Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on enhancing the CUT algorithms in Lemuroid. For those unfamiliar, CUT (Cheap Upscaling Triangulation) is a family of upscaling techniques that transform pixelated games, giving them a modern HD appearance.

I started this quest by completely rewriting CUT2, making it faster and significantly better at handling antialiased edges. This brings noticeable improvements to modern games and in games with mixed 2D and 3D content, like the classic Final Fantasy titles on PSX.

Building on that, I developed a new variant, CUT3. While slightly slower, CUT3 has the ability to approximate edges at any angle, improving shapes especially in retro games.

I’m sharing a demo web app where you can see the new shaders in action. It showcases how the filters look on a wide range of games, from the 8-bit era to modern titles.

As always, the code is available on GitHub under the GPL3 license. Feel free to check additional details or use it in your own open-source projects.

These enhancements are already available in Lemuroid 1.16.2, so make sure to update the app and let me know what you think.

Enjoy more games in HD!

Dear fellow readers,

It has been a long time since I last wrote here, but I’m back with some exciting news.

Lemuroid 1.15.0 is out and comes with major improvements to the HD mode.

I’ve spent the last few months working on a new upscaling algorithm, called unsurprisingly CUT2, which improves interpolation and handles edges at 30°, 45° and 60° degrees.

Feel free to check more screenshots and details on the CUT Github page.

If you prefer, you can still use the older version by toggling “Advanced Settings -> Prefer Legacy HD Mode”.

As always, you can grab the latest Lemuroid version, with updated cores and database, on Google Play, Github and F-Droid.

Cheers!

It’s finally time for a new Lemuroid release. It took a while, but I promise you 1.13.0 was worth the wait.

There are three main changes:

• New Material You UI: The UI now follows the new Material You guidelines, and if you own an Android 12 device, will change style depending on your background.
• Beta Support for 3DS: The Libretro guys recently polished and updated the Citra core, and porting it to Android was quite straightforward. It’s still pretty barebone and deprived of settings, but already serviceable.
• Direct Load: Some changes to cores were required, but now Lemuroid is able to load games directly from storage, without copying them to the cache directory. This means that PSX, PSP and 3DS games, which are usually quite big, load instantly when not compressed.

If that’s not enough, here’s a list of smaller changes:

• Add support for external keyboards
• Add support for gamepad and device rumble
• Opening game menu now requires a long press
• Slight improvements to touch controls layout and behaviour
• Expose sync save button
• Update all cores and game database
• More fixes

The update will be shortly available on Google Play, Github and F-Droid.

Enjoy!

These last few months have been particularly busy for me, both from a personal and professional perspective. My open-source time was reduced to basically zero, but I feel like I’m slowly getting back on track.

I decided to revisit an old friend, which was desperately in need for some love, so I’m very proud to announce version 1.2.0 of cool-retro-term.

Here you can find the changelog:

• Migrated QtQuickControls from 1.x to 2.x
• Fixed a lot of issues with MacOS build
• Added support for blinking cursor
• Added sub-pixels rasterization
• Updated qtermwidget engine
• Updated many fonts to the latest version

As always, you can grab it from the GitHub Release page.

Cheers!

This wanted to be a minor release, but a few important features slipped in, so say hi to Lemuroid 1.11.0.

There are a couple of new platforms, Neo Geo Pocket / Color and Sega CD, but the main focus has been on quality:

• The disk scanning procedure is now way more robust, especially with cue/bin files
• Multi-track disks are now properly supported
• Single gamepads can be disabled (very important when strange TV remotes take the lead)
• New translations on Crowdin (thank you very much guys!)
• Nearly every core has been updated to the latest Libretro version
• Some bugs and crashes have been fixed

Last, but definitely not least, this release also improves on tilt input. This feature was introduced a year ago only for sticks, but after a lot of thinking, I decided to extend it to more controls.

Tilt input improvements

While touch controls are designed to be used with thumbs, physical gamepads allow more simultaneous actions. Let’s take a look at how you shoot in the first Resident Evil game:

• You keep your right index on R1 to raise your gun
• You aim using your left thumb on the DPAD
• You shoot with your right thumb by pressing X

This is basically impossible to achieve with two fingers, but the tilt sensor can act as your third one. If you triple tap together L1 and R1 (or L2 and R2), Lemuroid will calculate the rest position and map left and right tilt motions to L1 and R1 respectively, so you’ll be able to aim just by tilting your device to the right.

This maps very well for many other games. You’ll finally be able to simultaneously shoot and strafe while playing DOOM or shift gears Gran Turismo. Ah, and If you triple tap exactly in the middle of the DPAD you’ll also be able to play Pokemon games with just one hand. Please give it a go, I’m eager to hear your feedback.

Thank you Supporters

I’d also take the opportunity to thank all the people who supported and are supporting Lemuroid. It’s great to see that people genuinely appreciate the 18 months of work I’ve put into this project and decided to give something back. You guys are awesome!

Cheers!