Oops, I might have messed up the display icon for the article, I’ve since fixed it, but what you’re seeing here is the thumbnail for Xanadu, not Shining Wind X!. This is a great example of me not being an expert at websites and still learning how to use NeoCities! Fixed now though :)

This morning’s little article is about Shining Wind X, a kinda obscure Sega RPG from 2008 that was released exclusively for Japanese mobile phones and has recently been recovered by preservationist YuviApp. It’s a follow-up to the PS2 game Shining Wind, but takes a different angle: turn-based tactical combat, and it’s one of those games I think plenty of Sega fans might never have known existed.

What I find super interesting is how much gaming history is effectively trapped in Japan’s oddball old mobile phone ecosystem. There were some pretty ambitious games released for these devices, like spin-offs from major franchises, and many of them became inaccessible when the original download services shut down.

I tend to think about preservation in terms of old cartridges and discs, but there’s this entire library of mobile games that could easily disappear without people putting in the effort to recover them. I thought this was a lovely little example of why that work matters, and really enjoyed learning more about it!

This is for my NeoCities site experiment, not my usual site!

I won’t ever let any effort like that go to waste. Thanks for confirmation. Now that two of you have said I’ve got the all-clear to keep on inundating this space with my articles …well, you have been warned :P

:)

P.S.

I know I’ve been writing and sharing a bunch of little articles here lately. Do let me know if you’re a bit tired of these.

Both my site and my NeoCities experiment are ad free (obviously, with the latter), so there’s no alterior motives when I share my writing here. But I do worry I’m just sharing them too much and becoming a slight annoyance.

Feel free to chime in and let me know if I’m annoying you all. I scrolled down the main page of this community and I see so many of my own posts. I don’t want to become a bother!

For anyone unfamiliar with it, DroidDeck is a relatively new, open-source Android application that lets you run Valve’s actual Steam client, along with PC games from your Steam library, on supported Android phones and handhelds. Rather than just launching individual Windows games through something like Winlator, it brings much of the familiar Steam Deck experience to Android, including Steam’s interface, Proton compatibility, controller integration and more. It does all this without needing to root your device or replace Android with another operating system. It’s still experimental, but the progress has been pretty amazing so far.

So I’ve been chatting with the people behind DroidDeck over the last couple of weeks, and I’ve finally put together what turned into a pretty lengthy feature about the project, its history, and the people making it happen.

I interviewed The412Banner, Max, xXJSONDeruloXx, Kimchi and Astro Sky, digging into everything from their earliest experiences with gaming and development to how their separate experiments with Linux, Gamescope and Steam eventually came together. What started as a way of getting the actual Steam client running on Android has grown into something way more ambitious, and I really wanted to tell the story of how that happened rather than just write another overview of what the software can do.

We also got into the technical challenges, the ridiculous pace of development (it updated and changed a few times while I was writing this!), their approach to AI-assisted coding and automated testing, the importance of open source, and where they hope to take DroidDeck in the future. There are some personal stories in there too, particularly about the early breakthroughs and the excitement of finally seeing things work. It’s a long read, admittedly, but I wanted to give everyone involved the space to tell their side of the story. I’m really grateful to all five for taking the time to answer my many, many questions, and I hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about the people behind a project that’s quickly become one of the more interesting developments in Android handheld gaming!

And just to be transparent, since I know it’s a subject people have strong feelings about, DroidDeck does make use of AI-assisted development.

We discuss that openly in the article, including how the developers use AI tools, automated testing and code reviews as part of their workflow.

Leave it with me, when I’m back home I’ll ask around for you :)

unofficial fork? its an unofficial emulator. What does unofficial fork mean? what is an official fork? It’s open source. someone forked it and doing their own thing. It’s also fine for the Azahar to stop supporting the anberric handhelds. That’s how open source works.

An unofficial fork just means it’s a version of Azahar maintained independently of the original development team, rather than by the people behind the official project. It’s still an emulator, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with forking open-source software. That’s one of the benefits of open source! I didn’t mean to indicate that there was anything wrong with that, at all.

The issue isn’t really that AzaharPlus exists, but that Anbernic chose to promote it rather than the original project, despite the Azahar team’s concerns about some of its features and branding. And I agree, the developers are perfectly entitled to decide which hardware they spend their time supporting. That’s largely the point of the article.

I hope you still enjoyed the read, even if it ended up being completely different to what your pre-caffeine brain saw!!!

Thabk you Jaygray!

That’s really kind of you, to not only read my regular articles but my (newish) NeoCities experiment. That means a lot!

This whole new rapidly changing world is a lot. A lot to see happen so quickly. I feel for some of the talented dev teams I know, because things are changing so darned quickly now :(

All I recommend is buying the game!

https://protovision.itch.io/steel-ranger-2

You might be able to contact him directly, and ask if he has a method for donations (I couldn’t find any!)

I love how it has the look of Aliens meets Metroid!

And thank you!

It has turned from a drip to a flood of these. I’ve seen so many niche-niche communities get inundated with these half-baked ‘ports’ or projects. It is the same thing each and every time. Someone puts in the tiniest amount of ‘work’ (they prompt Claude), show off the title screen or a minute of gameplay, release it and then immediately move on to the next one.

I’d be stunned if a single person on the PSP side specifically has even finished a single of of these ports. I’m just sad. Maybe this is the future, but I loved the admittedly quiet spaces which just had die-hard fans, not this port-slop

Some of the ports we’re seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I’ve definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of ‘port-slop’, with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I’m not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we’re reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I’ve been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

I’ve been looking into a lovely little preservation project involving EverQuest Online Adventures, the PlayStation 2 MMORPG that shut down way back in 2012.

Developer Ahmad Hassan (B-Ted) has been working on something called EQAI: an effort to bring the game’s original 2003 character models back into its later Frontiers version. It turns out this is way more complicated than simply swapping a few files, involving all sorts of reverse engineering of the PS2’s graphics and memory systems.

It’s still a work in progress, but I find something really appealing about people putting this much time and effort into preserving the little details of online worlds that disappeared years ago. So I’ve written a short piece about the project and the wider community working to keep this forgotten corner of gaming history alive :)

Absolutely!

But it really is still sad to see it confirmed

Really sad to hear that BioWare is closing its doors after 31 years. I can’t say it’s entirely surprising given how difficult the last decade has been for the studio, but it’s still a shame to see another enormously influential name disappear from the industry. This was the developer behind Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, among so many others. What an incredible run of games they had :(

I’ve written a little piece looking back at BioWare’s history, some of my favorite games from their glory days, and how depressing it’s becoming to see so many studios shutting down. Whatever you think of BioWare’s more recent output, I think gaming is a little poorer without them.

Clearly the news has been covered and re-covered, so this is just a brief look over their work.

Link should be up and working again, it was down (and terrible timing too!)

Not that you need to, but if you ever want a wonderfully sleek, small and metal vertical handheld, not unlike the Miyoo Mini (I own a V2 Mini myself), look into the TRIMUI Brick Hammer!

There’s a recomp of Wind Waker HD for Wii U, but I tried the same (regular version) game in Cemu and it played beautifully!

But the emulator itself is quite immature compared to the other systems in emulation, so it is very much a game-by-game basis