neobrain

Emulator developer & Mikage creator

Announcement

Let's work together: The Developer Edition goes public!

An open invitation for joining development: We've released Mikage Developer Edition on GitHub!

Technical

Taming the Beast: A Leap forward for 3DS Homebrew Development

Today, we're releasing a central building block used throughout Mikage: A package management solution for 3DS tools and homebrew development! Learn what this is a tool can do for homebrew and emulator developers, and read about the problems it solves for Mikage development.

Progress

Progress Update: The unsung Heroes of 3DS Emulation

Seemingly mundane tasks often turn out to be anything but trivial to implement: Here are the cornerstones of an emulator that doesn't merely work, but feels right.

Progress

Louder and faster: A belated Year in Review!

Wonder what we've been up to since our reboot in 2022? Here's a wild mix of improvements, from compatibility fixes to major performance uplifts and more!

Announcement

It's time to renew 3DS emulation: We're back!

It's official: Mikage is returning! We picked development back up again, and here's what's new: Supercharged performance, improved compatibility, and a fresh new PC port!

Announcement

Good Bye, Friends [2022 Update: We're back!]

2022 UPDATE: MIKAGE IS NO LONGER ON HIATUS! Previous version of this announcement: The 3DS community has spoken: There is no sufficient demand to fund development of a high-quality 3DS emulator for Android. Public Mikage development is put on an indefinite hiatus. This is a good-bye letter.

A Retrospective: Super Mario 3D Land

March's big news: Mikage can now run Super Mario 3D Land! Here's how we went from fixing error messages over to garbled rendering to almost perfect game visuals.

Gameplay Video

Gameplay video: Super Mario 3D Land

Yes! You're reading that right: Super Mario 3D Land is now (functionally) playable on Android via Mikage :) I'll publish a write-up of this exciting development progress next week, and I'll also push the next alpha release soon so you can try the game out

Development Update

Development Update 10: A teaser!

It's been a while since I announced new titles that now work in Mikage, so I figured I'd make up for that by announcing a big one ;) Super Mario 3D Land is now functionally playable! Yes, you read that right - it gets past the title

Progress

Mikage Progress Report: January + February 2020

We have another update in store, this time with major optimization work going on and of course the obligatory compatibility improvements. Let's dive right in! AArch64 JIT for super-fast CPU emulation Every emulator project has to start somewhere, and in terms of CPU emulation that's usually

Development Update

Development Update 9: Massive speedups!

Compatibility improvements and fixed rendering glitches aside: What good is an emulator if everything is a slideshow? I promised to tackle the framerate issues a while ago, and the first major step towards doing so has now been completed: An AArch64 JIT. This may come as a surprise, but I

Progress

Mikage Progress Report: August - December 2019

Hello again, it's been a while! I'm sure many of you wondered what we've been up to since there's been somewhat of a radio silence around Mikage. Suffice to say the project is alive and kicking, with hundreds of hours spent on

Development Update

Development Update 8: Bug fixes and speedups

It's this time of the month again! If you haven't seen yet, I uploaded a new gameplay video showing off Cave Story 3D [http://localhost:2368/gameplay-video-cave-story-3d/] earlier this month. But of course I didn't stop there, and in fact this month we got

Gameplay Video

Gameplay video: Cave Story 3D

Hey folks! First of all - happy new year! Mikage has kicked off 2020 with some really cool progress, but more on that later this month ;) As for today, I figured it's time for another video, and I already teased Cave Story 3D back in Development Update 7

Development Update

Development Update 7: Fixing all the things!

Another month, another update - let's see what December had in it for us :) New Games! The big news comes first: Mikage runs another game, Cave Story 3D! Turns out after a couple of small additions and the fixes mentioned later, this game pretty much just worked out

Gameplay Video

Gameplay video: Nano Assault EX

As a followup to yesterday's Development Update [http://localhost:2368/development-update-6/], I recorded some gameplay footage to show off in more detail how great Nano Assault already runs in Mikage. Like I mentioned before, I'm super happy to have a game with such complex graphics work

Development Update

Development Update 6: Renderer improvements and more games!

After the long-winded build up over the last months, we're finally seeing some work on the emulator core itself again. Lo and behold, there's progress on support for more games, and a new alpha release on the horizon! New titles going in-game: Nano Assault and Bravely

Development Update

Development Update 5

Reunited with an old friend: Software rendering is back! Back when we started development on Citra, all graphics emulation was done using a software renderer: All rendering was done purely on the host CPU and hence is incredibly slow, since it doesn't even attempt to use graphics acceleration.

Development Update

Development Update 4

It's time for a quick update on development progress again! But first, let me announce I'll be moving away from a weekly update cycle from now on. I became clear that a weekly schedule pushes development too much towards short-term progress that don't pay

Progress

Mikage Progress Report: July 2019

> Save file fixes, more games booting, and a better Android frontend! What a month! Thank you all so much for the heartwarming words and support. Mikage's website had around 20k unique visits, there have been lots of videos and blog articles on the project (including one on

Mikage for the Switch... close enough!

You might have come across an interesting piece of news earlier this week: An (unofficial) Android image for the Nintendo Switch has been released by the switchroot [https://switchroot.org/] folks! All basic functionality works, and the graphics driver even supports Vulkan. So of course, I couldn't resist

Development Update

Development Update 3

Another game made it to the title screen: Super Mario 3D Land! As usual, achieving this was "just" a matter of fixing the right things. In this case, a corner case in DMAs wasn't implemented (transfer sizes not aligned to 4 bytes). Implementing this case and

Development Update

Development Update 2

Another week, another update - making steady progress, and I've got some new pictures to show! * Extdata (used by a lot of games) is fully supported now: As it turned out, implementing this was straightforward based on the existing save data code. * Games that create a lot of

Development Update

Development Update 1

As you imagine, it's been a busy week - besides closely watching and replying to the announcement thread on reddit [https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/c7royh/hello_mikage_a_3ds_emulator_for_android_featuring/] and getting my hands dirty in video editing [https://www.youtube.com/

Gameplay Video

Gameplay video: TLoZ: Ocarina of Time 3D

People have been asking to see more of Mikage in action, so I've recorded a gameplay session of my favorite testing title yesterday :)