Finally yet another site comes back from the Death, Pandora Homebrew was the very first site to reveal the unnamed console that was to become the Pandora. The Pandora is at present the most powerful of all handhelds that are used for homebrew.

Check out all the news from the begining of the console up to the present day here --> http://pandora.dcemu.co.uk/ ...

PC Gaming our News site for everything PC Related inc Homebrew, free games, emulators, hardware news and Gaming news has returned from its hibernation.

The site started in 2006 and has returned to its full state,

Check it out here --> http://pc-gaming.dcemu.co.uk/ ...

Zouzzz released a new version of UpdateSPY, this programs allows you to download each Microsoft update and will give detailed information about each kernel/dash update (release date, burns fuses, size, files details, ...)

What's new/fixed:
* added detected for 2 Betas
* added donwload and detection of 2.0.13599.0 with avatars
* added some thanks

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...EEkyolFRyl.php ...

fbBuild v0.32 has been released, which will allow to create a freeBOOT-style NAND image and reboot JTAG-able 360s into the latest 13599 dashboard!

What's new/fixed:
* fixed yet another bug in the ini parser (affected lhelper.xex integration)
- corrected bad block detection bug on large block dumps (nandmu)
* correct mobile dat extraction on small block dumps for big block controllers
* corrected wording (oops!) of ECD option in ini sample file
* added option to ini file to try to retain NAND MU data on big block machines
* added option to ini file to set which power-on reason starts xell when not using oldvd/nodvd
* -v messages are now automatically logged to a file regardless of specifying -v on command line
* core and ini updated to allow specifying a power reason to cause dual NAND !SWITCH command
* add 13599

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...lyPBdPUwfs.php ...

Tuxuser released a new version of his homebrew application that will allow you to easily update just the XeLL part of your freeBOOT NAND. It'd been updated following fbBuild v0.32's release, and adds support for the 13599 kernel:
Official Site: http://libxenon.org
http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...lZuJcAjBoa.php ...

cOz released a new version of Dash Launch build for JTAG 360s.

What's new/fixed:
- added hddalive
- added 13599
- relocate external files so old files will no longer be used accidentally
new path is \default.xex dir\VERSION\files
ie: GAME:\13599\patches_jasper.bin

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...ElophLUmyf.php ...

News via http://blackbird.usask.ca/wordpress/?p=277

Since I did a similar post for the Xbox 360 XDK a while back and since this is intended to be mostly a developer-oriented blog, I thought it would be in keeping with that spirit to let people have a general idea of what to expect from a debug PS3 – which recently arrived.

Profiling/debugging
There are some limitations as to what you can do with regards to profiling – even on a Debugging Station. Code instrumentation through gcov is entirely possible, but this was not very appealing to me anymore given that we have been able to do this more or less even on Retail with Themaister’s net-stdio implementation. Gprof seems to have been made unavailable as Sony started moving more and more away from the open source GNU toolchain they originally based their development environment on. What’s left is a proprietary profiler that will not work on Debugging Stations but requires a Reference Tool instead – it has 256MB extra main RAM, bumping up the main system RAM in total to 512MB (plus 256MB RAM for the RSX) – which, together with the unit’s Communication Processor, gives it the extra horsepower it needs to do real-time profiling on-the-fly amongst some other things like realtime video capturing and graphical analysis through GPAD – which I’ll touch on in a moment.

LibGCM HUD

A very nice feature which seems to be only available on debug PS3s is the ability to run code with an RSX profiling tool called ‘GCM HUD’. As the name would imply, this is a Heads-Up Display overlaid on top of the application you’re running that neatly provides you with a point-and-click interface giving you access to features such as as:

•Fragment/Vertex program debugger (with the ability to set breakpoints and step through the code line by line from the console itself – with no PC having to be involved or connected to the PS3.
•RSX Performance Counters (telling you how effectively you’re utilizing the RSX).
•RSX Command Buffer log (showing you the workload of the RSX in real-time)
The whole interface is mouse-driven – so to interact with it, you have to hook up an USB mouse to be able to control it. This is not where the usefulness of this tool ends, however – GPAD (Graphics Performance Analyzer and Debugger) allows you to interface your PC with this HUD and dump all the performance data to your PC. However, again, some options – such as live video capturing – can only be done with the Reference Tool.

GPAD on a Windows PC interfacing with a debug PS3 running GCM HUD


Samples
A brief rundown of the samples that struck my eye -

Deferred shading
Deferred shading lends itself well to the architecture of the PS3 where you have a comparatively humble GPU (RSX) and up to 6 SPEs each running at 3.2GHz – the idea is to essentially subdivide the result of a shading algorithm into multiple parts that can be spread across different render targets/CPUs only to combine them at the end into one composite whole. Using this approach, the RSX can simply offload a lot of the vertex and fragment computations that are done in shaders to the SPEs which in turn crunch through the calculations (the original shader algorithm having been subdivided into parts for each SPE to chew through) only for the RSX to combine all these separate parts and render the picture.

Commercial game developers like DICE have started using this approach for games like Battlefield 3 to achieve graphical results and performance which normally would have been unattainable if all that was available to them was the RSX alone. A link to a slideshow presentation is available here.

Deferred shading sample pics



Yes, the FPS count starts to drop heavily once you start adding extra spot lights.

PSGL samples
At one point, Sony was asking developers whether they would be interested in having PSGL conform to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specs (link here). This has unfortunately never happened however, as developers seem to have mostly preferred to go with libGCM as their main graphics API of choice on PS3. This has meant that the development environment has started becoming more libGCM-centric over the years with PSGL eventually becoming a second-class citizen – in fact, new features like 3D stereo mode is not even possible unless you are using libGCM directly.

However, this has not deterred them from still making available a couple of nice samples that illustrate what PSGL is capable of in conjunction with Cg shaders (which is mostly what we use with the homebrew emulators up until now). Some nice examples show Cg being applied to render hair, skin mapping, normal mapping, parallax mapping, and sophisticated water effects (the latter ones definitely being a cut above our own water.cg shader – made by Themaister).

Conclusion
What the debug PS3 will allow us to do is to finally start getting rid of bugs – memory leaks that were simply impossible to flush out with a retail box because of the inherent ...

20th Century Fox is dipping its downloading toes into the 21st century's waters, releasing movies on Android in addition to good, old-fashioned Blu-ray. According to the Financial Times, retail discs of X-Men: First Class will direct owners to a website where they can sideload a digital version of the film onto their Android device of choice. Apparently some of the suits over at Fox caught wind of how popular Android tablets are getting, and now see them as complementary, not cannibalistic (remember that industry buzz kill?) Sure, right now you shouldn't expect any Netflix-sized library of titles, but perhaps we can all agree this is a step in the right download-to-own direction. Residents of the US, UK, Germany, and France will get the first crack at downloading the films. The rest of you can just stream and wait.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/2...droid-devices/ ...

Under eight hours. That was the time it took to jailbreak beta 3 of iOS 5, which dropped back on July 11th and was unleashed later that day. Now beta 4 is out and, well, our stopwatches are ticking. A new beta of iTunes has also been included, though looking through the change log there's nothing particularly amazing about this release. Among other minutia, the Twitter app will now prompt you if it's unable to identify your location before you exit it, MobileMe local contacts are deleted instead of being merged, and iCloud file names are now case sensitive. Yes, we can hear you CamelCase lovers cheering.

Interestingly, this is the first version of iOS5 that is said to be able to be applied OTA -- though that particular option comes with the warning that all photos will be deleted should you give it a try. We're guessing that "feature" will not be present in the final release candidate, but we could be wrong. Would certainly make for a fun Easter egg...

Update: We're actually having issues applying this on our many and myriad devices, and we're seeing others reporting the same. We'll keep trying, but let us know how you're getting on in comments.

Update 2: Looks like we got it. We had to go back to 4.3.4 and then we were able to move up to beta 4. Maybe that'll work for you. Maybe you'll be still stuck in the doldrums of beta 3. Either way, you're still okay by our book.

Update 3: Looks like the jailbreak is out in full force. Not too shabby, eh?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/i...ilbreak-timer/ ...