DCEmu Featured News Articles

Today we have a bunch of new Virtual Boy videos for you. In cooperation with Grooveraider, we are happy to present you with a total of 4 tradeshow videos from WCES 1995 and E3 1996, showing some fantastic, never before seen stuff.

Nintendo Laser Montage (E3 1996)
Just before a live demonstration of the long awaited Nintendo 64 console on E3 1996. Actor/voiceover Charles Martinet kept the trade show attendees amused while portraying Mario's nemesis Wario on an enormous C-shaped projection screen complete with a laser montage of Nintendo's game line-up. You had to have been there to really experience Nintendo's MASSIVE show booth.

E3 1996 VB Booth
The Virtual Boy booth at E3 1996 with a lot of VB display with playable versions of Bound High and Dragon Hopper. This contains some seconds of Dragon Hopper footage!

WCES 1995 VB Booth
Camera footage showing the Virtual Boy booth at WCES 1995. The video consists of three parts:
1. Surrounding of the VB booth
2. People waiting in front of the VB booth in order to be let into a darkened room where numerous VB Demos were shown on video
3. Coming out of the Demo room into another area with many VB displays

Virtual Boy Technical Demos (WCES 1995)
The fourth and last video shows 3:45 minutes of camera footage of the Virtual Boy demos shown on video on WCES 1995! You'll see not only prototypes of Teleroboxer, Galactic Pinball, Red Alarm and Vertical Force, but also the F1 and Dolphin demos as well as the first ever moving images of the Mario and Starfox demos!

Bonus: Mario Demo (WCES 1995)
The complete Mario demo, taken from the above video of VB demos at WCES 1995.

Furthermore, Grooveraider sent us new and better scans of almost all press releases from WCES 1995 and E3 1995, a WCES 1995 VB brochure, as well as this picture of him with Gunpei Yokoi and his autographed copy of the E3 1995 programme. Yokoi signing it can be seen in this video we added earlier. Jealous? I certainly am.

A huge thank you goes out to Grooveraider for everything!

Read on for quotes.

Chinese New Year holidays are over - work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:

At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day
While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it's fine, we'll use the silkscreen - if not, we'll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).
It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we'll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

The desktop fully works. It's like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora - and PLAY!
Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
Movie Playing: Working... but has some issues (see below)
USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
Power Saving Mode: Yep, it's included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.
What issues are there?

The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow, DJWillis is working on it, but it's time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands
There's no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you're just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn't yet working.
Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800x480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included
There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn't work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!
So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.
Please don't expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 - adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release - let's hope for WiFi!

Another quick note on updating the system:

When things work fine, we're going to setup our own repository server for firmware updates. You can then easily do a system update with the Pandora. The packages we use will be tested so that they shouldn't break anything
In the beginning, the updates will be full flash updates, until the basic system will be completely stable. Then we'll setup the repository server (which basically means: when WiFi is working).

Everyone who wants to help us can do so. There will be a bugtracker for reporting any issues. The complete system is already available via GIT to all devs, so patches and bugfixes can basically be sent to us by everyone
The first few months with the new OS will be pretty exciting! I've seen how