloud playtime packs to Xbox Insiders without Game Pass on 21 October, from 24 to 40 cents an hour, ahead of monthly Game Pass streaming caps in November.
• Namco's Ace Driver Victory Lap arcade racer finally reaches consoles 21 Oct 2026
  Hamster's Arcade Archives line brings Namco's 1996 F1 racer Ace Driver Victory Lap to Switch, Switch 2, PS5, PS4 and Xbox Series, nearly three decades after it left arcades.
• EmulatorJS Arcade 1.1.0 adds online multiplayer to a browser emulator, on desktop and Android 21 Oct 2026
  A community-built front end wraps the browser-based EmulatorJS project into a desktop and Android app, adding online co-op across 20-plus retro systems.
• Gaming World has a Discord server now 21 Oct 2026
  Reviews, previews, news and features land there as they go live, writers get their own desk, and studios get a lounge. Here is what is in it and how to join.
• AYN opens pre-orders for the Odin 3 Portal, a $399 Android handheld 21 Oct 2026
  AYN's next Android handheld, the Odin 3 Portal, goes up for pre-order on 22 October with a Snapdragon-adjacent Dragonwing Q8 chip, a 9,000mAh battery and prices from $399.
• EA is closing BioWare after more than 30 years, and the next Mass Effect is cancelled 21 Oct 2026
  BioWare announced its own closure on 21 October. Bloomberg reports EA is cutting about 400 jobs, roughly 50 of them at the studio, and dropping a Sims game too.
• Kronos 2.8.0 fixes over 100 Saturn games and adds a graphics editor 21 Oct 2026
  A new Kronos release repairs more than 100 Sega Saturn games, adds controller and filter support, and brings ST-V arcade emulation in line with MAME.
• AISLPC's Pocket AIS: a 4:3 handheld with Hall-effect triggers and a Rocknix-based OS for $169.99 21 Oct 2026
  Hong Kong brand AISLPC's Pocket AIS pairs a 4.5-inch 1024x768 screen with a Rockchip RK3562, Wi-Fi 6, an automatic fan and Ais OS, its own system built on Rocknix. It costs $169.99 or €145.95.
• Ritchie Torres announces the Power to the Players Act so a bought game stays owned 20 Oct 2026
  The New York congressman wants the FTC to write rules making a game purchase ownership rather than a licence, with an offline mode required before servers close. It has not been formally introduced yet.

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