Paprium, probably the most infamous of after-market Genesis titles, has finally been reverse-engineered to work on emulators. Now, for those not in the know, this might seem like a complete non-story, and usually, a modern Genesis game having its ROM dumped would be. However, anyone who knows even a little bit about the huge controversy that surrounds Paprium may feel like this is some form of justice. Although it still will not work on SD card readers such as EverDrive.

To provide some background, and without delving into extensive details, considering how well-documented the situation is, Paprium‘s release was a horror show from start to finish. The bottom line is that hundreds, if not thousands, of gamers who made payments to developer Watermelon have not received the game and are still waiting. To make matters worse, Watermelon double-dipped and took another round of crowdfunding money for ports of Paprium to modern consoles and Dreamcast, among other things. This is still nowhere to be seen either.

For anyone wanting the full story, we highly recommend watching DJ Slopes’ YouTube video that goes into immense detail about the project’s failings. But, skip forward to today, and a group of clever folk have finally managed to get the game working on a Genesis emulator. The reason this game hasn’t been dumped before, given that the game was released years ago, was that Watermelon used a custom chip inside the cartridges to improve the music and graphic compression.

After lots of hard work, a team of dedicated enthusiasts has reverse-engineered the extra hardware to create a core that can be added to emulators, most notably RetroArch. At this point, it is some justice for those who never received a copy of Paprium after backing the original campaign. This also draws a line under a lot of the controversy surrounding Watermelon and its infamous owner, Gwenael “Fonzie” Godde. Now to see if the ports to other consoles actually appear…