DCEmu Featured News Articles

Well, it looks like Nintendo isn't the only gaming company that thinks Apple is the "enemy of the future" -- Sony has now also taken aim at iPhone gaming in a new PSP ad featuring Kevin Butler's pint-sized counterpart, Marcus Rivers. In it, Marcus reminds viewers that the iPhone is built for things like "texting your grandma and calling your girl," while the PSP is "built for big boy games," some of which can be had for as little as $9.99.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/17/s...in-new-psp-ad/ ...

There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we've got the goods on it.

Here's what we can tell you about the hardware: if you're a gaming fan, this is exactly the kind of phone you've been waiting for. The device is described as cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go -- in other words, it's a landscape slider with game controls in place of the typical QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is here, but instead of the small joystick, the device will have what was described as a "long touch pad" for analog controls, along with standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The phone has a large display, described as being between 3.7 and 4.1 inches with WVGA or better resolution, a 5 megapixel camera that we're told might not be final, and it'll likely have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on board. The phone is mostly black with some silver highlights, and the gamepad area is white / silver in color. Apparently it's currently branded as a Xperia device, but it looks like it will carry PlayStation branding as well. Those who've seen the phone say it looks "pretty damn sexy." The mockup above probably doesn't do the actual hardware justice, but it should give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.

On the software side, it looks like the device will be running Gingerbread (Android 3.0) with a phone-specific skin, and there will be a new area of the Android Market specifically for the games. That content will be initially accessible only by the halo device, but from the sounds of things, these titles might be made available to other Android phones if their specs and button layouts meet requirements. Games will be graphically in the range of PSX or PSP games, meaning true 3D gaming is headed to Android. Titles currently being shown off seem to be focused around some older PSX as well as new PSP offerings, with God of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and LittleBigPlanet possibly on tap, and future plans for titles which incorporate augmented reality features.

In terms of release, it's possible that the phone and ecosystem could be introduced as early as October of this year, but we have yet to confirm.

Right now we're working on getting even more detail about the phone and partnership, but we can tell you now that this is not a random rumor -- we have reason to believe that what we've heard and seen is real and coming to market. It makes perfect sense in a way -- Google gets a much-needed push into the gaming and entertainment space for Android, while Sony (via its partnership with Ericsson) finally delivers the PlayStation phone users have been wanting. We see it as a major win for both companies and the consumer... and we always need another distraction. Stay tuned to this space for updates as we get them, and in the meantime, start socking away the pennies.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/11/e...aming-platfor/ ...

News via http://www.psp-ita.com/?module=news&id=41855

New version released for PSPedict the homebrew designed by PixelDragon and currently developed by batanen that allows us to transform our beloved PSP in a dictionary Japanese / English ( for English / Italian then we arrange it the old way ) . The expanded version v0.5 has a dictionary and several improvements to the code. The coder announces that this is the last version he published the work begun by PixelDragon willing to leave to others the task of pursuing . Who will want to try it with this archive in the Annex to the procedure and the source code homebrew .
Following full changelog and downloads

Changelog :

Quote:
- New searchable dictionaries :
° Tanaka Corpus ( Divided into three parts)
° Kanjidic (for studying purposes)
° Surname ( Divided into three parts)
° Given female name ( Divided into 2 parts)
° Given bad name
° Given name gender not specified
° Place Names ( Divided into four parts)
° Railway Station
· Company name
° Organization name
° Product name
° name Unclassified ( Divided into three parts)
- Wrote the logic and added 300 kanji images . Help needed with Completing the set!
- Fixed a bug. Immediately Edict icon is now seen in menus When used SKIP / Stroke count search. ...

News via http://wololo.net/wagic/2010/08/18/h...s-than-a-week/

Coder J416′ s announced a few hours ago that his port for HBL on 6.31 is ready.

He had encountered issues unloading the main module of the game (understand: freeing some Ram for homebrews) so his work was delayed and the port of HBL wasn’t as easy as expected, but he figured out a solution to this critical issue yesterday, and announced that his code is almost ready. He announced on his blog that the release, as planned, would be done this month, most likely in less than a week.

The game used for the exploit is available on UMD and its name will be announced soon as well. It hasn’t been confirmed yet if this game is available on PSN (I’ll update this post as soon as I know). JP, US and EU versions of the game exist, although for now the exploit only works on the JP version (mostly because no hacker has worked on the US/EU versions yet, but there’s a good chance the exploit exists in those versions too, which we will of course investigate).

I will keep you updated as I get more news, if you can read Japanese you can follow the news on mamosuke’s blog or j416’s blog. I am not directly involved with this port (which was entirely done by j416) so I haven’t personally tested it yet, but mamosuke and j416 have kindly kept me updated in the past weeks (thanks guys ).

I’m extremely excited to see the results. Please keep in mind that HBL “only” allows you to play homebrews, so when the name of the game is released, please don’t buy it for an insane price if you’re expecting to play pirated games, or you’ll be disappointed. Also be sure that Sony will patch this exploit soon after it is released, so I think people who are using HBL with the patapon exploit should keep using it. Upgrading to 6.31 for the ability of playing network games, or connecting to the PSN, will probably just last for a few days/weeks before the exploit gets patched.

Stay tuned ...

Arikado has updated Heretic Wii to 0.5

Heretic Wii is a Wii port of Heretic based in the open source HHeretic 0.2 engine.



Changelog
0.5
USB Support
GC Controller Support
Classic Controller Support
Wiimote and Nunchuk controls rewritten to take advantage of the Wiimotes IR
Fixed saving and loading
Other various bug fixes and tweaks

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Heretic_Wii ...

PlayStation CEO and Chairman Kazuo Hirai says future PlayStation consoles will not be download-only.

Speaking in an interview with MCV, Hirai insists Sony’s digital-only PSPgo was a success, despite slow sales of the portable.

But the firm has no intention of adopting the download-only model for future PSP consoles.

“We are doing business not just in the developed nations of the world, but also in parts of the world where network infrastructure isn’t as robust as one would hope for,” he said.

“There’s always going to be requirement for a business with the size and scope of our magnitude to have a physical medium. Whether it a portable device or a home-based console.

“So to say we are going to put all our eggs into a network-only basket? I think that is taking that a little too far. In general, to think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even ten years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme."

There will be more from our interview with Hirai in next week's issue of MCV magazine.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/40528/Hira...load-only-PSP2 ...

News via http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthre...243#post493243

So as I wrote. Public PS2PSXe preview. Only command line version attached. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get current sources to work properly (I'm halfway with some major changes and it will take awhile to complete them). The one attached you can consider as "the last one that actually works", or simply rev168.

Now all the necessary stuff.

The emu supports both PAL and NTSC display, but I REALLY RECOMMEND leaving the default PAL output. Why? Well, it's the only mode I use. Many fixes were made to make PAL games show less glitches in PAL mode... When you switch the display to NTSC it most often will show more glitches.

The PAL scph7502 bios is recommended to run games.

PAL games are recommended due to two simple reasons:
1. PAL games require only 50fps to be at 100% speed (NTSC games require 60, so PAL games are easier to emulate).
2. PAL games should look nice when using PAL display mode... NTSC games will always look much worse.
(well, I live in Europe. It's PAL region, so everything has been coded with PAL games and PAL TVs in mind. Actually, the option to switch display into NTSC mode has been added in rev163... so no fixes for that)
So use NTSC display mode only if your TV doesn't support PAL (yes I know this sucks... Most TVs in Europe nowadays support NTSC... On the other hand, most TVs in US do not support PAL... What a crap...).

Many of the parts of the emulator (like cue/ccd parser) have not been changed/updated for few years (the time I created them in 2007 or so). I focused on the most important parts of the emu... Once the time comes, everything will be replaced by proper code rather than some temporary solutions.

You shouldn't experience any problems launching it if you know what you're doing... Otherwise it might crash before even showing you anything.

The emu doesn't provide any drivers or modules other than the parts of the emu itself. But thanks to this it supports any devices that you will load modules for. I've tested it with internal hdd, usb, lan, dvd and even ps2 mc. I recommend using internal hdd or lan (host device). You can use usb, but the asynchronous cd plugin is tweaked for high bandwidth media... So when using with usb, some stuttering might occur here and there.

There is no real requirement for the modules present before the emu is launched except one. The emu REQUIRES IOMANX module to be loaded before launching it (older PS2link versions were loading it by default, but you will have to load it manually for newer ones or change it and recompile it).

Default ps2client versions will always truncate the files opened for writing and reading (even if O_TRUNC is not specified). Use the one from uLE or just change it by yourself).

Now the options:

-cdimage=PATH
Path to the cd image. 2352 bytes/sector images supported. CUE and CCD cuesheets are supported. Multiple tracks in ccd/cue are supported but only if all tracks are in a single file (no multiple files). For multiple files just point to the first track (it contains the data). PATH can be either relative to ps2psxe executable or full path.

-exepath=PATH
Launches PSX exe file (for intros, demos and such).

-bios=PATH
Bios path (bios/scph7502.bin by default)

-digitizepad
Internally switches pads into digital only mode (visible to PSX code). If you then manually enable analog mode (small analog switch at the center of the pad), then the left analog stick will act as D-PAD and right analog stick will act as R1/L1 horizontally. It's a nice features for games that do not support analog sticks at all (like FF7)

-spfix
Stack pointer fix. Try it if something goes wrong. It might be able to fix some games. It disables one of the optimizations (not many games make any use of it anyway)...

-xoff=OFFSET and -yoff=OFFSET
Positions the screen on TV. You can use it to correct the image position if your TV leaves eg. black bars at right or left side.

-sub
Enables subchannel support. It is really necessary only for libcrypt protected games... For two years or so not even for them. It's kind of obsolete as the emulator has automatic patch for libcrypt, so unpatched games like FF9 PAL will work even without subchannel data. The subchannel file has to have the same name as the img/bin/ccd/cue, just with the extension being .sub (so if the image is ff9pald1.cue, then the subfile is ff9pald1.sub). It's not really necessary anymore.

-excep
Disables some exception stuff. Use it if a games experiences problems. I believe this one should not be necessary anymore, but I left it... Didn't see a game that would need it in year or so.

-4ever
Disables most of the automatic libcrypt patches (not all of them though). It's there just for testing, really. You won't have to use it until you want to test subchannel file support.

-32bpp
Switches into 32bpp mode. I really RECOMMEND using it unless the game has texture problems (clut problems to be exact). It's not default only because it's not native PSX format . So use it unless it causes problems.

-nofps
...

News via http://www.aep-emu.de/PNphpBB2-file-...c-t-15480.html

A new test version of the Dreamcast emulator Makaron has been released.


Quote:
I changed a few things in T12 core and I´m finally quite happy with how it works so I´ll probably release another version soon. That would be the last of Test 12 series I suppose. The only thing preventing me from doing so is one last issue with the multithreaded renderer, it causes random crashes (though some systems seem more affected than others). It´s a pretty complicated issue though and cannot be fully fixed without major changes that would take considerable more time. For now I just added an option in the INI file to disable multithreading (not completly, just this part) and while it slows the emulator down it´s not as bad as the crashes.

Anyway, stay tuned. I want to make a release before I mess up the code again with my experiments, and I have quite a few ideas to try out.


UPDATE

Here it is, Test 12/5. There´s a small ReadMe included so be sure to read it. No Atomiswave yet since I didn´t think T12 core could be salvaged, so I didn´t bother with it. I wasn´t exactly wrong there, with all the changes I made this version could easily be called Test 13.

Anyway, other things of note (from the top of my head):

Current renderer needs to go. I have a replacement of sorts prepared, as a part of software renderer project. I´m pretty sure it will be a bit slower but that remains to be seen. I need the new framework anyway to support both D3D9 and D3D11 at the same time.

SH4 recompiler could use some sort of abstraction layer to handle the optimizations better. Again, it´d probably end up being marginally slower but more manageable and could in future be paired with x64 emitter.

I´m going to drop support for non-SSE2 CPUs soon, mostly because it´d be easier to code the new recompiler. Quite frankly any CPU without SSE2 is not going to be fast enough to handle Makaron anyway.

Windows XP and Direct3D 9 support is going to stay for now but once D3D11 renderer starts working properly I will focus mostly on that. While I realize that droping DX9 will upset XP users, I´d like to point out that Makaron always required a modern PC. I havent introduced any major changes lately but before that Makaron was the first Dreamcast emulator to require shaders, then it would work only with Shader Model 2 or higher. In return you got faster palletized texture support, shadows and fogging. Now it´s going to be DirectX 11.

UPDATE 2

That bug I wrote about? Now you´re seeing it´s effects first-hand. Oh well, guess I better fix that one since I didn´t add an option to skip DX11 init.

Redownload T12/5 from here, this time when Direct3D 11 is present on the system but actual device can´t be created it will just silently ignore the problem. This was the intention after all. And I also added workaround for the scaler issue. ...

News via http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingoon...bcef73ef1a88d3

xdpirate launched a new site, specializing on homebrew reviews!


Quote
Dingoo Homebrew Reviews!

Since some people have requested this in the Suggestions-forums, I took the liberty of setting up a homebrew review site myself, just because it sounded something that'd be fun to administrate. However, it isn't going to be exactly like suggested, everyone aren't going to be freely publishing reviews when they feel like it. If you wish to write reviews, send me a PM, and I'll hook you up with an author account on DHR. You are then free to review homebrew applications.


I will, however, perform spell- and grammar checks on your work. I'm by no means a total grammar nazi, but if you can't handle the English language, you shouldn't be publishing articles in said language. If your articles are total and utter crap, and contains more errors than not, I'll be happy to promptly remove your account.


Last, but not least, I want this to be informative, and tell people about what they'd like to know about before downloading/installing a piece of homebrew.

http://www.qqmore.info/dhr/ ...