RetroXR v0.6.0: cards you swipe, paks you plug in
Full changelog · Download · SideQuest · Discord
Major new features
Section titled “Major new features”🃏 The GBA e-Reader
Section titled “🃏 The GBA e-Reader”Nintendo printed dotcodes along the edges of trading cards — whole small games, NES titles, extra levels for Super Mario Advance 4 — and you swiped the card through a scanner plugged into your Game Boy Advance.
v0.6.0 does that as a gesture. Push the reader into the handheld, pick up a card, and slide it through the slit in the cartridge’s roof, dotcode edge first. There is no bay and nothing to seat — a card that could be seated would be caught half way through a swipe.
All three revisions are here — Card e-Reader, Card e-Reader+ and the USA e-Reader — and they are not interchangeable, because cards are region-locked and a reader answers a foreign card with its own Region Error screen.
Full detail, including where the reader’s own dump goes, on the new Card e-Reader page.
🎮 An N64 controller, and the paks that go in it
Section titled “🎮 An N64 controller, and the paks that go in it”The Nintendo 64 got a modelled controller — and, more to the point, the expansion port in its back. Spawn a pak, push it in, and the core is told what is there:
- Controller Pak — 32 KiB of saves, counted in pages like every N64 game counts them.
- Rumble Pak — force feedback, in the games that support it.
- Transfer Pak — socket a Game Boy cartridge into it for the games that read one.
Two things about saves are worth knowing. A Controller Pak keeps its own file, so a pak carries its notes between controllers and machines rather than belonging to a game or a slot. And a Transfer Pak’s Game Boy save is the cartridge’s own — play the cart in a Game Boy, carry it to the Transfer Pak, same save, exactly as the hardware did.
The port is on the pad receiver as well, so a player on a real gamepad can use paks too.
See Nintendo 64.
Minor new features
Section titled “Minor new features”- The Expansion Pak goes into the console, replacing the Jumper Pak, and sets the core option for you — the state of the machine is the setting. The N64 also has a new primitive model.
- The FM Sound Unit attaches to a Master System for the expanded soundtrack a number of Japanese releases shipped with, again setting the core options itself.
- The Power Base Converter goes into a Genesis and plays Master System cartridges. See Sega Genesis.
Bug fixes
Section titled “Bug fixes”A Godot engine deadlock during the loading screen is fixed, along with a long tail of smaller things.