Homebrew keeps proving that old hardware still has plenty to say. This week’s haul spans everything from arcade-perfect conversions to a full-scale mod that might technically count as homebrew if you squint hard enough, though it’s built by a team large enough to make most indie studios jealous.
Arcade Perfection, Eventually
JOTD is back at it with an AGA version of Ghosts’n Goblins for the Commodore Amiga, transcoding the original arcade ROM to deliver what might finally be the definitive home version. The project uses the original game data, including that iconic “ALL RIGHT RESEVED” typo, and implements interrupt-based blitting plus corkscrew scrolling techniques to handle ten-screen-wide maps without bloating memory usage. Early builds show some sprite wobbling during horizontal scrolling (a quirk inherited from the arcade itself, though amplified here), but JOTD has confirmed fixes are coming. IM76’s new soundtrack arrangements are already in, and the AGA hardware finally gives those colors proper arcade-accurate saturation. If you’ve been waiting decades for Arthur’s nightmare run through demon-infested graveyards to look right on Amiga hardware, this is the one to watch.
RCampeador’s Genesis port of Super Pang just hit v0.2, adding four more World Tour levels (now at 10 out of the SNES version’s 40), implementing the machine gun power-up, and reworking the sprite engine for bricks to maintain 60fps. Music remains missing while the dev hunts for someone to convert the soundtrack to YM2612, but the core balloon-popping action is intact with full two-player support. It’s shaping up as a solid complement to the SNES original.
On ZX Spectrum, Bob’s Stuff delivered an arcade port of Data East’s 1981 maze-chaser Lock’n’Chase, originally released as part of The Midnight Brew Collection 2025 physical cassette before going free. You play thief Lupin collecting coins while dodging four cops, closing vault doors to stall pursuit and ducking through side tunnels when cornered. The AY sound matches the arcade surprisingly well, and the graphics nail the look even if Spectrum color limitations force some compromises. Lee Bee handled sprites and audio; Allan Turvey coded the beeper support for 48K machines.
New Stuff on Old Silicon
The Atari 7800 just got Rogue 7800, a work-in-progress roguelike that proves even 1986 hardware can handle procedurally generated dungeon crawling if someone’s stubborn enough to make it happen. The game features procedural runs, permadeath, and all the replayability hallmarks that define the genre, compressed into a system whose most complex game was probably a helicopter shooter. It’s currently nominated for “Best WIP Homebrew” in the Atari 7800 category and already playable, though details on mechanics remain sparse. If you can run it on a flash cart or emulator, it’s out there waiting, rough edges and all.
FamiDash brings Geometry Dash’s rhythm-platforming chaos to the NES with surprisingly faithful results. The game strips down Geometry Dash’s core loop (timing jumps to music while dodging spikes) into something the Famicom’s hardware can actually render, keeping the momentum and instant-restart flow that made the original compulsive. It won’t win awards for graphical fidelity, but it captures the feel, which matters more.
Wheeze! is a Game Boy platformer about Pumpy, a sentient inhaler fighting pollution and corrupt healthcare executives, because apparently we’ve run out of normal mascot ideas and that’s beautiful. Vault Interactive built it with Unity and GBStudio, targeting DMG-era authenticity with tongue-in-cheek humor reminiscent of Rare’s N64 output. The game includes segments where Pumpy pilots a plane and squares off against a giant cigar, which sounds absurd until you remember Amazing Tater and James Pond were real products people bought. A Kickstarter campaign is pending, with a demo expected around summer 2026.
GlowPoint is Retro Nanny’s take on arcade puzzler Flash Point for Amiga, built because no official home conversion ever materialized and the nearest arcade cabinet was ten miles away. JMD pitched the concept to the Powder team years ago and got nowhere, eventually hacking together a Flash version in 2009 before losing the files. Hardwired recoded the engine while JMD handled graphics, levels, and music; version 0.7.2 adds Amateur/Medium/Pro difficulty modes that adjust how many upcoming Tetris pieces you can preview, plus better keyboard handling and per-stage leaderboards. It runs on any 68000 Amiga with 1MB RAM, though 68010+ with Fast RAM is recommended.
The Big One
Skyblivion straddles the line between mod and homebrew. It’s technically a fan project remaking The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion inside Skyrim‘s engine, but the scope rivals full commercial releases. The team just dropped new screenshots of Wendelbek, an Ayleid ruin east of Bravil, showing darker corridors with better organic lighting than the 2006 original. All of Cyrodiil is being ported with 223 quests (some original, some new), plus Oblivion mechanics like class systems and its original lockpicking that Skyrim ditched. Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine will arrive post-launch. Originally slated for 2025, the project got delayed into 2026 partly because Bethesda announced an official Oblivion Remaster, though no release date is set yet. It’s technically a mod, but when a volunteer team rebuilds an entire RPG from scratch with this level of polish, calling it “homebrew” feels accurate in spirit if not strict definition.
Also Worth Mentioning
Gobliiins 6 just launched on PC as a direct sequel to Gobliiins 2, reuniting Fingus and Winkle for another round of comical point-and-click puzzling. The original series creator directed it, packing in 16 levels with French and English support. It’s not homebrew in the strictest sense (it’s a modern PC release) but its retro pedigree and the fact that it follows Gobliiins 5 (itself a throwback project) puts it in adjacent territory.
Kula World, the PlayStation puzzle game about guiding a beach ball through gravity-defying mazes, is getting ported to the Sega 32X by OldPirate11, using the 3D engine from XProger’s 32X OpenLara port as its foundation. Early footage shows the first level running surprisingly well on hardware that was notorious for underdelivering on its “true 32-bit” promises, though the developer is still soliciting hardware tests to confirm stability across different 32X units.
For a hobby supposedly obsessed with the past, this week offered a lot of evidence that “retro” just means “willing to work with constraints most developers abandoned decades ago.” Whether that’s admirable or insane depends on how you feel about corkscrew scrolling.
