@Tankov @Lanmanna And here's Wes Fenlon's list:

https://readonlymemo.com/decompilation-projects-and-n64-recompiled-list/

@HylianFox I'm thinking 2008-style.

@KainXavier I would absolutely buy The Oliver Twins Collection for Evercade if it went back in print, and would love to see a followup with some of the non-NES games on it.

And yeah, I already said how much I'd love to see a Digital Eclipse Gold Master featuring their work, but just to reiterate, I would absolutely buy that if it existed.

@Drunkn1 I've said it before, but the Luddites were right and the mere fact that the word is used as a pejorative today is a textbook example of history being written by the victors.

@Zeebor15 Wikipedia (citing Bruce on Games) claims that the Olivers owned the copyrights and Codemasters owned the trademark. If true, it's possible that the trademark could have lapsed and the Olivers could have reclaimed it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizzy_(series)
https://www.bruceongames.com/2007/09/11/death-of-a-brand/

On the other hand, some of the games do have a "copyright Codemasters" notice on their title screen, so I really don't know. I'd be interested in hearing what the status is on all the rights, but IANAL and hopefully they've talked to theirs.

Well, that's neat.

What I'd really like to see is something like the Digital Eclipse Gold Master Series, either focusing just on Dizzy in particular or the twins' career in the '80s and '90s in general.

@Tankov Thanks for the explanation. And I'm thinking about one more thing you said, and I've got a few thoughts of my own on the subject:

> For all the people who say "the bad ones will sort themselves out". It's easy for you to say so as a solitary consumer of the end product.

Is it? Because from where I'm sitting, we're effin' drowning in slop and it takes real work to separate out the good stuff. Every time I see a new translation, or a new Pocket core, I think "probably more slop" and I'm usually right. I don't even know where to begin with the decomp/recomp projects.

I've been playing fan translations on emulators for almost 30 years now and I feel frustrated and overwhelmed by the state of things now. There's nothing inherently wrong with choice or competition; I'm old enough to remember the days of iNES and Nesticle and zSNES and SNES9X. But this isn't just a little friendly competition between different enthusiast developers; it's a flood of crap and it's increasingly difficult to find the good in there. I'm just one guy with a family and a day job; I don't have time to figure all that stuff out. I guess I can just do a search and see what other people say about it, except that, oh right, search engines don't work anymore, also because they've been flooded with slop. What rises to the top isn't the best product, it's the best SEO, as generated by a machine and determined by another machine.

There are folks out there like Wes Fenlon putting the work in to highlighting the good, human-made translations and recomps, and my hat's off to them. But even with their efforts it's still hard to navigate this mess. Wes helps me feel a little less discouraged about the whole situation, but I'm still pretty discouraged.

@Tankov Your link's broken; it's including the period as part of the URL. Should be
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/09/new-air-management-96-ps1-fan-translation-released-to-make-insulting-genai-effort-obsolete

I'm not familiar with the Suikoden slop translation you're talking about. I know there was a Woven Web of the Centuries translation back in 2021, but I think that was before the current era of AI translations?

@metaphysician I mean, yeah, he didn't run three grifts, change his name, and run a fourth one by accident.

@tektite_captain Well, this guy sure didn't.

@sftwn okay, but, like

you read the part about how the AI version is a buggy mess, right

have you considered that maybe that's not actually just a coincidence

@CJtothePast Roguelikes have their place. But yeah, I tend to prefer intentional design myself.

> Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry and Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice are currently available on the U.S. Steam store at a whopping 95% discount (though at this writing they are still full-price in other territories).

I'm seeing full-price in the US Steam store, too. I think the discount was probably part of the Steam Fall Sale that just ended.

@Protion9 There's plenty to worry about but I wouldn't worry about that. It's a bubble and it's going to pop. The only company that's actually making money off this slop is NVidia; all the other companies betting the global economy on LLMs are just passing money to each other in a giant corporate circle jerk.

I think Slice is going to work out about as well as Ubisoft's forays into NFT gaming.

That's not to say that AI will go away entirely, but I think it's going to be in a very different place in a few years.

I've got the Banjo cart preordered, but not feeling the urge to upgrade to the Nexus just at the moment. I've got an EXP and a VS-R and I think that ought to cover my bases for now. If I've got a game that really needs analogue input, I can play it on the VS-R.

Rockman Mega World, back when there was no US release and emulators didn't support EEPROM saves. It's a rare case of a MegaDrive game that's region-locked, but you can play it in an American Genesis with a Game Genie code.

I got the Famicom versions of Castlevania 3 and Kid Dracula from an eBay seller.

Super Game Boy 2, because it runs games at the correct speed instead of slightly sped up like the original model.

Dragon Quest Builders for Vita, because it never got a physical release in the US (but the mainland Asia release has an English-language option).

I bought the Japanese Dreamcast version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 at a local game shop.

More recently it all kinda starts to run together; now that most consoles aren't doing region locks anymore, it's pretty common to see PEGI-badged games from US sellers. I think my Super Mario RPG (Switch version) might be from Europe?

@Kotonete @Runex21 Okay, but did you read the part of the article about how it's shoddy and doesn't work right? Even if you don't care about the ethics and only care about the end result, the end result sucks.

SUUUUUUUUUUUUUURGE

Man

@OliverTwins That's great and all, but it doesn't change the number of legs a dog is supposed to have.

@somnambulance Those sure are some empty platitudes.

@Oldretrogamer It's incredibly telling that the best argument some AI boosters can come up with is "because change is good."

Well, if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer, that's change. Are they gonna go do that, too?

Maybe they already have.

@Snk4ever I was frankly a little struck by the copyright notices on the images on their Kickstarter. I don't know if the UK's adjudicated the copyrightability of AI-generated content, but the US has and it's not copyrightable here.

@SlangWon Well, it's certainly transformed the RAM market.

@roguetrooper "Dregs" is a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact is that Nintendo lost a lot of third parties (and especially Japanese third parties) to Sony in the N64 era.

Not for nothin', consider that your first example of a "third party" that supported the N64 is actually a company that Nintendo owned a significant stake in at the time.

I said this in the last thread, but they're out there repeating these talking points about how they've always strived for the best quality etc. etc. and here they are putting out promo images where Toto only has three legs. Like, do people, including people with the Oliver Twins' track record, genuinely not see how shoddy this "art" is?

When you ask "Would you only buy an indie game if it looked like the output from bigger studios?" you're sort of begging the question, but it's a false premise to begin with; when the Olivers suggest that their AI slop looks just as good as the graphics in AAA titles, they're just objectively wrong. Art is subjective, sure, but some things are quantifiable.

Not sure when it went on sale but it's available now; I just ordered a copy.

It's a really interesting and eclectic collection of games and I'm glad to be able to get a copy, even with one of them gone.

@OliverTwins
> I don’t think you’ll convince us to not use AI tools as we’ve always strived for efficiency and quality in everything we do

That dog only has three legs, Mr. Oliver.

@Daniel36 Yeah, I know the NES Dizzy games aren't exactly the definitive versions, but I played them recently and I definitely felt like I'd been missing out on something. If the Evercade collection comes back around, I'll be happy to buy it.

@Ristar24 Yeah, I've always been kind of offended by "it's for kids" as an excuse for cutting corners — hastily-produced artwork, plots that don't make sense, etc. Kids are smart. They notice that stuff. And when you think they won't, that's insulting, and they notice that, too.

And I don't see anybody complaining about using The Wizard of Oz as source material? It's a beloved classic that's seen many diverse and creative interpretations over the years. The Wicked films have grossed over a billion dollars between them. Clearly, reinterpreting The Wizard of Oz is not a barrier to creative or financial success.

I don't see anybody complaining that it's a Wizard of Oz adaptation. I see people complaining because they used a tool that's having terrible ongoing effects on the environment, jobs, the economy, and the supply chain, to produce something that doesn't rise to the level of mediocrity, instead of paying an artist to make art.

@OliverTwins I appreciate your willingness to step into the lion's den, but you realize how fallacious it is to dismiss criticism on the grounds that other critics have been wrong about other things in the past, right?

I've enjoyed your work in the past and hope to enjoy it in the future. But this ain't it and I hope these experiments in slop are something you put behind you sooner rather than later.

(I'd also love to see the Oliver Twins Collection on Evercade get a reissue, in case there's anything you can do to make that happen.)

@segasteve But they're Gen Xers.

Art of the Box is great. It's been awhile since I pulled my copy off the shelf and looked through it.

@JackGYarwood Spelling correction: Jeremy Parish. With one "r".

@Krambo42 Indie Heroes 5 coming early next year, though; those are always good.

@Damo Right you are. That could definitely explain the disconnect.

@Ristar24 Hadn't heard of that release; thanks for the heads-up. Probably worth comparing the two releases more closely once the Evercade version actually gets an official announcement, but it sounds like the Last Ninja Collection + Bonus Games has more versions of more games than the Evercade collection.

Interesting choice to go with John Romita's Spidey on the packaging but Todd McFarlane's in-game. Romita's Spidey is the classic and, to many, definitive version, while in 1990 McFarlane was the current Spider-Man artist and belonged to an exciting group of young artists who had really shaken up the style of superhero comics (and would soon go on to leave Marvel and start Image).

I wonder if it was Rare's marketing people or Marvel's that decided to go with Romita on the box art. It seems like a really weird choice, in context; I personally prefer Romita but McFarlane was definitely considered the cooler, fresher artist at the time. (Plus it would have, you know, matched the look of the actual game.)

@Andee Yeah, true. Occasionally you get a show that can sustain the "all meta jokes" format like Robot Chicken, but even Family Guy is at its best when it quits doing the '80s references and focuses on character-based or observational humor.

I liked the Golden Axe trailer but I'm sure part of that is that I trust Mike McMahan and know the show's going to be more than just the jokes. Lower Decks was never just "jokes about Star Trek", it was a Star Trek series that was also a comedy and managed to do an impressively good job of both.

Shame all the characters have to look like that, though.

@MontyCircus That's a pretty reductive take on both shows, TBQH.

If you don't like the tone that's fair enough, but there's a lot more to them than "mania screaming on fast forward".

@ecco6t9 Yeah, a warning or a C&D often gets blown up into a lawsuit in the retelling.

@-wc- I mean...the answer to how you accommodate D-pad/buttons, D-pad/stick, and stick/buttons control options without a three-prong design is...you add a second stick on the righthand side.

I always like this kind of investigative work. There are all these stories that are accepted wisdom and it's often a good idea to take a step back and ask "Wait, did that really happen?"

@Dehnus Really. People who are mad that they're not taking Golden Axe seriously enough seem to have forgotten that the original game ended with the characters exploding out of the arcade machine and chasing the players out into the street.

Silly meta humor is not a new take on Golden Axe. It was always there.

And again, if people aren't interested, that's fine; you like what you like and you don't like what you don't like. But there's a certain attitude a lot of people have that their opinion represents everybody else's, and I gotta tell you, people who are mad about a Golden Axe TV show not having the vibe they wanted are...not as large a group as they think they are.

@SlangWon "Who is this for?" is a pretty weird question to ask when Family Guy's got 24 seasons under its belt. Irreverent jokes pandering to Xennial nostalgia, paired with cheap-looking, bug-eyed animation, is a pretty well-worn formula at this point.

@CookieByte You're entitled to your opinion but it's not the consensus. Lower Decks is 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, was nominated for Emmys, and won a Hugo. (Two Hugos if you count the comic book.)

You don't have to like it just because the critics did, and you certainly don't have to watch similar shows if that one wasn't for you, but "it was awful" isn't exactly specific or constructive criticism.

This won't necessarily help with the Steam version, of course, but there is a translation patch for the SFC ROM:
https://romhack.ing/database/content/entry/3NNv5JQBNs8FWu0C5YO1/wizardry-bane-of-the-cosmic-forge-english-translation

There's also a translation patch for the Saturn version, as Time Extension reported last year:
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/09/im-literally-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants-here-saturn-version-of-wizardry-vi-is-finally-playable-in-english

Great stuff. I think these primary-source interviews are the best thing on Time Extension and they're a major reason I'm a reader.

(I think he must have been reading different comics than I was, though. If he thought American comics didn't have nuanced villains with motivating tragedies, I guess he wasn't an X-Men fan.)

@Ellie-Moo SD2SNES/FXPAK Pro has MSU-1 support; I don't have my SNES hooked up right now to check but I think it should work.

@allahver_fist Sure, I've got my research right here.

@allahver_fist Based on what source?