News: TLZ: Link’s Awakening gets in-game with graphics and Astral Chain bootable in Yuzu and TwiLight Menu++ 10 for the 3DS released allowing flashcards to load Nintendo DS game dumps & Widescreen Improvements
Today, it’s Nintendo’s day to shine from a console hacking/emulation point-of-view as TLZ: Link’s Awakening for the Switch is now in-game in Yuzu and the highly popular TwiLight Menu++ received a significant update. In this article, we’ll be taking a look a closer at these two notable news items and why they’re significant
Yuzu gets in-game in TLZ: Link’s Awakening, Astral Chain is bootable and many more improvements
It’s no secret that work on emulating the Nintendo Switch has been going on for quite a while and as time goes on, Yuzu continues cementing its place as the definitive Switch emulator that regular users should use similar to how Dolphin and RPCS3 are perceived in the Wii and PS3 emulation scenes respectively. Work on Yuzu initially started in January 2018 and development has gone a long way since then as the emulator can run numerous games with playable results including Pokemon: Let’s Go, KAMIKO and Super Mario Maker 2.
Now, the folks behind Yuzu have shared with us the work they’ve done in September and this includes:
- Many improvements to the emulation of Horizon OS which are important as games need a solid basis to run on. These improvements include:
- Frame count fuctionality for REV5’s audio renderer has been implemented
- NVDRV (Nvidia Services) had the ‘ioct12’ and ‘ioct13’ interfaces, which are found on the Switch, added to it
- Asynchronous GPU emulation got many fixes and improvements which translate to Fire Emblem: 3 Houses, Cadence of Hyrule, and Pokkén Tournament becoming bootable with Async and the dynamic resolution re-scaler working better in Super Mario Odyssey
- Work is now spread more evenly among the four emulated SoC cores thanks to a new Timer (Patreon builds only for now)
- The ‘New Scheduler’ got improved which made Astral Chain bootable and improved performance in Fire Emblem:3 Houses, Hyrule Warriors and Resident Evil 4 even though these titles aren’t yet playable. (Patreon builds only for now)
- Improvements to GPU emulation including:
- The implementation of more shader instructions, improvements to how draw calls are handled and support for the RGBX16F image format which is used by Rocket League
- Mipmap filtering, stencil testing and some Vulkan issues got fixed
- Other improvements which can be viewed in the Yuzu article below
- The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, a game released under a month ago, is now in-game and can be played to a certain extent as the graphics now show up and performance is decent on capable hardware (Patreon builds only)
- This video by Leafnation demonstrates the current state of the game with the Yuzu October 2019 Patreon Release
- All previously generated shader caches are now useless and must be regenerated! This applies to all games
To read more about Yuzu’s progress in September and about the October 2019 Patreon release, follow this link. Furthermore, the Nightly and Canary builds of Yuzu have been merged into one release channel simply named ‘Yuzu’. As usual, the features from the Patreon releases eventually end up in the freely available builds of the emulator. You can donate to the Yuzu team via Patreon and get access to exclusive builds by following this link.
TwiLight Menu++ 10.0 and 10.0.1 released with the ability to run commercial game dumps from flashcards, an improvement to widescreen mode & game fixes
As many people know, the Nintendo 3DS homebrew scene slowed down quite a while ago but TwiLight Menu++ development never quite stopped and it’s been receiving frequent updates for a pretty long while.
Now, version 10.0 and 10.0.1 have been released and these come with:
- The ability to run dumped Nintendo DS games from a flashcard that doesn’t have backup loading support – This is possible thanks to the B4DS functionality that comes with nds-bootstrap v0.25.2
- Supported carts include the Datel Games ‘n Music, Action Replay DS Media Edition, MAX Media Dock, R4iGold, R4i-SDHC and any other one that supports DLDI
- Not all games work properly when using this method but popular titles like Chrono Trigger and Mario Kart DS work just fine
- Users of B4DS can now change the language, save number & nds-bootstrap build in per-game settings
- GBARunner2 has been updated to a more modern version
- Widescreen cheats now use the ‘199A’ value rather than the ‘1999’ value
- You are no longer required to hold the L Trigger for SpongeBob’s Atlantis SquarePantis, Ultimate Mortal Kombat, Retro Game Challenge and The World Ends With You to work
- Flashcard users can select between arm7 or arm9 mode for GBARunner2’s DLDI access and autoboot files for popular flashcards have been updated
To grab TwiLight Menu++ 10.0.1 and view the changelog, check out this link and make sure to check the installation instructions here if you’ve never installed TWL Menu++.
Conclusion
If you own a Switch and use SX OS, SX OS 2.9.2 Beta and SX Installler 3.0 have been released which might be of note. However, if Nintendo consoles aren’t your thing, you might be interested in yesterday’s release of PPSSPP 1.9.3 which mostly fixes bugs in the Android port.
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Thank you to everyone that work hard so we can play games better!
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Damn I’m late for the party.