Flashback: The Quest for Identity was released in 1992 by Delphine Software International, designed and directed by Paul Cuisset. Conrad B. Hart wakes up with amnesia on Titan, his only clue a holocube he recorded himself: "Find me". From the jungles of Titan to the television studios of New Washington, he follows the trail of an alien invasion led by creatures able to take human form.
The game belongs to the "cinematic platformer" lineage opened by Prince of Persia and continued by Éric Chahi's Another World, released by the same publisher two years earlier. The animations are rotoscoped — drawn from live-action footage — which gives the character an unusual inertia: Conrad leans before jumping, rolls on landing, draws his gun a beat late. You do not play on reflexes but on anticipation. The cutscenes, in filled polygons, are a direct continuation of Another World's visual language.
Released first on the Amiga and then ported to just about everything that existed — Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, PC, 3DO, Jaguar, Mac — Flashback held the title of best-selling French game worldwide for many years. Recalbox does not replay the original program: it uses REminiscence, the free reimplementation of the engine written by Gregory Montoir and licensed under GPL-3.0, which reads the PC version's data files directly.
| Studio | Delphine Software International |
| Year of release | 1992 |
| Engine | Original engine, reimplemented by REminiscence |
| Game type | Cinematic action platformer |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Recalbox provides the engine, not the game. Flashback is a commercial title: its data is not shipped and must come from a copy that you own.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro reminiscence | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Libretro reminiscence is the only emulator for this system and is available on every machine, including the Raspberry Pi Zero 2. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core.
The core boots straight into the game and skips the original menu.
Place your files in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Flashback/
Recognised files: instru_f.map instru_e.map demo_uk.aba
Recalbox ships nothing at all for this system: the folder starts out empty and no download is offered in the system menu. Copy in the contents of the DATA folder of your PC (DOS) version of Flashback — that is the file set REminiscence knows how to read.
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Flashback/
├── instru_f.map ← French version
├── instru_e.map ← English version
├── demo_uk.aba
├── LEVEL1.MAP … ← the levels
├── *.MOD ← Amiga music (optional)
└── VOICE.VCE ← spoken dialogue (optional)
Recalbox makes the game appear as soon as it finds one of the three files instru_f.map, instru_e.map or demo_uk.aba; the rest of the data must sit in the same folder. The instru_*.map files correspond to the localised versions: the one you provide determines the language.
Two optional additions noticeably improve the experience: the
.MODmusic files taken from the Amiga version, and theVOICE.VCEfile which restores the spoken dialogue. Without them the game still runs, just more quietly.