DCEmu Featured News Articles

As shops prepare to open stores at midnight to sell Call of Duty: Black Ops and gamers around the world are anxiously for the likes of Fallout: New Vegas and Vanquish to pop through their letterboxes, one developer close to the hardware manufacturers has predicted that the next round of consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will ditch physical media entirely.

Indeed Blitz Games Studio chief executive officer Philip Oliver would be surprised if the PlayStation 4, Xbox 720 and Wii HD – if that's what they're called – played discs at all.

"Let's be honest, a lot of us have got smart phones – mostly iPhones – certainly in this office there are iPhones," he told Eurogamer. "I can't remember the last time I went into a shop to buy an iPhone game, and I haven't missed it. In fact I've got lots of iPhone games and I'm quite happy.

"With the current generation of consoles, the best games come in physical form. But the next range of consoles that will be out in the next five years, why would any of those need physical media? Why would they want physical media?"

Why indeed. According to Oliver, the benefit of going exclusively digital far outweighs the benefit of sticking with physical discs.

"If you've got it physically and you trade it, the hardware manufacturer just lost out, big time," he said.

"When they produce their next console - let's call it Sony Next, it could be any platform holder Next – if they make it only a digital store, they absolutely control everything. Pricing, their margins, you can't trade it second hand.

"Their logistics and overheads come down considerably. The cost of manufacture of the original console comes down considerably. The reliability goes through the roof because there are no moving parts. Why would they not?

"It would surprise me if any of the next round of consoles has physical media.

"What we know about that's coming – launching next year – is still physical media. But beyond that I just don't see the point.

"If you were designing a machine right now, why would you want physical media? It would be crazy."

Blitz Games Studios is currently working on a raft of multiplatform titles, including Kinect launch games The Biggest Loser and Yoostar 2, and the just-announced Kinect game Fantastic Pets for THQ, due March 2011.

Oliver's comments contradict those from Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai, who in August insisted that a digital future is over 10 years away.

"We do business in parts of the world where network infrastructure isn't as robust as one would hope," Hirai said.

"There's always going to be requirement for a business of our size and scope to have a physical medium.

"To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even 10 years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme."

Oliver, though, reckons digital-only consoles will benefit the consumer as well as the companies that make them.

"Once you've got something and you've turned it digital and you've stuck it on the net, it's there forever," he said. "Whereas if I only had a videotape or a disc box, if I lose it or break it, that's it. It's over.

"In some ways it's more secure being digital. I own it more because I've always got access to it.

"Photographs – I can access my digital photographs way easier than I can access my physical ones. I wouldn't even know where they are.

"It's completely generational. I've got kids and they have no value in discs and physical things."

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have refused to comment directly on their plans for their next home consoles.

Sony and Microsoft have been keen to push motion-sensing add-ons PS Move and Kinect, respectively, while Nintendo points towards its glasses-free 3D handheld the 3DS.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...y-ps4-xbox-720 ...

If your performance in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty isn't where you'd like it to be, perhaps it's because your controllers aren't glowing enough. Sure, the StarCraft 2-branded Spectre mouse, Marauder keyboard and Banshee headset from Razer (all designed in collaboration with Blizzard) have other features that make them well-suited for games -- like specialized configuration utilities and quick response times -- but those aren't why anyone would buy one of these. Cool backlighting is.

Besides, when the keyboard description lists things like "Optimized Key Travel Distance" as a selling point, "pretty lights" doesn't seem like such a minor thing to latch on to. The set will be released in the US, Europe and Korea in November, with the mouse retailing for $80 (€80/94,800 won), and the keyboard and headset for $120 (€120/142,800 won) each.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/20/st...t-up-november/ ...

We're still left wondering about its "winter 2010" release date, but Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam has now been priced at $15 (€12.99, £9.99, 1200 MSP). The DLC expansion will add four new maps, 15 new weapons and six vehicles to fit in with its setting. Era-specific items include the M79 grenade launcher, Navy SEAL XM22 machine gun, Huey helicopter and the ability to "RUN, FORREST! RUN!" from all the bullets and explosions.

The DLC also features a '60s soundtrack comprising 49 tracks across eight in-game radio channels. So, just recline on the battlefield and listen to "Ride of the Valkyries" as the destruction occurs all around.

And now we just keep on waiting for that date to show up -- like we did on prom night.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/21/ba...till-not-date/ ...

THQ has Fantastic Pets.

It's an augmented reality game for Kinect that's due March 2011.

So, it's like real-life but better.

The pets you're given at the start of Fantastic Pets are rubbish: cat, dog, horse, lizard. Chuck them out, send them back - rubbish!

But they can become great. Through training and competitions and plenty of TLC, your beasts can change, eventually morphing into stunning dragons or unicorns - hence Fantastic Pets.

Blitz Games is making it and employing voice recognition as well as gesture input.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...lity-on-kinect ...

Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer will be different to Modern Warfare 2. How? There won't be any drop-shotting. Instead, you'll be diving to prone.

"Another [change] is this whole new core movement mechanic called diving to prone. It's something that we found was very interesting; it's used best for evasive defensive manoeuvres, but we needed to make sure we balanced that because we understand that drop-shotting is frustrating for some people," community manager Josh Olin told Inside Xbox.

"So we wanted to make sure that this thing wasn't going to be used aggressively to grief - to frustrate players. There is a sort of a recovery time after you land and you'll have to take a half-second to pull your gun back up, so it's actually a penalty if you try to use it as an offensive manoeuvre."

Treyarch implemented 'diving to prone' because the community asked for it. Other examples of requested features are icons that fade from the HUD to clear your view; shotgun returning to primary weapon status and grid coordinates on the overhead map: "It's going to be very easy for you to call out exactly where action is happening," declared Olin.

He said all of these are "little subtle things" that "fans are really going to like".

In Call of Duty: Black Ops, killstreaks don't count towards other killstreaks. Online director Dan Bunting said there were "a lot" of complains about "how the rich get richer and it becomes a griefing mechanic and it encourages people to camp".

"We wanted to clean that up a bit," Bunting said.

Black Ops killstreaks will be "interactive", not "fire and forget". So, if you order the attack chopper in you have to pick a spot on the map where it hovers rather than let it circle around the map. Or there's the mortar team that you can pick up to three locations on the map and get "a really fast targeted strike to those places".

Perks have changed too.

"The perk design philosophy is we want every perk to feel like it supports a specific gameplay style," Bunting explained. "We want to beef up this characterisation of if I select a perk this represents me and how I play the game.

"One of the big changes we're making in Black Ops multiplayer is that the Perk 1 slot determines what your character model is. For instance, Flak Jacket decreases explosive damage, so the character model is all beefed up - he's inspired by that bomb disposer guy with the padding and extra elbow-pads and knee-pads and helmet. So you can tell from a distance and at a glance that that guy has Flak Jacket as his Perk 1 slot selection, and if you throw a grenade he's probably not going to die from it."

Bunting said there is another perk called Hacker that let's you not only see enemy-deployed equipment but also to hack it and claim it for your team without the original owner knowing.

The Inside Xbox video coincides with a leak of what appear to be the 14 maps playable in Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer.

According to cod7blackops, these are the snowy Array (large), the Vietnam streets of Cracked (large), the Cuban base of Crisis (medium), the military facility of Firing Range (small), the Russian electrical plant of Grid (medium), the NVA prison camp of Hanoi (medium), the Cuban city of Havana (medium), the jungle of Jungle (large), the spaceship launch facility of Launch (large), the nuclear testing grounds of Nuketown (small), the nuclear plant of Radiation (medium), the snowy research facility of Summit (medium), the urban estate of Villa (medium) and the old Soviet base of WMD (medium).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ses-drop-shots ...

News from http://boards.openpandora.org/index....on-2010-10-20/

Well, it's more than time for an update on the board production site.
Michael had a conference call today with the company, and here is what they told us:

Over 2000 boards are finished with SMT populating.
The last 1000 boards are half finished (SMT populating only on one side yet).

Over 1000 boards have already been tested (well, except for the nubs).

While not all 3000 are finished yet, if what they tell is true, they should be finished when the nubs arrive.

We're currently also working together with another company that is VERY interested in the whole Pandora project.
If sales go higher we might need more than one company to actually produce the boards, as the capacity of the current one would be full.
Also, the given deadline have not been held yet (they wanted all boards finished except for the nubs on Monday). We need reliable deadlines if we want to give reliable lead times in the future. It just adds to our costs if parts, etc. are there and paid but the production did not finish in time.
But first, everything needs to be setup and test runs have to be made before we can say we will switch. This happens parallel to the production by the old company. ...

Newly released for Pandora

Hi,

PND Here
No source code changes from scintilla.org scite221.tgz were needed.
Compiled with prefix=/mnt/utmp/scite . All files in the pnd are writable by user, so you can open the global options file and edit it directly in scite (no need for editing as root). Also, I recommend that you do your option modifications to the global options file, because that is in the appdata. If you create an user options file that will be written to your home directory (propably on NAND), but since that doesnt happen automatically and is avoidable I decided not to change the scite home dir to appdata.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php...dpost&p=922585 ...

Newly released for Pandora



GemRB 0.6.2 to run Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on the Pandora

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/...?0,0,0,0,5,204 ...

Newly released for Pandora



Defendguin is a clone of the arcade game "Defender," but with a Linux theme. Your mission is to defend little penguinoids from being captured and mutated.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/...0,0,0,0,27,225 ...