Epilogue Launches Big Update To Playback Software For GB & SNES Cartridges

If you're unfamiliar with Epilgoue, they quite simply create premium cartridge readers for the GAME BOY and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Most recently, they released the SN Operator, which we reviewed a few weeks ago, and it is now shipping to customers who pre-ordered the device within the first batch window.

Upon our testing of the SN Operator, we did come across a fair few bugs, which we mentioned wouldn't please their first customers too much upon arrival. These bugs, in some cases, were pretty major, and we advised Epilogue to refine these before shipping their first batch. Well, it looks like they've been working on this update for months, regardless of our reccomendations, and although they state that it's a "quieter update" I beg to differ, as the tweaks and refinements in my eyes are pretty damn big and very welcomed.

They have officially released version 1.10.0 of Playback, their modern, and incredibly well-designed software that enables you to take full advantage of your Operators, both for SNES and GAME BOY. Yes, this update tweaks both of them in a major way! This update is specifically designed to increase performance, iron out bugs, and in Epilogue's words,, "improve overall smoothness". So what's new?

Real-time clocks that actually work

Anyone who’s tried to play an old Pokémon Gold cartridge in the last few years knows the screen: “TIME NOT SET — INTERNAL BATTERY HAS RUN DRY.” The little coin cell inside the cart died years ago, and with it went Berry growth, daily rematches, the Lapras at Union Cave, and everything else that gave those games their rhythm.

Playback now steps in when it spots a dead clock battery and uses your computer’s clock instead. The game runs as if the battery were fresh; day-night cycles work, time events trigger, and your Berries grow back.

This works for every Game Boy cartridge with a real-time clock (Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal, plus the third-party clock carts) and every Game Boy Advance cartridge with one (Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, Boktai). A handful of subtle bugs got swept up along the way, too, mostly around corrupted or out-of-range timestamps that could throw the in-game clock by years.

We also pulled the mGBA emulator up to a much more recent version while we were in there. That brings in a year of accuracy work from the mGBA team: proper Game Boy Advance clock support at the emulator level, Game Boy rumble fixes, and a long list of smaller timing and audio corrections. Older Pokémon games and any GBA title that leans on the clock should just feel more correct.

Cleaner Game Boy and Game Boy Advance audio

Playback used to receive Game Boy and Game Boy Advance audio through a community fork of mGBA that converted the signal internally before handing it to us. We then converted it again to match your audio device, which meant the sound went through two passes of resampling for no good reason.

In v1.10.0, we switched to the official mGBA project directly and now receive audio at its native rate, untouched. Playback does the conversion once, in a single pass. If you have a dedicated DAC or any high-end audio chain, you should notice a cleaner signal. For everyone else, audio is just closer to what the hardware actually produced.

Lightgun and mouse capture

We rebuilt the mouse-capture path across Windows, X11 and Wayland. Lightgun games (Super Scope and friends) now report off-screen aim correctly, whether the cursor is captured or not, so games that distinguish “shot fired off-screen” from “shot fired at target” behave the way they should. Tab is now reserved as a universal “release the cursor” shortcut, so you no longer have to hunt for the right corner of the screen to get your mouse back.

If you’ve been waiting to take Super Scope 6 seriously, now’s the time.

Two Operators, two windows

If you have more than one Operator (say a GB and an SN) and you’ve ever tried to run two Playback windows at the same time, the experience wasn’t quite right. Devices could end up assigned to the wrong window, and the two instances didn’t always agree on who owned what.

In v1.10.0, each window has clear ownership of the devices it has open and hands them back cleanly when you close it. Two Operators, two windows, two carts running side by side: properly supported now.

Smaller features

• Per-device settings filter. Settings now show only options relevant to the Operator device you currently have connected. SN Operator preferences stay out of the way when you’re on a GB Operator, and vice versa.
• Hide navigation bar during emulation. A new setting in Emulator preferences collapses the navbar while playing. Pair with borderless fullscreen for the cleanest possible look.
• Always-visible emulator controls. The opposite, for people who want the controls bar permanently in view.
• Cheats disclaimer. A one-time acknowledgement when enabling cheats, because some cheats can corrupt saves, and you should know before turning them on.
• Block unlaunchable games. Known-broken titles are flagged in the cartridge details and can’t be started, so you don’t waste time wondering whether it’s the cart or the emulator.
• Report unrecognised cartridges. If Playback doesn’t recognise your cart, try giving the contacts a clean first; sometimes that’s all it takes. If it still won’t read, you can submit it for review via a prefilled form, straight from the details panel.
• SN Operator calibration certificate. SN Operator owners can now open their calibration certificate directly from the About section.
• SN Operator detection marked beta. Cartridge detection on SN Operator now carries a beta tag, since not every result is final yet. It’s improving with every release as we gather more data from real cartridges.

Improvements

• Custom libretro cores work on notarised macOS. If you’d downloaded a third-party core on macOS (SNES9x is a common one for RetroAchievements support) and Playback silently refused to load it, that’s fixed. We added the entitlement that lets Apple’s hardened runtime trust custom dynamic libraries.
• Native Wayland. Wayland sessions now boot Playback without the X11 fallback dance, and GLX vendor detection keys off the actual session type instead of guessing.
• Flatpak on Wayland sessions launched with --force-xcb now starts cleanly; the sandbox was missing X11 socket access.
• Notification styling is now bundled in the Linux resources, so toast notifications look right on Linux for the first time.
• AppImage and Arch. AppImage builds are back in the release pipeline for both amd64 and arm64 Linux. There’s an Arch PKGBUILD for AUR now too.
• Pokémon Emerald (EU) cover art is now correct (was using the wrong artwork).
• OpenGL on lower-end GPUs handles XRGB8888 texture uploads correctly, which fixes rendering on a range of older Intel and embedded chips.
• OpenSSL bumped to 3.5.6 LTS from 3.2.0.
• GB Operator photo tooltips on Windows survive a drag-and-drop now (they used to disappear after dragging once and never come back until restart).
• Cover art on cold cache no longer flickers on first launch.

Bug fixes

• Achievements window no longer cuts off long lists; the vertical scrollbar shows up properly.
• Controllers: phantom RetroPad B presses from unmapped buttons fixed; controller input no longer triggers “Start Emulation” unintentionally; hotkey events stop leaking through to the game on top of triggering the hotkey.
• SNES core switching no longer crashes when moving between snes9x2010 and snes9x2002. Previously the old core’s controller info was leaking into the new one.
• GB Camera: photo scaling setting is now actually honoured for thumbnails; stuck-hover state on thumbnails fixed.
• Save-to-vault: backups now happen even when the read integrity check is skipped; vault filenames use local time instead of UTC, so they sort the way you’d expect.
• RA/Discord auto-auth at boot now fails silently if the network is down. No more popup at launch when you haven’t connected to wi-fi yet.
• App tour replay setting now applies only at startup, not mid-session.
• PiP button showing after settings reload in fullscreen, fixed.
• Core download stalls no longer leave the Enable button permanently stuck. There’s a transfer timeout now, and the UI recovers cleanly.
• Layout polish: navbar tabs, beta labels, cartridge details, dropdowns and message-box titles all got stability fixes for the cases where they’d flicker, mis-align, or get truncated during transitions.

Behind the scenes

We built out the end-to-end test suite for this release: language switching, FPS counter, fast-forward speed, vault, backup encryption, window resize, pixel-perfect rendering, and more. This is how we catch regressions before they reach you, instead of after.

Console (kiosk) mode got attention too, with OpenGL ES 3.0 support, frame size correctness, unified core options handling and a mock mode for development. If you don’t run Playback on a dedicated retro console build, you won’t see any of this, but it’s foundational work for things that are coming.

My thoughts

This is a huge update for those with Epilogue products, and although it doesn't fix all of the bugs that we ran into in our review process, such as playing the Super GAME BOY Adapter or certain cheats that crash your game, but that said it is a big step in the right direction, with additional features and tweaks that make the entire experience much more enjoyable.

Thanks, Epilogue, and great work on updating this during the first batch shipment window. No doubt that will make new and old customers happy.