via http://www.aep-emu.de/

Free Heroes2 Engine is a free implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine using SDL.

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Aug, 04, 2011 (2440 rev.)

• Added: option: autosave begin of day
• Fixed: world: move "lean to" object
• Fixed: game: AI recruit hero, fixed: recruit hero and surrender status
• Fixed game: crash, Castle::ActionNewWeek, Castle::ActionNewMonth
• Fixed: AI: recruit troops for castles
• Fixed: game: Army::color null after load game
• Update: xml resources
• Fixed: AI: add prioritize range attackers and others...
• Added: game: WeekOfMonster can be 1 in every 3
• Fixed: battle animation, opponent animation and kill troop animation
• Fixed: World: next teleport scan
• Fixed: pocketpc: necromancer build shrine
• Fixed: GUI: incorrect focus after restart game
• Fixed: GUI: incorrect show splitter

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via http://www.aep-emu.de/

D2X-XL is an OpenGL-port of Descent II.
Supported platforms are Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Quote:
updates since last AEP reported release 1.15.242

v1.15.251
Fixed: The program crashed while trying to join a multiplayer game when the old style menus were enabled
v1.15.250
Fixed: The mission download failed (due to a general bug in timeout handling)
v1.15.249
Fixed: A syntax flaw in a shader program made the shader unusable
v1.15.248
Fixed: Explosion effects on objects weren´t rendered
Fixed: Splash damage of huge explosions (e.g. from Mega missiles) wasn´t computed correctly
v1.15.247
Fixed: Transparent stuff was rendered incomplete (e.g. only one triangle of a transparent face was shown)
1.15.246
Fixed: Missiles and gun shots couldn´t move into skybox segments anymore
Fixed: Missiles and gun shots in skybox segments were invisible
Improved: Reintroduced an optimization for stereoscopic rendering to the transparency renderer
v1.15.245
Improved: Decreased the light data memory footprint by about 40%
v1.15.244
Fixed: The transparency renderer consumed a whopping 290 MB of memory which could cause program crashes when it couldn´t allocate its buffers
(its memory consumptions has now been decreased to around 10 MB)
v1.15.243
Fixed: A bug in secret level handling could cause program crashes

For the complete changelog, please visit the official site ...

via http://www.aep-emu.de/PNphpBB2-file-...c-t-17397.html

The NES emulator puNES for Linux and Windows (SDL) has been updated.

Quote:
Changelog: 0.28

• in this release I have implemented a "Timeline" bar. In the lower left corner there is now a bar with which you can go "back in time" up to a maximum of 60 seconds. Each tick corresponds to 5 seconds. If you don´t want to use the mouse you can also use the keyboard. Pressing CTRL will pause the emulator and, while keeping CTRL pressed, you can move the bar with the left and right buttons.

...

The PSP Emulator for windows has been updated yet again, heres whats new:

Deleted old files from r2261.

http://buildbot.orphis.net/jpcsp/ ...

The following applications have been added/updated:
5 August 2011

• bootOperaModUSB v0.4
• Console Shooter Beta 1 -> 2
• Cubicle Shooter v0.1 -> v0.2
• SaveGame Manager GX r108 -> r110
• SysCheck v2.1.0 b9 -> b10
• Yabause Wii r2649 beta 18 -> beta21

http://www.codemii.com/2011/08/05/hb...–-week-31-2/ ...

via http://dknute.livejournal.com/39276.html

And they said imitation diamond wasn't good enough



So, does it work? Sure. It's a very early version though. I've hit some metastability problems so I switched from external ARM7 MCU to NIOS2 running on FPGA to speed up debugging. After I reversed my main clock polarity (yeah, Star Trek style) and it worked better I finally realised that I'm running a synchronous system with asynchronous inputs. Which is basically the same as having two different clock domains since I have no control over setup/hold times... So I've added two-stage synchronizers to /DIOR and /DIOW but that's additional latency and Dreamcast has a bad habit of deasserting /CS signals shortly after rising /DIOx. These things always work so well on paper

In the end the hardware side of GD interface is pretty small, should fit in EP2C5 (that's Cyclone II FPGA with 5k logic elements) and that's pretty cheap. The downside is I only have so much internal RAM so the main data buffer is just 8kB. While external SRAM could help here, I'm not yet sure it's worth the trouble. We'll see.

Digital audio is completly not supported yet (but is part of the design, so it will be added eventually) and I just wanted to test it out ASAP so I went with slow, PIO-only SD card access and very inefficient CPU buffering. Also, external MCU needs to be connected to FPGA with some sort of data bus and this becomes a bottleneck for the transfers, as it turns out. For example my ARM7 doesn't have a dedicated external memory interface so I have to do everything myself using a PIO port. With only 30 pins (minus a few for SPI and clock output) all I could manage was 8-bit shared address/data bus. Not very fast, unfortunately.

Because of the slow transfers games exhibit various issues, like missing textures, slowdowns, stuttering sound. This will get better as the project matures. In fact, with proper buffering I'm sure I can get it working as well as original GD drive and perhaps even faster - up to some 2x, which is the limit of what one can do with SD cards in SPI mode. Well, there's always the USB route I suppose.

By the way - I get simply tons of spam in the comments now. I've enabled LJ CAPTCHA but that only cut it in half or so. Worst of all, the spam looks (at the first sight) as proper comments, pretty nice English, capital letters, periods. I might accidentaly delete some actual comments while cleaning so keep that in mind when posting here. And if the situation gets even worse I'll probably disallow anonymous comments completly... though that's the last resort.



EDIT: Okay, a small explanation on what this does.

I started this project long time ago but lost interest after hitting some walls. Recently I had a few good ideas and decided to work on it a bit.

What you see on the photo is Dreamcast with it's cover off and the GD drive assembly removed. I cut some holes and soldered wires directly to the mainboard to avoid messing with the original connector. This way I can always plug the drive back in and use it as before - or even better, I can use FPGA as logic analyzer to watch the traffic.

In this configuration there is no real drive and FPGA runs a soft-core CPU that emulates it. Obviously there's some glue logic in there as well or I wouldn't need an FPGA in the first place Data is being pulled from SD card - you can see it inserted just over the flat cables. With this I can run any dumped game, and unlike CD rips I actually emulate a GD media so the Dreamcast can't tell the difference. The USB is used to program the FPGA and I can't disconnect it because I don't have a license for that NIOS2 soft-CPU core, it will stop working after the PC uplink is lost. Other than that I can't use it for data transfers unfortunately.

The idea is to have a much smaller (and cheaper) FPGA here with fast external MCU. Data would be stored on SD media or pulled via USB 2.0 uplink to PC.

So far I've tested a couple of games for EU region, and a few JP ones after I hacked them to be multi-region I do have Japanese Dreamcast mainboard (well, two actually) but this is the only one I have modified for the project. Once this goes out of prototype phase I'd like to find a matching connector and just make it a plug-in replacement for the GD drive.

So... Skies of Arcadia works, at least EU version. Hacked US one shows no picture but I can hear it running. It works on Makaron but I'm starting to wonder if there is a problem with this particular dump... Anyway, the GDEMU is good enough to not freeze the intro sequence like the ripped version does. There is about 3 seconds of video/audio desync at the end of the intro due to the transfer speed being a bit too low. Same things happens in Dead or Alive 2 intro, which is also pretty long. But other than that it seems to work. Street Fighter Alpha 3 has some sound issues in the attract mode but not during actual fights. This is all after a few improvements I made today, I ...

Up until now the only way to liberate your Wii console and enable the use of homebrew with System Menu 4.3 was to use a gamedisc based exploit such as “BatHaxx”, “Return of the Jodi” and others.Today we are announcing a project that changes this completely and removes the requirement for an exploitable game.
In memory of BannerBomb, we present you with LetterBomb , a brand new System Menu exploit that will allow you to enable homebrew with the push of an envelope (no stamp licking involved)
This exploit reuses (and abuses) some of some Nintendo’s Wii Messageboard functionality.
You will need:

• A Wii running System Menu 4.3 (E/U/J/K)
• A SD(HC) card with some free space
• Your Wii’s WiFi MAC Address (available from your Wii’s system settings). This is needed because the Wii will only accept messages addressed to its specific MAC address.
• A few minutes of your time

For this very special occasion we have created an easy-peasy webpage that takes away some of the pain that is usually involved with getting homebrew onto your system:

http://please.hackmii.com

This webpage will ask you for some necessary information (such as your System Menu region and MAC address), and will then return a nicely packaged ZIP file that is ready for extraction to the root of your SD card. Simple eh?
All that is missing from that point is a boot.elf/boot.dol file (that you will need to place in the root of your card), and you should be good to go. For your convenience we have an option to prepackage and bundle the HackMii Installer boot.elf (this is enabled by default).
So, how do I do this?
Simple…. once you’ve unzipped the file to your SD card (and inserted it) just navigate to the “messageboard” on your Wii and in the default view you should browse to “yesterday” (the place where you usually see yesterday’s messages) – sometimes this may be “today” or “two days ago” (this depends on the timezone you are in).
From this view you will be presented with a small envelope (that should obviously stand out against the rest of your plain old boring ones), click it, kick back, twiddle your thumbs (the Brits among you, go and make a cup of tea) cross your fingers and hope it worked.
DISCLAIMER: We are aware of a similar exploit by giantpune (good work!), but as of today this has not been released. In anticipation of its release we decided to reverse engineer, hack and implement something ourselves.

http://hackmii.com/2011/08/letterbomb/ ...

via http://psp.dashhacks.com/2011/08/09/...ta-5-released/

Who’s jamming Geecko’s gSquare? Pretty awesome, ain’t it? Well did you know said homebrew was built using Geecko’s 2D graphics library — gLib2D? That means you too can create pure awesomeness with relative ease, should you, yourself be a developer.
gLib2D provides a layer between your code and the PSPGU, letting you interact with the PSP graphics processor for rendering & manipulating 2D graphics. It’s much easier than talking directly to the PSPGU. Include the gLib2D library in your project and code on.

Beta 5 Changes

•Improved support of intraFont
•Renamed g* functions to g2d*
•Removed g2dSetCoord*Relative’s third argument
•Using constants instead of bools for some g2d* functions (better readability)
•Dynamic allocation of the display list, no more artifacts with a small heap
•Replaced G2D_FALSE and G2D_TRUE by false and true
•Added a global scale factor : g2d(Set/Get/Reset)GlobalScale
•Better scaling quality
•Lots of code rework
•No more swizzling artifacts
•Smaller display list size, saves 3/4 megabyte
•Forced coordmode with an inverted object is no longer applied
•Corrected documentation ...

According to Pocket Gamer, EA's taking a scattershot approach to succeeding on the iOS platform with two of its recently revealed upcoming releases. The first isBattlefield 3, which EA wasn't keen to share any details about -- though the safe bet is that the game will resemble the iOS version of the series' last installment,Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The second is Theme Park, a new version of the 1994 amusement park management sim which is absolutely nothing like Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

No release details beyond "later this year" were given to Pocket Gamer, though both titles will be playable on the show floor of Gamescom next week. We can't wait to fluidly switch between the two, heating up our blood with a round of evildoer-shooting followed by a cool-off period in the Bouncy Castle.http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/09/ea-bringing-theme-park-battlefield-3-to-ios/ ...