Emulation

A dizzying amount of scripting while utilizing LaunchBox, DOSBox, 86Box, and more. That's a lot of boxes.

Installing 7th Heaven Mods via Winlator for FF7 OG

A number of years ago, I was the first documented person to install New Threat 1.5 to the iOS version of Final Fantasy 7 using a jailbroken iPhone 8 (as far as I know) and posted my findings to Reddit.

When I moved back to Android, I was unable to recreate my little trick due to how permissions had recently changed.

I wanted to attempt loading New Threat 2.0 via winlator, so I got to work, and wanted to share with my fellow Lemmings.

Since New Threat 2.0 is available via standalone installer AND 7th Heaven, I wanted to use the iro file from 7th Heaven. The installer would be as simple as installing the mod on your PC copy, then moving the changed file structure to overwrite files in your FF7 install on Winlator. Too simple. Too easy.

This is merely a POC for installing 7th Heaven mods to FF7 through Winlator as 7th Heaven is an absolute monster to get running on Winlator.

This tutorial goes on the assumption you have a completely clean install of FF7 from Steam on a PC as the work will be done there to set up the folder structure, as well as a fresh RUNNING install of FF7 via Winlator. Strap in, it's a long one.

Starting the install

1. Download your chosen mod. We'll of course be using New Threat 2.0 in this example. Download the iro and find the path it downloaded to. The default path is ..\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\mods\7th Heaven

2. Inside 7th Heaven, go to Tools tab > IRO Tools > Unpack IRO tab Unpack your IRO to a new folder called NT somewhere on your machine.

This should spit out the following file structure:

-ConditionalMidgalBat/
-ConditionalVolcano/
-hext/
-New Threat - Sega Chief/
-OptionDifficultyModifier/
mod.xml
no_change.png
nt_preview.png
Readme.txt

We won't need any of the loose files, just the folders.

3. Make a new folder here called direct.

4. Take the contents of the New Threat - Sega Chief folder and move them into this direct folder

You should now have the following inside of ..\NT\direct\

-battle\
-battle.lgp\
-char.lgp\
-flevel.lgp\
-kernel\
-menu\
-music\
-music_ogg\
-world_us.lgp\

You can ignore step 5 if you wish as NT has a default scene.bin to set the difficulty

5. Open the OptionDifficultyModifier folder, and choose which difficulty you'd like to use, either Struggle or Relax. Inside of either folder you choose, there is another battle folder. Copy this and paste it into your direct folder. It will ask you to overwrite - choose yes.

6. Back to the root of our NT folder, if you'd like to have materia slots with 3 links, open the OptionMultiLinkedSlots folder > open the Enabled folder. Copy this kernel folder and paste into your direct folder. It will ask to overwrite, choose yes.

7. Copy the contents of the ConditionalVolcano and ConditionalMidgalBat folders, paste them into your direct folder as well.

8. Now go download FFNx from here: https://github.com/julianxhokaxhiu/FFNx/releases

I chose the stable FFNx-Steam-v1.23.0.0.zip release instead of the Pre-Release 1.23.0.26 version. - keep this zip after unzipping it.

10. Unzip this archive directly into your Final Fantasy VII folder and overwrite when asked.

11. Open 7th Heaven and start FF7 with New Threat enabled. Just get to the New Game prompt and quit. This should change out your ff7_en.exe for a different one - a backup is automatically created in the FINAL FANTASY VII folder under 7H2.0-BACKUP.

Go back into 7th Heaven and Disable New threat.

12. Now, copy your direct folder AND the hext folder, then paste into your Final Fantasy VII folder so that direct, hext, and ff7_en.exe are visible in the same location. It may ask to overwrite or merge, say yes.

Now, here's the kicker. 7th Heaven automatically deals with the file paths properly unlike FFNx does alone, so we need to change some folder structures. While vanilla FFVII DOES have a ..\data\battle folder, it does NOT have the files inside in the same place, so FFNx will not know to redirect the vanilla files to our New Threat files. We need to fix that.

13. Inside of your direct folder, find the battle folder. NOT battle.lgp, JUST battle. Create a new folder called lang-en inside of the direct folder and copy your battle folder inside of it.

You should now have ..\Final Fantasy VII\direct\lang-en\battle

14. Go back to your direct folder, and find the kernel folder. Copy this kernel folder into lang-en the same way you did the battle folder from the previous step.

Testing the install

1. Now, with our mods in the correct position, double-check in 7th Heaven that New Threat is disabled, and launch FF7 VIA STEAM just to confirm the mods are being loaded directly by the game.

2. If you get the prompt to choose Scenario A or B after choosing New Game, that's an excellent sign! Choose Scenario B and Standard difficulty, then start the game.

3. Take note on if you see Tifa come off the train. If so, open your menu and check Cloud's magic. If he has fire, ice, AND bolt, move forward until the scripted battle with the two MP enemies.

If you actually start a battle with two MP enemies, you should be in the clear! The hard part is over with!

If not, something is screwed up!

If all of the above worked, New Threat is working in FF7 without 7th Heaven doing the injecting, so now it's time to move it over to your Winlator install!

OPTIONAL

I chose to name the folder containing the mods direct due to FFNx already being set to look for this folder by default. You can change this folder name by opening the FFNx.toml file and change line 499 from "direct" to whatever you want.

If you want to set up multiple mod folders, you can rename your direct folder NewThreat and change "direct" to "NewThreat" or whatever you'd like, then change this line again later to match the new mod folder name later to run it instead, just follow this guide loosely for other mods and give it a different name in the root of your FINAL FANTASY VII folder.

Keep in mind, these folder names are case sensitive so be very specific in your naming if you change it.

Not as easy as 7th Heaven on a true Windows box, but it's as good as you're gonna get through Winlator.

Moving the install to Winlator

1. Zip your direct folder (you can exclude the 7th Heaven folder if you wish), your hext folder, and your ff7_en.exe files together and copy them over to your device in a directory that Winlator can access.

If you did the optional step and renamed your direct folder to something else, add the FFNx.toml file to this zip as well.

We zip these files together because there are a TON of tiny loose files in these folders and we all know how Windows Explorer loves to take its sweet time with thousands of small files.

2. Copy over the FFNx-Steam-v1.23.0.0.zip you downloaded earlier as well to the same location.

3. Find your ff7_en.exe and rename it. I renamed mine to ff7.exe.bak personally.

4. In this order, move the unzipped files into your FF7 install on Winlator:

- ff7_en.exe
- FFNx zip contents, overwrite when prompted
- direct folder
- If you changed the direct folder name, now copy over the FFNx.toml, overwrite when prompted

This should be enough to get it going.

Conclusion

And that's it! Load up FF7 via Winlator and give it a shot.

This took way longer than I'd have liked but hey, it works. If you have issues with this or another mod install, post here and I can try to help you out.

OC by @Cyanogenmon@lemmy.world

Visit linked page for full changelog.

Quote:

With the end of the year barely more than a month away, it’s time for MAME 0.283! As you may be anticipating, there are even more Sega Model 2 fixes this month. Trilinear luma filtering should be working now, and some glitches in tilemap layers are fixed. Microtexturing, used to good effect in The House of the Dead, is emulated for the first time. Some of the tilemap layer fixes have spilled across into Sega System 24 as well.

Several Ensoniq synthesisers have been promoted to working in this release. The Sequential Circuits Six-Trak analog synthesiser has also been promoted to working, with improvements there benefiting the related Bally/Sente 6VB sound board. There’s been quite a bit of work on NEC computers this month, and there are some new software lists for Sharp home computers. MAME now emulates all supported (and some unsupported) video modes on the IBM PCjr.

To find out about everything else that’s happened in MAME development this month, you’ll have to read the whatsnew.txt file. As always, you can get the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

IT'S A NEW LAP RECORD.

Probably the most anticipated and most ambitious video of my entire career - this is the full iiSU Presentation!

After the initial reveal, iiSU has blown up and exceeded so many of my own expectations. I went from being a niche creator to now being a widely-known figure-head in the emulation space, all because of this one idea. Words can't begin to describe how lucky I feel to be in this position and essentially living my life-long dream in real time.

The presentation has been delayed around 4 times since its intended release, and I think you'll understand why once you give it your first watch. I've poured my entire life essence into this one video, and I'm super proud of the final product! Genuinely excited to see how others react to it!

Nearly 24 minutes of pure iiSU overstimulation -- this will answer as many questions as possible so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to iiSU and its bold ideas. A lot of first-time reveals will be happening here as well, so I hope everyone is sitting down! Please let me know how you feel about this ambitious project, and I can't wait to see how the community responds!

I got a PS5 controller for API testing purposes, but I also could use it for gaming on the go purposes.

"If you thought today was an exciting day for the future of the N64 with the announcement of more new and unreleased games coming to our collections via ModRetro, then things are just getting started."

Changelog

This release has been focused on fixing overall regressions found since 0.0.3, in tandem to prepare for a full 0.0.4. We hope to offer users a more stable experience with this new release candidate.

As always, clear your shader caches as the vulkan pipeline parameters continues to change.
Critical

Experimental support for firmware versions 21.x is now available.  
    Most software applets work as expected, but like 20.x, the home menu is currently missing game icons.  

Universal

Reduce SPSC/MPSC queue contention, increases performance for various games  
    Mileage may vary, on tested hardware games could get up to 10 FPS extra  
Translations have been updated  
Fixed performance regressions (stuttering) found in Tears of the Kingdom  

Renderer

Fix SURED() having inappropriate behaviour for certain decoding fields  
Fixed Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound black screen during the 4-1 boss fight.  
Improved Pokemon: Legends Z-A graphical bugs  
    Enabling Extended Dynamic State and disabling Vertex Input Dynamic State is recommended to avoid vertex explosions.  
    Flickering and invisible objects may still be present.  
Fixed flipped screen in 20xx  

Desktop

Working MinGW (Windows) builds for arm64 are now available.  
    This primarily targets Snapdragon X laptops.  
Fixed several issues with Ryujinx save data linking.  
    Attempting a "From Eden" link and saving on Ryujinx would destroy the link.  
    Windows would often fail to create a link at all, especially if the path contained spaces.  
    Prior link detection was unreliable.  
Fixed several issues with the orphaned profile detector.  
    A bunch of extra zeroes would appear in the "good" profiles list  
    Automatically-created profiles for games like Smash Ultimate and Factorio were included in the "bad" profile list.  
Fixed a bug on POSIX where the app would immediately crash in scenarios where USER was unset.  

Android

Fixes crashes on Ender Magnolia and UE4 games introduced by defered allocations  
    UE4 games should be more stable  
Remove ScopedJitExecutor; fixes crashes in Assasins Creed 3  
    Scoped JIT sucks and will hopefully never be brought up ever again  
Custom CPU Ticks can now have its value typed in manually.  
Setting to manually set app language  
Fixed carousel view occasionally clipping out of the bottom of the screen.  
Added a system information dialog  
    Contains CPU, GPU, system, etc. info  
Shader cache is now wiped whenever the GPU driver is changed.  

Internal

MinGW and macOS builds are now fully static.  
    macOS now only contains its MoltenVK dependency, whereas MinGW builds are self-contained executables.  
Fix FFmpeg annoyances for Solaris and BSD  
Reduce code duplication on shader_recompiler  
Provide fallbacks for platforms without atomic 128 bit swaps  
Fix formatting for big endian targets  

Builds

MSVC/arm64 builds have been retired, and replaced with MinGW/arm64 builds. Additionally, all MSVC PGO builds have been removed due to a lack of performance gain, and are replaced by MinGW PGO builds.
TL;DR

Again these changelogs aren't that long, but for the sake of briefness:

Fixes for Pokemon ZA on AMD  
Fixes for Ender Magnolia on Android and other UE4 games  
Fixes for regressions from 0.0.4-rc1 and 0.0.4-rc2  
Initial Firmware 21 support  
Windows on ARM support  

Implicit Conversions, the studio behind emulating some of your favourite PS1 and PS2 games as part of PS Plus Premium, is quietly working on a PS3 emulator.

While boss Bill Litshauer insists improving its support for PS2 is his company’s current focus, he revealed in an interview with Mystic that he believes it will be “feasible” to emulate PS3 games in the future – potentially on the PS5 and “certainly” on the PS6.

He said:

“We believe it’s feasible. I don’t think anyone expects it to run on a Switch or a PS4, but maybe PS5 and certainly PS6 whenever that comes out. We do feel it’s technically possible, it’s just a matter of devoting the time, energy, and resources to it.”

Now, the problems were due to missing some packages not mentioned in the compiling process:

• libfreetype6-dev
• libfontconfig1-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev

All packages are available through apt, so running apt install libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libgtk2.0-dev should suffice. Haven't tried other compiling settings to be sure, but with this, my games worked fine, so don't feel an urgency to test.

Hope it helps!

ES-DE (EmulationStation Desktop Edition) is a gaming frontend for Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. It comes preconfigured for use with a large selection of emulators, game engines, game managers and gaming services. It can also run locally installed games and applications. It's fully customizable, so you can easily expand it with support for additional systems and applications.

The last article was a momentous ocassion. After years of work and research, every single piece of officially licensed Game Boy hardware was finally emulated. While it took literal decades for the community to reach that, we nevertheless accomplished it. This was one of the biggest goals I'd been pursuing as an emudev, however, it wasn't the only one. Rather than retire, I figured I'd take a short break before jumping right back into the fray. Although the Game Boy is finished, there are still a host of peripherals on other platforms that desperately need preservation. As a result, the Edge of Emulation ain't over. In fact, we're just getting started.

cont. reading via linked article.

Developer He Chunhui has turned the humble Espressif ESP32 microcontroller into a fully-fledged '90s personal computer with Tiny386 — a resource-efficient emulator capable of running Microsoft Windows 95 and a range of 16- and 32-bit software packages on the low-cost chip.

"Tiny386 is a x86 PC emulator written in C99," Chunhui explains of the project. "The highlight of the project is its portability. It now boots Windows 9x/NT on MCU [Microcontroller Units] such as [the Espressif] ESP32-S3. The core of the project is a built-from-scratch, simple and stupid [Intel] i386 CPU emulator. Some features are missing, e.g. debugging, hardware tasking, and some permission checks, but it should be able to run most 16/32-bit software."

Video game emulation in 2025 has been huge and in today's episode we discuss the Best Emulators that I've been using in 2025 and showing off their features. These all run on PC but many of them also run on Linux, MacOS and some on Android. These are of course my picks, please let me know which your favorites are in the comments below!

Support all the Emulators you saw in this episode:

► PCSX2 Website - https://pcsx2.net/
► PCSX2 Become a Sponsor - https://github.com/sponsors/PCSX2
► RPCS3 Website - https://rpcs3.net/
► RPCS3 Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/Nekotekina
► ShadPS4 - https://shadps4.net/
► gopher64 Website - https://github.com/gopher64/gopher64
► gopher64 Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/loganmc10
► Azahar - https://azahar-emu.org/
► Mesen 2 - https://www.mesen.ca/
► Ymir Website - https://github.com/StrikerX3/Ymir
► Ymir Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/StrikerX3
► SuperModel Emulator - https://github.com/trzy/Supermodel
► Xenia Canary - https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary

FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple's Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64.

Plus: An interview with the creator of legendary emulator ZSNES and a healthy dose of patch notes.

*Software mode video backend in Playable and Perfect categories combined. The article doesn't state this but I'm sure a lot of people would take issue with this headline otherwise.

MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, later expanded to include video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms.

"Today, we have a very spooky surprise… Oh wait, no we don’t. But what we do have is MAME 0.282! If you want to get into a haunted mood, you might want to try playing Beast Busters: Second Nightmare, because Hyper Neo Geo 64 sound is way better than it was a month ago. Just a friendly reminder, MAME still runs plenty of other ghastly classics, like Laser Ghost, Splatter House, Monster Bash, Haunted Castle and Ghouls’n Ghosts. And speaking of sound, XaviX sound emulation has just had a major overhaul, so you might want to give some e-kara cartridges another listen. Also, if you’re musically inclined, remember to keep an eye on MAME’s synthesiser emulation, because it just keeps getting better!

Sega Model 2 emulation is noticeably better again, with improved graphics and a number of logic bugs fixed. Speaking of 3D graphics, the severe graphical issues plaguing ARM users playing Namco System 22 games have been corrected. Apple II users can enjoy more accurate emulation for software that pokes dark corners of the hardware, including Zip Chip accelerators, interrupts and model-specific functionality. There’s also new D13 disk image write support for people using Apple DOS 3.1 and 3.2 disks. There’s been steady progress on emulating more features of the graphics chip used by the Minitel 2 terminal.

That’s all we’re going to talk about here, but as always, there’s lots more to enjoy, including better Namco System 23 performance, an overhaul for Mega Drive cartridges, plenty of software list additions, more features for the floppy disk image utilities and some additional functionality exposed to Lua scripts. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page."

cont. thru to article for full change-log.