JOTEGO

A lot has been happening in the FPGA arcade scene lately, and I want to hear your thoughts on where the project should go next. I'll share a few ideas I've been considering, but we'll read through all your comments and use your feedback to shape our plans. My Vision More Research I think we've reach

Research Work As more and more people are using AI to produce cores, I feel less pressure to publish new cores and more freedom to do research and validation work. We are re-evaluating how the work gets executed and we are adjusting out setup, including computers, arcade PCBs and the several FPGA pl

Two new Konami games join the beta lineup this week: ’88 Games and Rollergames. One brings back the frantic button tapping; the other puts you on skates, with an opponent to knock down and a rolling background unseend on arcades before this title. ’88 Games takes the track-and-field formula into Kon

You may remember the sound of a game before you remember the images: the roar of a crowd, a shouted warning, a tune coming through a wall of cabinets. Konami's 054539 sound chip powered X-Men, Run and Gun, Premier Soccer and dozens more. The JT cores for these games have been around for a while alre

JTKCPU: back to the real board Konami's custom CPU sits at the heart of quite a few arcade favorites. This week I put the FPGA's JTKCPU through a major update based on measurements from a real Vendetta PCB. We ran instruction probes on the original 053248 chip, recording results, condition flags and

The JTTHUNDR core -Rolling Thunder- had the potential to run one more game: Alien Sector. But it had some GFX problems. I spent a couple of days on it, but the game software seemed to be expecting something else from the hardware. I assumed that the game was not very popular and moved on. But you ne

Early update this week to bring up a new core: JTHARIER. Available for MiSTer, Pocket and SiDi128 and developed by Chris Watson in close collaboration with Jotego. After several weeks of going back and forth through several reviews, and a final edition by Jotego, the core got well aligned with both

We bring one more core by Andrea Bogazzi reviewed by the rest of the team. This is Taito's X system. Hardware-wise it shares a lot with the existing JTKIWI core (The New Zealand Story, Arkanoid 2) but it is also the first JT core sporting a Yamaha YM2610. That is the same chip as in the NeoGeo but d

We come to the last game update for the JTCPS3 core: the Third Strike. For those who know the game, this needs no introduction, for the rest: boot it up and just watch the art. Watch the use of color for the backgrounds, for the clothes... All that was hand drawn, no 3D models, no shading calculatio

We have a big list of requested features implemented and bugs fixed below. But, let me present first two new cores contributed by Andrea and reviewed by the team. Volfied, a QIX-like game from TAITO. This is a derivative board from Rainbow Islands, using the Yamaha YM2203 instead of YM2151 for sound

Rainbow Islands We added this game to the JTRASTAN core with contributions from Andrea, Fulvio, Furrtek, Skutis and IkaMusume. The core has a very solid base on reverse engineering of chips and PCB. The tilemap chip is the only piece derived from the MAME documentation, but it seems to be a simple c

We have two new games this week. I have fond memories of both. Operation Wolf This game needs no presentation. This is the spritual successor of N.Y. Captor. It reuses the idea but makes the game much more vibran and interesting. The hardware is very close to Rastan's so I have implemented the syste

We bring this week a small system that has been requested many times over the years. It is Gals Panic. This game follows the mechanics of QIX but it brings them to the 16-bit era. It is the starting point of a game series that continued onto home consoles. Indeed the SEGA Saturn has a version playab

Too many new games to fit in the title! We bring today: Double Dribble, a Konami core contributed by Andrea Bogazzi. Andrea has work on the schematics to make the core implementation aided by an AI tool and my reviews. This is good quality work that aims to achieve the high fidelity we look for The

Quick update for a new game supporte on the JTCPS3 core: Street Fighter III 2nd Impact. This game uses 20MB more memory space than the original SF3 New Generation. Those giant sprites must go somewhere! The core now operates using the same pixel clock and video signals than the CPS1/2 cores. This sh

Quick CPS3 core update (only via update_all/or direct JTBIN download): Graphic glitches should be gone Much better internal FPGA timing (almost clean). It will still work better with a good power supply that provides solid 5V at the MiSTer power jack DMA timing must be close to actual hardware now.

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The JT BETA KEY changed this week. Update your SD card. Fist of all, welcome to all new subscribers and thanks to all of you who have stayed around. I have felt your support during this hard effort and it has reminded me of how important it is to get these systems right for the community. After thre

Just a really quick update. The CPS3 core is finally running games, the video of this post comes from the JTCPS3 core. I have tested redearthn and sfiiin ROM sets and they are both functional. There is still a lot of trivial and non-trivial work to polish before the beta. I do not want to bore you w

Lots of things for today, including a core with a 3 in the name. Gradius 3 Skutis prepared the schematics for Gradius 3 a while ago and Fulvio put together a quick version of the core that was good enough to play it. Then my assistant spent two weeks making that initial version compliant with the fr

As you can see on our development kanban, we have accumulated a number of features and bug fixes on cores to be released lately. One of them is the game saving for NGPC, which we have now tested extensively and it is working well. However, I am still focused on CPS3 and reviewing a general release c

As we look back on this year at JOTEGO, it’s incredible to see just how much ground we’ve covered together. Thanks to your continued support, 2025 has been one of our most active and ambitious years so far — not just in terms of game releases, but also in technical progress and long-requested featur

A new arcade game - yet from the past!? Clockwork Aquario was developed by Westone in 1991 on Sega’s System 18 hardware, and even went through multiple location tests in 1993. However, its release was cancelled, as the industry was then in the middle of the massive fighting-game boom. The protagonis