DCEmu Featured News Articles

Politicians in the real-life town of Ciudad Juarez are petitioning for Ubisoft's upcoming shooter Call of Juarez: The Cartel to be blocked from sale in Mexico.
Chihuahua state politicians "unanimously" voted to request that the federal Interior Department ban the modern-day shooter, according to congressman Ricardo Boone Salmon.
Salmon told the AP that "It is true there is a serious crime situation, which we are not trying to hide. But we also should not expose children to this kind of scenarios so that they are going to grow up with this kind of image and lack of values."
Ciudad Juarez has seen 6000 deaths from drug-related violence over the last two years – a factor which also led to a number of senior Texas police recently expressing concern about the game's use of the setting.
State congress leader Entrique Serrano was concerned that the game might provide a negative inspiration to local youth. "Children wind up being easily involved in criminal acts over time, because among other things, during their childhood not enough care has been taken about what they see on television and playing video games. They believe so much blood and death is normal."
The first two Call of Juarez games were set in the 19th century, but developer Techland has relocated the third game to present-day Mexican ganglands.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-of-juarez-ban
...

EA has formed a new internal studio, Victory Games, which is to focus on strategy games for the publisher.
In a relaunch of its Command & Conquer website – mysteriously now pulled, but seen in full by GamesIndustry.biz last night – the publisher revealed that Victory had locations in LA, Texas and Shanghai China.
EA's strategy portfolio in 2009 suffered a large round of lay-offs at internal studio EA LA, which had previously handled the publisher's Command & Conquer and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth titles.
The new studio will apparently work on a fresh "AAA" C&C title, claimed Victory general manager Jon Van Canegham in a now-removed interview. "We're not just working on a game, though. Our general focus is on the future of Command & Conquer.
"That means updating a lot of the core technology to create a stable base for future development, and leveraging that work on this first game."
The new game will be a PC title and, according to the vanished site's About page, plans to "combine classic RTS gameplay with bold new technology, innovative new concepts and, as always, tanks by the dozen."
Van Canegham has previously worked on Heroes of Might and Magic games for Ubisoft, as well as holding executive positions at MMO publisher Trion Worlds. He was allegedly removed from his position as president and CCO at the latter in 2009.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-victory-games
...

The first list of game firms appearing at this year's GamesCom in Cologne have been revealed.
Appearing at the August 17 - 21 show are the likes of EA, Nintendo, Ubisoft, 2K and Valve. A number of major names – such as Activision and Square - are not yet listed, while SEGA and Capcom, no-shows in 2010, are yet to appear.

The full list of confirmed publishers so far, as revealed by GoNintendo, is as follows:

• Electronic Arts
• DeepSilver
• Konami
• Namco Bandai
• Nintendo
• Ubisoft
• Warner Bros
• 2K
• Bethesda Softworks
• Frogster
• NCsoft
• Trion Worlds
• Valve Corporation
• Hama
• Razer
• Bigben Interactive

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-gamescom-2011 ...

Scribblenauts studio 5th Cell believes digital platforms XBLA and PSN make more sense for a developer of its size than attempting to move to full console development.
"We want to start small but we want smart growth," creative director Jeremiah Slaczka toldGamesIndustry.biz in an interview published today. "We're not hiring bodies and biting off more than we can chew. DS to XBLA makes sense as a next step. Whereas DS to Xbox 360 might be possible, it's maybe going to be a hard road. "
The studio is currently working on XBLA action-shooter Hybrid, which it has scaled up to 65 staff for as the bar for XBLA is so much higher than it used to be four years ago. We're seeing a lot of people go to XBLA with games that look like console games.
Although "When you break the math down we make far more money on Hybrid on XBLA that we would on a retail game," 5th Cell is conscious of the risks involved.
"I think there's opportunities but you've got to be careful about riding a whole company on it. Especially as experimentation, you can have just a few people on it. Hybrid's 30-40 people and even DS games are 30 people.
"Whereas with iPhone you can screw around, iterate, try different things. You're not making tons of money and bank-rolling the whole company but you can still make decent money."
For the full interview with Slaczka and 5th Cell's general manager Joseph Tringali, in which they also discuss being a third-party success on Nintendo platforms, why they won't lay off staff come the end of a project and their resistance to publishing deals, please click here.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-it-used-to-be
...

via EverythingHQ


With all the recent price drops circulating Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and even reports suggesting the company may even introduce an official price drop, you can’t help wonder why Sony are really doing this for. If they really wanted to drop the price of their machine the best opportunity would have been at E3 last year. So, there must be a motive behind the recent price drops from major retailers – Sony are reportedly looking into a hack-proof PS3 SKU.

According to what I have been told by an anonymous source Sony are already deep into plans of developing a hack-proof PS3 system. This is mainly due to the recent leaks of Killzone 3 which has worried Sony of their console becoming a mainstream threat to piracy.

The hack-proof SKU will be a slim PlayStation 3 model and will contain a 300GB hard drive as an incentive to purchase the hack-proof system – the price of the SKU will be £186.99, my source informs me. The scheduled launch is unsure at this time due to Sony seeing if they can win the battle in the courts against the root of all the PS3 hacks – George Hotz.

Sony is essentially trying to get rid of all the old SKUs with these price drops – and even their own price drop incoming possibly – so it makes way for their new hack-proof model. ...

News via http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic...d7aca2a1860dcc
http://libbag.atfreeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10 ...

News via nmax








http://www.dubquake.net/ ...

News via AEP

A new beta version of OpenTTD has been released. OpenTTD is a clone of the Microprose game "Transport Tycoon Deluxe", a popular game originally written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.

Quote:
1.1.0-RC1 (2011-02-1
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Feature: [NewGRF] Test all possible industry layouts during construction and prospecting [FS#4131] (r22012, r22010)
- Feature: Wheel scrolling in the console (r21982)
- Feature: Console command to reset the engine pool. It removes the traces of engines which are no longer associated to a NewGRF, and can be used to e.g. ´fix´ scenarios which were screwed up by the author. You can only use it when there are no vehicles in the game though (r21975)
- Feature: Add a setting to enable/disable funding local road reconstruction (r21974)
- Feature: Introduce ´minimal´ number of industries as a replacment for the old ´none´ setting in the new game window (r21969)
- Change: When loading old savegames with long trains set the maximum train length to the length of the longest train (r22061)
- Change: Always report mammoth trains are disabled to NewGRFs, and allow the maximum train length to be modified in multiplayer as well [FS#4471] (r22004)
- Fix: Remove invalid keycodes when reading hotkeys.cfg [FS#4510] (r22094)
- Fix: The server list did not get sorted with one item in it, so the ´position in the list´ variable was never updated causing problems when using the keyboard shortcuts for scrolling [FS#4514] (r22093)
- Fix: When deleting towns, only relocate objects during DC_EXEC (r22087)
- Fix: [Windows] If fullscreen fails with current resolution, use desktop resolution [FS#4489] (r22081)
- Fix: The owner view of the smallmap was not updated after a company colour change (r22079)
- Fix: Maximum train length interfered with wagon replacement when wagon removal was turned on [FS#4499] (r22078)
- Fix: NewGRFs with invalid multi-tile houses could cause a valid 1x1 house following it to be seen as multi-tile, causing crashes [FS#4501] (r22075)
- Fix: Immediately update the train weight when you change the multiplier for train cargo weight (r22073)
- Fix: Some hotkey names in hotkey.cfg for the scenario editor toolbar were completely bogus (r22071)
- Fix: Crashes when disconnecting after requesting the map [FS#4503] (r22070)
- Fix: Delete all savegame packets, not just the first one (r22069)
- Fix: Return ´connection lost´ instead of ´okay´ when SendPackets closed the connection, so we do not try to do anything else with the closed socket (r22068)
- Fix: Do not hold a mutex when sending packets and thus possibly closing the connection as that wants to acquire the mutex again (r22067)
- Fix: Verify we can allocate an Order, OrderList, CargoPacket, CargoPayment, and others before we actually try to do so (all corner cases) [FS#4468] (r22066, r22057, r22047, r22042, r22040, r22033, r22031, r22026, r22025, r22024, r22023, r22022)
- Fix: Crash when disconnecting and reconnecting while the server is still saving the savegame [FS#4497] (r22064)
- Fix: Memory leak when saving with LZMA or zlib fails mid-way (r22062)
- Fix: Make the send chat message window follow the position of the status bar (r22059)
- Fix: Metric and imperial HP are not the same. As imperial HP are used internally, set a conversion rate for metric HP [FS#4408] (r22056)
- Fix: [Squirrel] Some invalid squirrel code caused the squirrel compiler to crash [FS#4490] (r22055)
- Fix: The land area information window was not updated after a language change (r22053)
- Fix: Roads under road stops would get a wrong owner after overbuilding (r22051)
- Fix: In ancient savegames, e.g. TTO savegames, non primary vehicles (wagons and such) could have unitnumbers or even orders. However, these orders would not be updated when a station is removed. As such some savegames have wagons with current orders to invalid stations which triggers trouble in the load conversion. So, trash any orders/unitnumbers a non-primary vehicle has [FS#4496] (r22050)
- Fix: [NewGRF] Company 0 does not always exist, so put temporary vehicles in a valid company (r22048)
- Fix: Make sure order indices stay in range when copying, sharing, unsharing or deleting all orders [FS#4487] (r22046)
- Fix: Update the consist cache when a part of a train is flipped in the depot [FS#4493] (r22044)
- Fix: Invalidate the right windows when a part of a train is flipped in the depot (r22043)
- Fix: Tab completion in chat did not cycle through all possible options (r22038)
- Fix: Crash when watching the vehicle view of a vehicle that has multiple sequential nearest depot orders (or consists of a single nearest depot order) when there is no depot with index 0 [FS#4488] (r22034)
- Fix: The server list got not resorted/redrawn after NewGRFs were downloaded [FS#4482] (r22029)
- Fix: When paused and having the allowed actions while paused setting on ´no actions´ cheating ...

News via AEP
A new version of DSP Emulator has been released. DSP emulates ZX SPECTRUM +3, ZX Spectrum 128, ZX Spectrum 48, Arcade, Amstrad CPC 464, NES and Game Boy.

Quote:
21/02 - DSP Emulator 0.11b1 WIP 20/02
Another release of DSP 0.11b1 WIP binary and source.
Added new CPU MCS51 serires.
Added MCU i8751 to Black Tiger (removed protection patches).
Added ´Repulse´ driver with sound.
:: Homepage ...