Progress Report <> May 2026

[nickybmon]

Hey everyone! 👋

It's been a big month and I wanted to write something up because a lot happened and I don't think a release notes page really does it justice.

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The RetroAchievements thing

The headline of this release (and honestly what I'm most excited about) is hardcore mode and everything that came with it.

If you're not familiar with RetroAchievements: it's a system that adds achievements to classic games, kind of like Xbox/PlayStation trophies but for your entire retro library. It works by running alongside your emulator and tracking what's happening in the game. Hardcore mode is their way of keeping it honest, when it's on, save state loading, rewind, and cheats are all disabled. You're playing the game the way it was meant to be played.

For OpenEmu-Silicon to show up on RetroAchievements' official list of approved emulators, which is what allows RA users to actually earn points while playing, I had to implement hardcore mode correctly and get it reviewed. I've been working with the RA team on this, and @wescopeland reviewed my implementation before it shipped. We're in the approval queue now.

Getting this done also meant wiring up RetroAchievements support across eight different emulator cores: Game Boy, GBA, NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PlayStation, and more. That work has been building for months, and this release is when it all came together.

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The PSP situation

PSP emulation has been broken for a while. Games would open a black screen and crash. @CamberwelK filed the first detailed report, and what followed was a 16-comment thread that stretched across weeks. They tried every theory I threw at them, reinstalling the core, clearing old config files, checking for conflicts with Rosetta. Each time: still broken.

The actual fix turned out to be a JIT (just-in-time compilation) issue specific to Apple Silicon in Release builds, something that doesn't show up at all in debug mode, which is part of why it was so hard to track down. @CamberwelK sharing a crash report late in the thread is what finally gave me what I needed to find it.

If you've been sitting on a broken PSP setup, update both the app and the PPSSPP core and it should work now.

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3DO audio and video

@CamberwelK also filed the 3DO black screen report… different bug, same persistence. Games were booting and playing audio but showing a black screen. That one turned out to be a similar Release-vs-Debug discrepancy in how the 3DO core hands off its video frames. Fixed in this release, and 4DO got a new version alongside it.

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N64 is more stable

There was a crash in the Mupen64Plus core that would happen during normal gameplay, a render thread deadlock that nobody filed a specific report for but that showed up repeatedly in crash data. That's fixed. N64 should be noticeably more stable.

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Save backups without the drama

The previous version had Google Drive sync. It required OAuth credentials, a Google Cloud project, and a bunch of setup that most people weren't going to do. I replaced it with something simpler: pick any folder, and OpenEmu mirrors your saves and battery files into it automatically. iCloud Drive, Dropbox, an external drive, whatever you use. If a newer save shows up in that folder when you launch a game, it'll offer to restore it.

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The stuff that was quietly annoying people

A few fixes that I think will matter more than the headlines:

• The app was hanging for 2+ seconds on launch on some Macs. It turned out to be a macOS Keychain call blocking the main thread something that got worse on Sequoia. That's replaced now with an encrypted local credential file and the hangs are gone.
• Arcade wasn't showing up in the sidebar for a lot of people. That was my fault, I shipped the Arcade system plugin but forgot to bundle it inside the app. Fixed.
• Light mode looked terrible. Also fixed.
• ScreenScraper artwork wasn't matching a lot of games, and people were getting authentication errors. Fixed the auth bug, corrected a bunch of wrong system IDs, and stopped it from making redundant API calls when it already had everything it needed.

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People who made this better 🙇‍♂️

• @wescopeland from the RetroAchievements team reviewed the hardcore mode implementation and gave feedback before it shipped. That's not a small thing, getting a proper review from the team who has to approve us was genuinely valuable and I'm grateful for it.
• @CamberwelK went through 16 comments on the PSP bug and never got frustrated with me, even when my theories kept not panning out. They also filed the 3DO report. Two separate major fixes in this release exist because of their reports.
• @WurstBrotAlDente filed the RetroAchievements not registering bug and pulled Console.app logs to help diagnose it even though they said they had no idea how to use Console. That kind of effort from someone who just wants their achievements to work means a lot.
• @gh0sti sent a screen recording on the core updater bug that happened to show two bugs at once. That recording made both of them immediately reproducible.
• @kda49-github provided the crash log that cracked a launch crash that was hitting a lot of people on fresh installs.
• @ketsuban filed a careful first-launch report that caught two separate issues on M4/macOS Tahoe, both of which got fixed before this release.
• @PipinxAlinos tested an import bug across three different builds and kept sending me the exact details I needed each time.
• @Jimmdean-1 filed a ScreenScraper report detailed enough to expose that there were actually two bugs causing the problem, not one.
• @Ekamekia has been quietly helpful all month, providing Console logs on the RA bug, confirming the Arcade issue with screenshots, and helping other users figure things out in the threads.
• @gingerbeardman filed a detailed Virtual Boy speed report and insisted I test against actual hardware footage to verify the fix. That issue didn't make this release, but that's the right approach and it's shaping the next round of VB work.

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Come get involved

If you want to dig in: good first issue and help wanted are where to start. And if you hit a bug, detailed reports with logs genuinely move the needle as you can see above.

Thanks for using this. It's been fun.

~ @nickybmon

[WurstBrotAlDente]

Thank you for your work. God bless you.

[nickybmon]

You're so welcome! I hope you're enjoying the updates. 🙏