In the wake of Modern Warfare 2 pricing controversy, industry legend Chris Deering questions current model for triple-A games
Industry stalwart Chris Deering has estimated that today's triple-A video games need to be priced at £70 – if the trade's current release cycle for 'blockbuster games' is to be maintained.
His comments come just two weeks after we revealed that Activision had raised the SRP of Modern Warfare 2 to £55.
Deering is once again acting as chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, which this year takes place on Thursday, August 13th and Friday, August 14th.
At the event, industry luminaries such as Deering, Sony’s Ray Maguire, EA Sports’ Peter Moore and Eidos’ Ian Livingstone will discuss ‘the future of the blockbuster game’.
Former Sony Europe president Deering  – who is on the board of Codemasters and IGA, amongst others, told MCV this week:

“Before there can be as many successful blockbuster games as there were in the past, games have to be produced in a more efficient fashion.
“In order to price these games at a level where they would support an industry [as strongly as] they did ten years ago, they’d have to be sold at £70. But people just don’t have that kind of money, there’s a psychological glass ceiling.
“Consumers won’t spend more, but to write the game, publishers are having to spend more than ever before. That’s the key problem.”
MCV revealed that Activision had raised the trade price of Modern Warfare 2 by £10 to £55 a fortnight ago. The story has featured heavily in the national press this week.
Deering added: “The cost of development is ten times what it was for PS2, and more like 20 to 50 times more than on PSOne. Yet there are lots of things you can get for less than the relative value of paying 50p an hour for a very high end game.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/35209/Publ...g-says-Deering ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

Sega Genesis/MegaDrive/CD/32X emulator has been updated. Changes:
- Mega Drive Plugins v1.0.0. This major update to the plugins system adds support for external plugins (.dll on Windows, .so on Linux), as well as support for more than just rendering plugins.
- doc/mdp/ contains the MDP Interface Specifiction Version 1.0.0. This document is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3.
- A new manual for Gens/GS has been created. It is available in doc/manual/.
- The Game Genie functionality has been moved to an MDP plugin. It now supports
8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit patch codes, and uses a new patch code file format. Old patch code files are supported for loading; however, they will be written
in the new format when saved. Later versions will add support for patching CPU address spaces other than the main MC68000.
- New MDP Plugin: VDP Layer Options. This lets you adjust the visible layers on screen, so e.g. you can hide sprites, swap scroll priorities, and lock the palette to prevent color changes.
- New MDP Plugin: Sonic Gens. This lets you view various information in memory in several Sonic games. Sonic Gens was originally written by LOst as a standalone version of Gens.
- New renderers:
-- EPX (ported from Gens Rerecording)
-- EPX Plus (ported from Gens Rerecording)
-- Super 2xSaI (ported from Gens Plus)
-- Super Eagle (ported from Gens Plus)
-- Blargg's NTSC filter for MD
- [Win32] Ported the GDI video backend from Gens Plus. It still has a few bugs, but it mostly works.
- Extended controller configuration format. The new configuration format allows for up to 128 axes, 256 buttons, and 64 POV hats, whereas the old configuration format only allowed for 6 axes [5 axes on Win32], 112 buttons, and 4 POV hats. This mainly affects the Linux version, since Linux usually reports all axes as axes instead of mapping some axes to POV hats, and some newer controllers (e.g. the Xbox 360 controller) have more than 6 axes. Older configurations are automatically updated to use the new controller configuration format.
- The reverse-engineered 32X firmware, written by DevSter, is now included in Gens/GS. If you do not have the original Sega 32X firmware files, the reverse-engineered ones are used instead.
- Added SH2 DMA support for PWM audio. Thanks to Joseph Fenton for submitting a patch.
- [Win32] Joysticks connected after loading Gens/GS will now be detected in the Controller Configuration dialog.
- WAV dumping has been reimplemented.
- ROM History now caches the ROM type (MD/MCD/32X), so it doesn't have to check the ROM type every time the ROM History menu is rebuilt. This improves performance significantly if some ROM images were loaded from network shares.
- ROM History now keeps track of compressed files inside of multi-file archives. For example, if you have a 7z archive containing several different versions of a game, selecting version 1 will result in a ROM History entry for that specific version, and selecting version 2 will result in another ROM History entry.
- Added initial support for the "Palette Select" bit in VDP register 0. If the "Palette Select" bit is cleared, only the LSBs of each color component in CRAM is used to determine the colors to display, resulting in a maximum of 8 colors onscreen. Not very useful, but more accurate to how the MD's VDP works.
- SRAM can now be disabled in the Options menu. This fixes Puggsy, which checks for the existance of SRAM and prevents the user from advancing past a certain point if it exists. (Puggsy uses a password system, not SRAM.)
- Improved PWM scaling algorithm, provided by Chilly Willy on the Sonic Retro forums.
- A new command line option, "--boot-cd", can be specified to tell Gens/GS to boot from an actual SegaCD CD-ROM on startup.
- [Linux] Improved VSync support with the OpenGL backend. Both the MESA and SGI swap control methods are now supported.
- The video subsystem now supports fallbacks. For example, on the Linux version, if SDL+OpenGL is selected but OpenGL isn't available, it will simply revert back to SDL instead of crashing. As an added bonus, this allows for Gens/GS to start up properly on Windows NT 4.0, since the default backend on Win32 is DirectDraw 4, but NT4 doesn't support it. Instead of crashing, it will fall back to the GDI backend.
- Gens/GS no longer changes non-alphanumeric characters in SegaCD game names to spaces. This may cause some games to have different names, which will prevent their BRAM files from being loaded properly. If you have any of these games, you will need to rename the BRAM files in order to get them to load correctly.

Release 7 fixes the following bugs:
- Dragging and dropping a ROM image onto the Gens/GS window will now synchronize the menus. This bug was reported by Tets on the Sonic Retro forums.
- Loading a GSX savestate file that is not in GSX format will now show an error instead of crashing. Apparently, Gens Plus GZips its savestate files when saving by default. This bug was reported by SoNick in #retro.
- [GTK+] Copied ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

NES emulator for Windows has been updated recently.

Changes:
- improved sound emulation;
- added new PPU core;
- various changes in GUI;
- fixed bugs.

http://fceux.com/web/htdocs/ ...

Deunan has released a new version of the Dreamcast Emulator for Windows, heres the release notes:


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Straight via Australian filling, a US Patent filling for what looks like an iPhone Nano via Apple emerged recently on the USPTO directory.

The patent shows the iPhone Nano as a small device with screens on both sides. One side is shown as just a touch screen display similar to the iPhone today with menus for all the basic features including phone, text messaging, iPod, camera mode, etc etc etc.

The flip side however is where things get different. The patent shows it is a "force-sensitive touch-surface." This surface would control a click wheel like everyone is used to one the iPod of today. Somehow you control the screen side of the iPhone Nano via the controls on the back blind. Maybe the force-sensitive touch-surface has some etchings back there so you can feel your way around -- or something. There are also images of keys and whatnot being on the surface, specifically something that resembles a dialer pad.

http://www.modmyi.com/forums/iphone-...no-patent.html ...

The Cydia Store launched its first product on March 07, 2009. Cyntact sold sells for a buck, and was the first paid package through the Cydia Store. It allows you to see profile pictures in contact lists. While not the only 3rd party application store for the iPhone (Rock Your Phone also exists), the Cydia Store is definitely the most popular one, largely due to Cydia's immense popularity as the source for jailbreak packages (items you can only get when jailbroken - like themes and apps such as GV Mobile, recently kicked out of the AppStore).

http://www.modmyi.com/forums/iphone-...on-income.html ...

A few months back, Apple made a plea to the Copyright Office to make jailbreaking illegal. The EFF called their reasoning "absurd" and "FUD." It's still sitting before them to make a decision.

Apparently, Apple feels they are in a losing battle and are now throwing out some pretty far-fetched reasons to the Copyright Office in order to back up their case. For one, they say jailbreaking could let users alter the Exclusive Chip Identification number, letting the jailbreaker make anonymous calls. They say "this would be desirable to drug dealers."

In further claims, they say jailbreaking could lead to cell towers or networks being taken down Hacks to the baseband processor (BBP) would mean “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands

http://www.modmyi.com/forums/iphone-...-networks.html ...

Booboo has posted some news regarding Linux for Dingoo:


http://www.dingux.com/ ...

News from Eule


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