New, original (and tested on hardware) software for arcade PCBs is always good to see.

Can we just admit that Google is no longer fit for purpose? You've got AI Hallucinations as the primary result, often based on pages full of AI Hallucinations. The ability to search is diabolically bad. It's worse than its competitors (Yahoo etc.) were when it wiped them out.

new MAME is out, a few bits and pieces from me in this one, but it's been a quieter month. Worth updating over 0.278 though as some bugs in the new sound system were ironed out at the very least.

Sure, it should only apply to online components if that happens, but many games have passive online parts, or already require you to 'agree' to an EULA covering online parts, even if you play entirely offline. I can see it being put on boot in any game with an online component.

I have a feeling this 3rd party age verification stuff will become a threat to proper physical games too, requiring online age verification before anything will play. @DoesItPlay1 is going to end up with a lot more 'no' entries in their database if that comes to be.

We're going to end up using generative AI primarily to create our own virtual faces for virtual camera devices to trick the ID verification sites into thinking that's actually us aren't we?.

It's horrible juddery frameskippy slowdown too, with input lag, not what you want in a shmup at all.

Sonic Wings Reunion. Played on Switch, looks a bit like a HD Dreamcast game. Drops to 20fps on some bosses even on easy mode with not all that much on screen. Yep, it's another Unity based game with unexplainably abysmal performance as soon as things get even slightly busy.

Video (spoiler, it's terrible).

Annotated PCB with pinout

The N-Vision Spider-Man 2 plug and play was also dumped. This is a motion control thing but it looks like the motions just map to button presses

I got an 'F1 game' handheld and an 'F5 game' handheld. Both seem to be running the same software, although I have a feeling this software was originally designed for the F1 unit, which is actually shaped like a car. Bit disappointing as I thought the F5 would be different.

If I was designing a CPU I'd encode NOP as 0xD0FA.(and this is why I'm not designing CPUs).

pinout (assuming it's readable on Twitter)

more shots

TeamEurope figured out the ROM pinout for this one @RockmanSSR Still need to add controls etc. but it runs attract demo. It's a SunPlus SPG2xx

regular Flash ROM and glob

(it does say Pokemon on the case, so yeah).

I think this is another Pokemon toy?

If a 'party game' has DLC upsell (DLC locked contents, pop-up asking you to buy extra content etc.) then it's not coming out at a party because all that does is create conflict when people select those options. It's sad how many party games do this, and are relegated to unplayed.