Anti-piracy measures don't come more ingenious than overlaying hacked DS versions of Michael Jackson: The Experience with a vuvuzela drone. Especially when you consider that Ubisoft apparently knew nothing about it.

But the inventor, Marcelo Oliveira, knows that annoying as the South African plastic horn can be, it may take a teensy bit more to curb piracy completely.

"When I came up with the idea," he said (according to Tiny Cartridge), "I thought it would at least make the game pirates laugh.

"I never imagined it would become so popular and show up on so many sites, and that the original Youtube video would have over 140,000 views."

Oliveira worked for Ubisoft São Paulo, for which MJ: The Experience is reported to be its last ever game.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...was-for-laughs ...

How many consoles from this generation have now been sold around the UK? Answer: 32.4 million.

That covers everything from PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 to DS and PSP. The number was found buried within a meaty GAME financial paper.

Chart-Track, data-tracker and publisher of the results, didn't break down the number by platform. But we can assume that Nintendo's consoles dominate the pile, Xbox 360 is sandwiched somewhere in the middle and Sony's machines snap at heels from the rear.

The new total (based on sales ending 4th December 2011) signifies a 5.2 million bump on last year's lump sum. That's the slowest growth for a couple of years, but with Kinect and Move out and 3DS on the horizon, 2011 could set about rectifying that. Similarly, if Nintendo chose to dock the price of Wii, sales may once more shoot through the roof.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...talled-base-is ...

Sony has offered PlayStation Plus subscribers perhaps the premium service's most eye-catching deal yet: LittleBigPlanet spin-off Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves free of charge.

Plus subscribers will be able to download the PlayStation Move-compatible game a week before it goes on general release on 15th December. Wait, that's today!

The idea is for the person with the Move controller to flick switches to help people using the normal PS3 pad controls to progress.

As an additional treat, the LittleBigPlanet 2 beta will be extended – but only for PS Plus subscribers. "We were gutted we couldn't give you the first LBP2 beta exclusively but to hopefully make up for it a little, we have managed to persuade the guys to extend the LBP2 beta for you Plus members," PlayStation Network product manager James Thorpe said on the EU PlayStation Blog.

"The numbers are unfortunately limited but if you have been chosen then you should have already received an email and are hopefully playing, creating and sharing as we speak."

He added: "This is just the start of the December treats so keep your eyes open for another update very soon."

The PS3's PlayStation Plus service launched in the summer. It costs £39.99 annually - or £11.99 for 90 days.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-spin-off-free ...

DiiLC 1.2.2 released by Conanac

DiiLC is a simple application to download and insert the DLC (downloadable content) or HDLC (hacked downloadable content) into Animal Crossing City Folk savegame file (use Waninkoko's savegame extractor for extracting savegame file). This application searches the DLC and HDLC files from the distributing servers. It could download and insert four DLCs (for US, EU, JP, and KR regions) and one HDLC that are available at the time when the application is running. It will process item, design and associated chosen letter from the downloaded file (either DLC or HDLC). User could choose to directly store the letter with item or design pattern into either the chosen player pocket and design slots (including global design slot in Able Sister's shop) or ask Wendell and Pete to deliver those.

Changelog
1.2.2 – 05 December 2010
Fix a bug for built-in item

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/DiiLC ...

News via http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/scea-...-action-72427/

On the eve of everyone screaming about the new v3.55 Firmware update, killing off the Downgrading PS3 consoles.

Sony has also been busy with new paperwork in a court room today, and have re-opened their case against the Jailbreakers in the United States.

Lucky, for everyone it is almost XMAS season, so the next big court date will be February 24, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. in front of Honorable Richard Seeborg which will now also take place in the Golden Gate city of San Francisco.

In the meantime SCEA is busy filing court papers and most likely new printouts from all the forum sites and other sites that have appeared in the last month with the outbreak of all these new fancy dongles and downgrades.

So it seems tonight, Sony is not happy with just releasing a v3.55 update, it looks like they plan a new court battle also, and we here at PSX-SCENE will keep you updated as SCEA starts filing their paperwork thruout the XMAS holidays.

Sony becomes the new Scrooge in our holiday books this year! ...

News via http://www.psp-hacks.com/2010/12/07/...ance-with-hbl/

Developer frillybob emailed this in yesterday — it’s a tweaked out version of gpSP for all you that are using Half Byte Loader. If ya don’t know, gpSP emulates the Game Boy Advance. What’s new in this version? Primarily tweaks to improve your overall GBA+HBL experience. Tweaks like:

•Speed boost for 6.20/6.30/6.31 users
•PRX in place for when TN-HEN gets released (not done of course)
•Less crashes with saving games (specifically Mario Party Advance, that’s what made me code this better for HBL)
•Added special HBL font (not in use, going to be later ...

News via http://boards.openpandora.org/index....le-2010-12-07/

Nubs and boards

The first 2000 of the new nubs have successfully arrived at the board company in Texas yesterday at 10am (according to the UPS tracking information)

If what they told us is true and they really have over 2000 boards finished, putting the nubs on should not be a big deal and happen pretty fast.
But let's be careful here - so far, we have no proof that the boards really exist. They missed a few deadlines already - but then again, they might've been waiting for the final nubs to appear.
Trey (as mentioned before, he's one of the guys from the community here) will most probably be visiting them tomorrow to find out what the status is.
Let's all hope he comes back with good news.

If they haven't produced as many boards as they claimed, I can only hope you continue to support us. If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't have come this far.
And after all, they successfully built 900 boards so far so we know they can do it. They won't have the excuse that they're waiting for the nubs anymore AND we have Trey to regularly check the production, so it should be possible getting the remaining boards soon!

And as you know - we're also currently setting up a batch with a new company - so in worst case, they can start the production.
We're trying to do whatever we can to keep the Pandora alive. All we need is your support! Then we can do it!


LCD Cables

If you take a look at the threads, the issue of the purple tint of death hasn't occured often since we began to handle the LCD cable extra careful.
Some still seem to be week and fail, but that was about 3 out of 700 so far.

Still, the LCD cable needs a lot of work (we need to apply a lot of copper tape manually for shielding) and we don't want ANY cable to fail in the future.
We're getting some samples from a different company next week (some contact he had at MSI proposed them to us). That company is specialized on flex cables, so they know exactly how to produce the cables that they won't break.
They also shielded the cables, so we won't need to do that manually anymore.
That will make things easier in the future.


TV Out Cables

The TV Out cable production can now be started anytime and should take 4 - 6 weeks.
I want to wait for the next big batch of boards to ship from Texas before doing it though, because if the company in Texas doesn't work reliable, we need to concentrate on that first!
But finally, it's ready to be produced.


Broken Nubs

It was planned that the company in Texas replaces the nubs, but currently, as long as we don't know how fast they're really working, we're looking for options.
The best option is doing it ourselves - saves shipping costs and I know I can rely on myself
ERSA (one of the biggest companies creating soldering and desoldering tools) is really helpful and is currently investigating if they can provide us a solution to easily remove the nubs.

If this is the case, then we can finally repair broken nub boards once all the new nubs are there.
This might be after christmas, because during christmas season there are always a lot of delays everywhere (also in production), but we'll inform you when the time is finally there.


Well, as usual, time is our only enemy - but we will face that enemy! ...

News via http://ps3.gx-mod.com/modules/news/a...p?storyid=2345

TimRex released a new version of its set of emulators for Commodore. You will be able to emulate the C64, C128, and VIC20 Plus4.

Features:

- Full speed emulation
- Support Audio (FastSID)
- Support 16:9, 4:3
- Support of filters (with preview)
- Autoload
- Warp Mode (~ 350-700% of the current speed)
- On-Screen Keyboard.
- Keyboard support (partial implementation).
- Support for most formats, uncompressed (. D64. D71. D80. D81. D82. G64. G41. X64. T64. Tap. Prg. P00)

New / fixed:

- C128 Support
- Fixed On-Screen Keyboard (virtual keyboard)
- Initial support for emulation RESID (better audio)
- Fixed a minor bug that caused a return to the settings screen
- Added PIC1.PNG
- Support for inserting a disk image without rebooting (TRIANGLE)
- Added compatibility mode SlowLoad (SQUARE). This will disable the user mode and activate FastLoad True drive emulation (TDE) for titles that require it to improve compatibility
- Assigning buttons RUN / STOP to L3
- Assigning the right stick to the arrow keys (up / down / left / right)
- Fixed the assignment of keys to buttons F1/F3/F5/F7 L1/L2/R1/R2
- Significant increase in CPU speed of the order of 1749% due to the deactivation of the audio emulation mode during Warp. This speeds up loading times relatively long.
- Optimization of the size of audio buffers ...

News via http://ps3.gx-mod.com/modules/news/a...p?storyid=2337

facanferff PS3 offers an application that allows you to open files of type .txt / .cpp / .c / .h.

Features :

- File Explorer to select a document
- Option to increase / decrease the font size
- Option to increase / decrease the number of lines in the document to be read
- Go to file browser when you're on a document (R3) ...