Wonder what we've been up to since our reboot in 2022? Here's a wild mix of improvements, from compatibility fixes to major performance uplifts and more!
2023-07-18 11:17:32 +0000 UTC View PostSummer is here, and you probably noticed it: It's been fairly silent around Mikage on social media lately (other than my rants about hobbyist lawyers and actual lawyers). The truth is it's too nice outside to spend all day coding at home, so instead I'm taking some refreshing time off to power up energ...
2023-05-30 17:35:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks!
Just a quick heads up: In a few hours, a new gameplay video showing off VVVVVV will go live on Mikage's YouTube channel.
The twist: Audio support! (Yes, finally 😊)
Premiere will begin at 8:30 pm CET if you want to join and follow live chat, otherwise of course you can still catch up later.
That's all! Have a nice week and until next time 😉
2022-11-08 13:53:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Update August 2022: Alpha releases are no longer available. The text below is for historical reference, only.
You can now play Super Mario 3D Land on Android! I added lots of updates this month specifically for this game (most of which luckily will benefit other titles, too), as you'll have seen in the gameplay video earlier this month. As usual, the new alpha release is available for patrons in...
2020-04-23 12:24:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes! You're reading that right: Super Mario 3D Land is now (functionally) playable on Android via Mikage :)
I'll publish a write-up of this exciting development progress next week, and I'll also push the next alpha release soon so you can try the game out for yourself.
Until then, stay safe!
2020-04-18 16:23:01 +0000 UTC View Post
We have another update in store, this time with major optimization work going on and of course the obligatory compatibility improvements. Let's dive right in!
2020-03-26 12:46:45 +0000 UTC View Post
The big update is finally done - readily available from the download area for patrons!
You can read the full list of changes here. Notably this includes an early prototype of the new CPU JIT, but furthermore:
Took a while, but the second Progress Report is out now!
Note that if you've been following the Development Updates closely, most of it won't be new to you. But if you were looking for a more condensed and high-level overview of what has happened since August, that's it.
As usual, thanks for your support, and let's make 2020 a good one :)
2020-02-01 15:50:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks!
First of all - happy new year! Mikage has kicked off 2020 with some really cool progress, but more on that later this month ;)
As for today, I figured it's time for another video, and I already teased Cave Story 3D back in Development Update 7 so why not? Here you can see me playing the game (well, trying to) to show off what's now possible with December's emulation fixes.
Hi folks!
I've got an announcement to make - Development Updates will be public from now on, telling you about all the latest progress and advances we make on 3DS emulation!
What's a Development Update? It's sort of a small Progress Report - not focusing on the big picture, but instead giving brief updates on what happened over the last couple of weeks: New games that started running, interesting bugs that were fixed, and other tasks involved with emulator development.
I've ...
2019-12-15 14:44:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Another month, another update - let's see what December had in it for us :)
The big news comes first: Mikage runs another game, Cave Story 3D! Turns out after a couple of small additions and the fixes mentioned later, this game pretty much just worked out of the box. And for what it's worth, both the original Cave Story and Cave Story 3D are supported ;)
I've a...
2019-12-11 19:45:08 +0000 UTC View Post
As a followup to yesterday's Development Update, I recorded some gameplay footage to show off in more detail how great Nano Assault already runs in Mikage.
Like I mentioned before, I'm super happy to have a game with such complex graphics work in the emulator already. Hope you enjoy :)
After the long-winded build up over the last months, we're finally seeing some work on the emulator core itself again. Lo and behold, there's progress on support for more games, and a new alpha release on the horizon!
I already teased Bravely Default back in July when it started booting. With the upcoming alpha release, it wi...
2019-11-19 15:51:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Back when we started development on Citra, all graphics emulation was done using a software renderer: All rendering was done purely on the host CPU and hence is incredibly slow, since it doesn't even attempt to use graphics acceleration. The reason for that was simple: Debugging rendering code on the GPU is notoriously difficult, so back when the 3DS hardware wasn't understood well, the software renderer was ideal for quick anal...
2019-10-31 08:38:52 +0000 UTC View Post
... or well, on YouTube, but who still watches TV anyway :)
I went to the CppCon conference in Denver last month to give a public talk on blobify, one of Mikage's building blocks. Blobify solves the central emulation problem of data deserialization: Whenever a running game "talks" to the emulated hardware, what Mikage sees is a sequence of raw bytes (i.e. lots of 0s and 1s). This happens for example when decod...
2019-10-16 17:54:38 +0000 UTC View Posttl;dr: Patrons won't be charged in September. Mikage development continues, but no alpha build will be released next month.
Since Mikage's announcement on 1 July, a lot of progress has been made. About 70 source code changes resulted in many games starting to draw graphics, and those that didn't got much closer to it. As Alex (the author of the PS4 emulator Orbital) put it: "damn i wish i ...
2019-08-31 09:56:47 +0000 UTC View PostIt's time for a quick update on development progress again! But first, let me announce I'll be moving away from a weekly update cycle from now on. I became clear that a weekly schedule pushes development too much towards short-term progress that don't pay off well in the long run and hence keeps me from doing the more fundamental work that's required for the larger picture. From now on, Development Updates will be released on an irregular schedule, i.e. whenever meaningful progress h...
2019-08-31 09:12:26 +0000 UTC View Post
You might have come across an interesting piece of news earlier this week: An (unofficial) Android image for the Nintendo Switch has been released by the switchroot folks! All basic functionality works, and the graphics driver even supports Vulkan. So of course, I couldn't resist giving it a try and checking how Mikage fares on this exotic setup.
Lo and behold, it works without any modifications! Unsurprisingly performance ...
2019-08-02 14:39:25 +0000 UTC View Post
The first Progress Report is out! As usual, thanks for your support :)
Another game made it to the title screen: Super Mario 3D Land! As usual, achieving this was "just" a matter of fixing the right things. In this case, a corner case in DMAs wasn't implemented (transfer sizes not aligned to 4 bytes). Implementing this case and stubbing the MIC module was sufficient to get the title screen appear :)
I've also taken a day to improve the Android frontend UX. With the upcoming August alpha release, you'll finally be able to load games from any storage locatio...
2019-07-24 12:19:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Another week, another update - making steady progress, and I've got some new pictures to show!
As you imagine, it's been a busy week - besides closely watching and replying to the announcement thread on reddit and getting my hands dirty in video editing, I actually managed to spend some time on development too:
People have been asking to see more of Mikage in action, so I've recorded a gameplay session of my favorite testing title yesterday :)
You've probably already seen it, but just in case you haven't - here's our recent announcement!
2019-07-03 09:12:42 +0000 UTC View Post