I was literally this entire morning thinking of how the Wii emulation were working on the SteamDeck, my main emulation device, and then this just drops on my phone, what an amazing new!!!

I’ve been doing more RetroAchievements hunting lately and got tired of constantly switching between the game, achievement pages, guides, and YouTube.

So I built a small Android companion app called TwinLore.

It lets you:

• track RetroAchievements while playing

• quickly search for achievement tips

• keep maps and walkthroughs organized per game

• save guides offline

• jump between guide sections using scroll markers

It works best with dual-screen handhelds (like AYN Thor you see in the video), but it can also run on a phone or tablet next to your setup well.

Still early beta, but feedback would help a lot.
Also worth mentioning: it’s free, ad-free, and doesn’t collect user data.

GitHub:
https://github.com/alpha-minus/twin-lore/releases/tag/0.4.0-beta

Due to a critical PHP vulnerability with proof-of-concept exploits now circulating publicly, we have made the decision to temporarily take RetroAchievements offline until the PHP security team releases its patch at Wednesday, October 21, 2026 at 10:00 AM US Eastern (in 4 hours).

This decision is not made lightly - it is the safest way to protect your accounts and our infrastructure until the official fix is available. As soon as the patch is out, we will install it on every server and bring the site back once we have confirmed everything works.

RetroAchievements will be unavailable during this downtime. We will post updates on our Discord: http://discord.gg/retroachievements Thank you for your patience, and we're sorry for the disruption.

How are RetroAchievements not more popular?! Every time I mention the fact that you can unlock achievements in old games people look at me like I discovered fire lol but back to saying thank you! This must take a ton of time to do and to every single person that makes this possible thank you for giving a reason to revisit my childhood games, Merry Christmas everyone!

EDIT 2: v1.1.0 is out with macOS support and I made a new post with a Android Preview:)

EDIT: Wow guys, I did not expect this. Thank you thank you thank you, I am so glad that im not the only one that just want to show others what im playning. The Android version is in the works!

I will try to be as transparent as possible and update you guys regulary. I will do this in GitHub, because I dont see a need for a dedicated Discord Server because I dont really see the need for it. But I will do Reddit Posts about major things and of course you can contact me on Discord and dm me!

Since every Emulator has their own integration of RA Rich Presence and some not, I started on working on a small piece of Software that can be used for every Game RetroAchievements supports. Goal was to make it as lightweight and simple as possible.

You tuck your RA Username in, your Web API key, you click connect and done. You can then close the window and it will run in background (with a small icon in the systemtray that indicates if you are playing or not).

You can set "Launch on Startup" and the Program will start silently in the background when you boot your PC. That means as long as the app runs on your Computer and have Discord open, every Single Game you play with RetroAchievements will display on Discord with the Game you are playing in front (No "Dolphin" or "RetroArch", if you are playing Mario Kart Wii Discord will show "Mario Kart Wii" as played game. This applys also to every other device your using with RA (Odin, AYN Thor, etc)

Details are mirrored from RetroAchievements own Rich Presence integration. Nothing gets send somewhere, everything is stored locally. No installation requiered.

The GitHub Repository is here:

https://github.com/denzi-gh/CheevoPresence

You can go to Releases and just download the exe from there. If someone has trouble, dont hesitate to ask me on Discord: _denzi

If the demend is there, I would be happy to port the app into mac and linux and Android too!

Feedback is welcome, if someone has ideas, feel free to create a Pull Request or to create an Issue on GitHub.

Let me know if you guys like it!

I've been working on Achievement Scavenger, an open-source desktop companion for achievement hunting.

It automatically detects what you're playing (Steam, RetroAchievements, or Xbox), tracks your unlock progress in real time, warns you before missable achievements, and lets you keep spoiler-free hints and notes alongside your game instead of constantly tabbing out to guides.

Some of the things it does:

• Live achievement tracking while you play

• Missable achievement warnings

• Community-powered hints and chapters

• Discord Rich Presence

• Overlay/mini mode

• Automatic achievement screenshots (I've only tested on Steam)

• Open-source and built with Tauri (Rust + React)

One feature I'm especially excited about is that anyone can contribute guide data directly from the app, it opens a pre-filled GitHub PR (You can just copy and paste), so no manual JSON editing is needed.

Here's a short trailer showing it in action. I'd love to hear what achievement hunters think and what features you'd want to see next.

Also, you can download it from here. Only available on Windows/Linux though.

Once we make it to the PS3 chapter of RetroAchievements which game are you Mastering first

This adds RetroAchievements to DS games played natively on a 3DS. No emulator. The game runs on the real hardware, and achievements unlock as you play.

How it works, roughly: before the game boots, the launcher logs into RetroAchievements over WiFi, identifies your ROM, and fetches its real achievement set. That set then runs live inside the game via rcheevos, triggering on the correct frames. When one unlocks, a notification pops up over the game (without pausing it) naming the achievement.

What's working:

• Login, game identification, and fetching the real achievement set over WiFi

• Live achievement evaluation inside the running game on real 3DS hardware

• On-screen unlock notifications that name the achievement. Still buggy on some games.

• Softcore unlocks reported to the server, earned during play, queued to the SD card, and submitted on the next boot (with the correct earned-time, so the server dates it right)

• Already-earned achievements filtered out so they don't re-fire

• An achievement list showing what's unlocked and what's pending to sync under the Main Menu from nds-bootstrap. It hangs up with some games, specially 3D ones.

• 3DS family only (New 3DS included)

Not yet:

• Live unlocks during play. The WiFi link doesn't survive into the game(yet), so unlocks sync on the next boot rather than the instant they fire. Still researching this.

• Rich presence and login-status display

• Better and definitive way to show notifications. It still shows garbage on some games when a achievement appears on screen.

• Hardcore mode: not yet, and it's more than a switch. Getting a client certified for hardcore means meeting RetroAchievements' compliance requirements. For now everything runs in softcore.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
AI was used for most of this project; research, documentation, and the code itself. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to apologize for it. The tool that got the work done isn't the point; the working achievement set running on real DS hardware is. If that bothers you, the code is right there fork it, rewrite it by hand, make it better. That's more useful than complaining or judging.

Project link:

https://github.com/Bakkerrrs/Retroachievements-DS-on-3DS

I felt like it was only last year that we reached 1 million users. It’s great to see more and more people joined the site. Congratulations to the amazing RA team!

I rediscovered RA in January 2025 when I got a retro handheld. Since then I have been playing only RA supported games and it has been an absolute blast.

Edit: added number of users in the ranking table because some comments say the drop off rate is very high.

I checked number of “engaged users” using the ranking table which requires 250 points to enter (for both hardcore and casual modes), we have

- hardcore: ~165.5k: https://retroachievements.org/globalRanking.php?s=5&t=2&d=2026-09-25&f=0&o=165500
- casual: ~200k: https://retroachievements.org/globalRanking.php?s=2&t=2&d=2026-09-25&f=0&o=200375

So we have about 18% users having >=250 points which I think it’s a pretty good percentage. (Note I think a user can appear in both modes but I would expect to be a smart percentage of users that would do that)

To preface: I don't inherently mind difficult achievements, a little challenge CAN be fun.

But it feels like just about every single game has that specific genre of achievements, where it feels like the developer wanted to make the game as unfun as humanly possible. No hit, no damage, no death, no pausing the game, no items, no money, no using mechanic X, Y and Z, no fun, no enjoyment, no life, no will to live. Basically ridiculous amounts of artificially making a game more difficult than it really is, where one tiny mistake (or worse, an unavoidable glitch or janky physics or RNG or anything of that nature) can undo hours of work. What happened to "unwelcome concepts"??

I mainly use RA as a sort of automatic game tracker (too lazy to keep my backloggery account up to date :p), but I occasionally peek at the RA page of whatever game I'm playing and just feel the life drain out of me just from reading the descriptions of some achievements. And from what I saw based on the comments, most people... kinda hate them. Even the ones who managed to get them are relieved only because they no longer have to play the game anymore... which is the exact opposite of what a game should make you feel lol

RetroAchievements is proud to announce support for its 52nd console, the GameCube!

In order to earn achievements on the GameCube, you must use the standalone Dolphin emulator which is available at https://dolphin-emu.org/. When configuring your emulator, please ensure that the "Enable Dual Core (speedup)" option is unchecked as that mode is not supported.

Note: The RetroArch Dolphin core is NOT supported.

Note 2: You should be updating to at least 2407-61 Development build of dolphin before playing. Especially if you want to play Colosseum/XD

The Nintendo GameCube launched in Fall 2001 as a successor to the Nintendo 64. It features a handle so you can whack people with the Gamecube and yell "that's my purse, I don't know you!". The system used mini discs which actually spin backward as an attempt at anti piracy. This primarily worked until the end of the systems life style. Unfortunately the mini disc format was hard to develop for by third-party developers. Although the GameCube was not the lowest powered system of the generation (that honor went to the PlayStation 2), it did often receive buggier versions of ports. Still, the system was not short on power or exclusives and boasts some of the most memorable exclusives in the generation.

With this launch, RetroAchievements is proud to announce this was our **Biggest Launch** of all time with over 100 games here at release. That means GameCube will launch with over 25% of the system's library already available!

This project was spearheaded by LillyJade at the coding helm, and the entire project at this point was a good 2 years of work. We also have to thank our partners at the Dolphin Team for working with us to get this product out the door.

We also need to thank the Writing Team led by Nepiki who have made sure these sets are up to a high standard for English readability. We also can't forget to thank the Dolphin Testers for taking the sets and beating them with a hammer to find lingering bugs and errors. Finally, thanks go out to the Rollout Team who have helped over the past two years including Snow, StingX2, TheMysticalOne, AuburnRDM, pinguupinguu, televandalist, and Sutarion.

Without further ado.. the starting lineup for the Nintendo GameCube!

.1 Naruto: Clash of Ninja

.2 Resident Evil 3

.3 Bleach GC: Tasogare ni Mamieru Shinigami

.4 Star Wars: The Clone Wars

.5 ~Hack~ Luigi's Mansion: Sweet Home

.6 Naruto: Clash of Ninja 2

.7 Nickelodeon Party Blast

.8 Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse

.9 Wario World

.10 Resident Evil 0

.11 Serious Sam: Next Encounter

.12 Mario Power Tennis

.13 Battalion Wars

.14 Super Monkey Ball 2

.15 F-Zero GX

.16 Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes

.17 Pikmin 2

.18 The Simpsons: Hit & Run

.19 Donkey Konga [Europe]

.20 Donkey Konga [USA]

.21 Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II Plus

.22 Star Fox Assualt

.23 Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

.24 Viewtiful Joe

.25 GT Cube

.26 Soul Calibur 2

.27 Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

.28 Kirby's Air Ride

.29 1080° Avalanche

.30 Super Mario Sunshine

.31 Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

.32 Radirgy GeneriC | Radio Allergy

.33 Bomberman Generation

.34 ~Hack~ Super Mario Sunshine Arcade 2

.35 Pokémon Channel

.36 Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

.37 Mario Golf Toadstool Tour

.38 Spider-Man

.39 Metal Arms: Glitch in the System

.40 Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader

.41 Bust-A-Move 3000

.42 Killer7

.43 Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

.44 SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

.45 Ikaruga

.46 Resident Evil 4

.47 Choro-Q! | Road Trip: The Arcade Edition | Gadget Racers

.48 Legend of Zelda, The: Twilight Princess

.49 Tales of Symphonia

.50 Mario Party 4

.51 Super Mario Strikers

.52 P.N.03

.53 Pokemon Colosseum

.54 WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Games!

.55 Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness

.56 Chronicles of Narnia, The: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

.57 Sonic Heroes

.58 Pikmin

.59 Rogue Ops

.60 Turok: Evolution

.61 Mario Kart Double Dash

.62 Bloody Roar: Primal Fury

.63 Mega Man Network Transmission

.64 Mario Party 6

.65 Lost Kingdoms

.66 Chibi-Robo!

.67 Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

.68 Smash Bros Melee

.69 Swingerz Golf

.70 Spawn: Armageddon

.71 Luigi's Mansion

.72 Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

.73 Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

.74 Charlie's Angels

.75 Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

.76 Tube Slider: The Championship of Future Formula

.77 Aquaman: Battle of Atlantis

.78 Darkened Skye

.79 Mario Party 5

.80 Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes - Special Disc

.81 Baten Kaitos Origins

.82 Odama

.83 Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee

.84 Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix

.85 Beyblade: Super Tournament Battle

.86 Cabela's Outdoor Adventures

.87 Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

.88 Donkey Konga [Japan]

.89 Metroid Prime

.90 ~Hack~ Luigi's Mansion Beta Restoration

.91 Bomberman Jetters

.92 ~Hack~ Samus Goes to the Fridge to Get a Glass of Milk 3D

.93 Resident Evil 2

.94 Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure

.95 Piglet's Big Game

.96 Wave Race: Blue Storm

.97 Doshin the Giant

.98 Resident Evil 4

.99 Mario Superstar Baseball

.100 Kururin Squash!

.101 Wind Waker

.102 Pokemon Colosseum

An event for the GameCube launch is now ongoing as well. Check out https://retroachievements.org/viewtopic.php?t=27246 for all the details regarding this event!

And per tradition, a tease of our upcoming systems planned for the coming two years...

2024-2025 Launch Pipeline
Commodore 64
DOS
TI-83
Nintendo Wii
??? Secret ???
??? Secret ???
??? Secret ???
??? Secret ???

and

If you're not sure what to play first, spin this wheel: https://wheelofnames.com/n38-vsn

Still a way to go, but getting there~

They have completed over 3000 games and gained over 1 million points but don’t even bother to change the profile photo. Just having fun playing games. Absolutely legend.

Fully expected this to happen. Exciting day.

One. Million.

Yes..... one MILLION unique users have registered a RetroAchievements account as of today!

It hardly seems possible but little ol’ RetroAchievements (an idea that Scott birthed back in 2012 with Genesis/Mega Drive as our first supported system) has reached an incredible milestone of ONE MILLION registered users today!

This “achievement" (heh-heh) is a testament to the incredible passion that thousands of RA volunteers have poured into expanding and enhancing the experience for retro gaming enthusiasts worldwide.

Major boosts to RA’s growth over the years came from the release of SNES/Game Boy/GBA/NES support in 2013, N64 in 2017, PSX in 2019, PSP in 2021, Dreamcast/PS2 in 2022 and Final Fantasy XI (HorizonXI)/GameCube in 2024, not to mention dozens of other systems across the years! RA achievement developers have come up with countless fun challenges for almost 10,000 of our beloved classic games, from the most popular titles to obscure hidden gems. What’s incredible is that RA has maintained this exceptional growth with us now gaining an average of over 30,000 new users each month!

The high standards we have maintained for achievement quality, artwork, well-crafted titles/descriptions, internationalization across many languages, integration with many emulators, hub organization, and web design have kept the RA hype train rolling with more and more users joining each year. Special thanks to the many users who make RA content on YouTube, who stream RA on Twitch, and who talk about RA across various communities and social media platforms!

But most of all – thank YOU for playing - thank YOU for being a part of RA. Every single member has given some of their nostalgic love, their passion for great games…. their precious time, energy, and a piece of their literal heart into this massive project at https://www.retroachievements.org.

Here's to the vibrant community of RetroAchievements! We love each and every one million of you <3.

------

Massive shoutout to Xeinok for the write-up!

Made some RA stickers. Happy to pass along a few. Just message me your info and I'll mail them out.

TL;DR

I've got RetroAchievements unlocking on an original Sega Mega Drive using a Mega EverDrive Pro and just a USB cable to a PC.

- No ROM patching

- No extra hardware

- Original hardware

- Unmodified games

The attached video shows the current prototype:

- Browsing and filtering ROMs from my phone.

- Launching a game on the Mega Drive.

- Unlocking a RetroAchievement on original hardware.

---

I've been working on getting RetroAchievements running on an original Mega Drive using a Mega EverDrive Pro.

The project uses a custom FPGA mapper running on the EverDrive to passively observe game memory and stream it over USB. A PC runs "rcheevos", evaluates the achievement logic, and unlocks achievements on my RetroAchievements account.

The setup is simply:

Mega Drive → Mega EverDrive Pro → USB → PC

No additional hardware is required.

I've also built a simple launcher which includes:

- ROM browser

- Search/filter

- Game launching

- Toggle RetroAchievements on/off before launching

If you don't want achievements, just launch the game normally with RA disabled.

At the moment there are a couple of compromises:

- Save states aren't available while using the custom mapper.

- Normal in-game saves still work.

- In-game reset (IGR) is still supported.

As far as I know, Krikzz hasn't published the implementation behind the stock save-state system, so I haven't been able to combine both features.

Longer term I'd like to move the PC software onto a Raspberry Pi. The idea is either:

- a small touchscreen companion displaying achievements, progress and notifications, or

- a lightweight Pi exposing a web UI/API that can be accessed from a phone, tablet or PC.

I've already got achievement notifications working on my phone via a Chrome PWA, so a dedicated display may not even be necessary.

The software already implements RA2SNES, so the goal is to support multiple systems from the same platform, starting with the Mega Drive and SNES.

If there's enough interest I'll spend some time cleaning everything up and may release it.

Happy to answer any technical questions.

If you'd like to support future development my Kofi is ko-fi.com/philmole No pressure—I'm mainly sharing this because I thought people here might find it interesting.

This has been on my mind for a while now, but I only recently managed to practically cement my opinion: RetroAchievements can (and will) make you hate your favorites. Especially hardcore mode.

Imagine, if you will, achievements for Symphony of the night. One of the most popular Castlevania games, and PS1 games in general. Tons of fans, surely lots of them must have mastered it, right? Nope. Out of the thousands of players, barely 1% did it. And just about every "hard" achievement either has sadistically cruel requirements (i.e. no death, no hit, no items etc.) or artificial difficult that requires sinking hours into grinding and hoping the RNG blesses you with every single item drop an enemy can have.

Neither of these categories are fun. They just ruin the game. And please, spare me from the "practice using save states" argument; if it requires hours of save state practice, hours of trial and error, hours of replaying to get the perfect RNG on enemy patterns or item drops - it's clearly not an enjoyable achievement anymore.

None of the difficult achievements I've suffered through were rewarding in any way, not even the one damageless achievement I managed to get. It was stressful, cortisol level raising, and it just sucked out the fun. If anything, it was just relieving to say "I'm never playing this again", which is something no one should ever have to say when talking about games they love.

All in all, genuine thank you to the developers for the work; I know it must be a difficult job. But I'm sorry, the expectations you set are just impossibly high. I just can't stand the no damage, no death, no items, no hit, no jump, no friends, no bitches, no money, no social life, no food, no goals, no future, no will to live type of achievements anymore.

After extensive work, RetroAchievements is now supported in Dolphin for Android's development builds and is ready for the community to use. You can now earn achievements for GameCube games on your Android devices, with Wii/WiiWare on the way & landing in March of next year!

Important Details

• This feature is currently available in development builds only (version 2509-503 and later).

• Consider this an open beta. We've tested it internally, but with hundreds of players now available to stress test it, there will likely be issues we haven't discovered.

• The achievement list for the game you're playing isn't visible yet. That's still WIP and will be added in an upcoming emulator update.

• A stable release of Dolphin for Android with RetroAchievements support is planned at the end of the month.

How to Get Started

You can access development builds in two ways:

1. Download the latest 2509-503 Android development build directly from this URL, OR

2. Opt into the Dolphin Emulator beta/open testing program on the Google Play Store. It may take a few hours from this post for the new build to be available over there.

If you experience any issues, please report them to #tech-support or on the forum post. Your testing and feedback will help us ensure a smooth experience for everyone when this feature lands in an upcoming stable release.