Talk about a success story. Nintendo's jump into the console market was a gamble which turned a simple toy company into one of the biggest videogame console manufacturers in the biz.

Nintendo began it's gaming history producing arcade hits like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, and selling the licensing rights to those games for home console use (See Colecovision). Eventually Nintendo decided to take a crack at the home console industry.

The Nintendo Famicom (FAMIly COMputer) videogame system was released in Japan in 1984. The console's great specs, and ports on Nintendo's popular arcade titles, quickly made it a popular favorite in Japan. The Famicom sold 2.5 million systems in that same year. With success achieved in Japan, Nintendo set it's eyes on the American gaming market. They began negotiations with the American videogame console industry leader Atari to bring the Famicom to the U.S.

The "Great Videogame Crash of 1984", and some poor business announcements forced Atari to pull out of the agreement. After the negotiations with Atari to sell the Famicom fell through, Nintendo decided to release the system on their own regardless of the weak videogame market or the recent crash occurring in the States. Nintendo take a chance? You bet, but they were not going to gamble without doing their homework.

They called the US. version of the Famicom the 'Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)', and designed it to look less like a videogame console and more like something that would fit in with other home entertainment appliances. Nintendo took steps to make the system seem like a computer or a VCR. Nintendo even agreed to buy back all unsold inventory in order to get retailers to take a chance on them.

The NES also used 72 pin cartridges (The Famicom used 60 pin). Four of the additional pins were used for Nintendo's patented lockout chip. This initially prevented software developers from producing unlicensed games for the NES. Nintendo used the lockout chip and restrictions on 3rd party software developers to prevent the over saturation of bad games that contributed to the "Videogame Crash".

The system was originally targeted for release in spring of 1985, but the release date was pushed back. After test-marketing in the New York City area in late fall, the system was released nationwide in February of 1986.

The Nintendo NES was an amazing success, and revived the videogame console market in the United States. Nintendo ushered in the 3rd Generation of console gaming.

Nintendo would later debut the NES successor, but would still try to cash in on the remainder of the NES's success. In 1993, Nintendo released a top loading NES model 2. This newer model was scaled down to nearly half the size of the original. The case was a sleeker design (Like a smoother Famicom). The cartridge port was more stable, and used eject & power buttons similar to it's successor the SuperNES. Even the controller had the "bone-like" shape of the SuperNES. This new model sold for $45. The cheaper price came at the loss of the original model's interface and A/V output ports. Nintendo dropped support for this new model a year later. Today, it's a collectors item.

The NES had sold over 62 million systems and over 500 million games, making it the most popular videogame system of it's time.

FACT: Nintendo's success introduced some of the most interesting accessories and conversions. Who could forget the "Power Glove", and "Rob the Robot". Nintendo slapped "NES-like" hardware into an Arcade cabinet and released Nintendo Playchoice to arcades everywhere. In Japan they released a disk drive accessory that allowed gamers to download games from vending machines onto a disk.

I am not sure that my Star Wars project for the Nintendo DS will be finished in time for Christmas. I have a lot of work done, but recently found that the DS port of PrBOOM is not friendly to translucent walls, 3D floors, which my maps were full of. As it happens when you get close to a translucent window, the game slows to a crawl. If you so much as have a 3D floor within your line of sight the game also slows to a crawl, thus I am going to have to alter a number of things in many of my maps and perhaps reduce there size. Needless to say I wanted to release something for the holidays which is when Batman DOOM came to mind.

All you need to know about this classic Total Conversion can be found on the links below. This is not my own project, my only contribution is merging the TC into FreeDOOM which means you DO NOT need to own a copy of DOOM or DOOM II to play this. Merely copy the files onto the root of your Memory Card, launce Batman DOOM.NDS and you should be up and running.
I've not played through this on the DS, so if you experience any problems feel free to contact me on my site listed at the bottom of this text. If you report errors, BE SURE to be as specific as possible. I'll need to know what level you were on, what weapon you were using, and what was going on at the time of the crash or what ever.

http://starwarslegacy.net/NDS.aspx - Download via that url

It's been about a month since the last release, so it's about time for another. Woopsi 0.26 is now available on the SourceForge site:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=207650

Here's a screenshot of the lastest demo:



(I know the version number in the screengrab is wrong.)

There are a huge number of changes, mainly aimed at improving the API for developers. Changes are:

- Fixes:
- Added clip-to-physical-screen code back in.
- Fixed inconsistency in screen _flags.borderless variable.
- Fixed warning in gadget.cpp (bug 1826584).
- Removed parent pointers from gadget constructors.
- Removed eventhandler.cpp and rolled the functionality into the header.
- Removed font bitmap check from TextWriter (feature 1830307).
- Renamed "addXXX()" gadget creation functions to "newXXX()" (feature 1830242).
- Added check for null parent pointer before adding gadgets to child vector (bug 1830241).
- Fixed flicker in top display when flipping screens.
- Fixed border size confusion in Window class.
- Fixed problem with height and width to y2 and x2 conversion in TextWriter.
- Fixed scroll limit problem in TextViewer.
- Fixed drawing problems in TextViewer.
- Removed _deleteQueueActive from Gadget class and rely on vector size instead (bug 1843784).
- Made destructors virtual where appropriate.
- Set gadgets to be invisible until added to a parent gadget to prevent them being drawn to arbitrary positions on the screen.
- Removed "removeOverlappedRects" from Woopsi class.
- Changed Gadget::eraseGadget() so that the parent is responsible for erasing children instead of passing call up to Woopsi instance.
- Fixed Woopsi constructor parameter order.

- New Features:
- Screen and window borders can be enabled/disabled with setBorderless().
- Gadgets now have a flags bitmask instead of individual bools to control properties (request 1826433).
- Added addGadget() and insertGadget() for more control over children.
- Added an ID number ("refcon") to the base gadget class (request 1828519).
- Added getClientRect() function to gadget/window/screen classes.
- Added GraphicsPort class to handle drawing within gadgets.
- Gadgets now cache their visible regions to improve drawing speed.
- Pong demo uses a GraphicsPort instead of a SuperBitmap.
- Added "removeGadget" function for deleting gadgets from vectors.
- Added gadget decoration concept to handle borders, etc.
- Removed all usage of Gadget::getType() to aid subclassing.
- BitmapButton draws its bitmap using GraphicsPort.
- Window uses parent screen's GraphicsPort to draw its XOR rectangles (fixes bug in which XOR rectangle overlaps other screens, but no longer relevant since screens automatically depth-sort when clicked).
- Window border gadgets use GraphicsPort for their output.
- Screen title gadget uses GraphicsPort for its output.
- Removed most drawing functions from Gadget class.
- Added hardware-accelerated horizontal line drawing.
- Improved speed of filled rect by using faster horizontal line routine.
- Renamed bool getters from "getXXX()" to "isXXX()".
- Added clip-to-parents into Gadget::cacheVisibleRects and Gadget::splitRects.
- Removed glyph font and added support routines to allow single font.
- Added font inheritance system.
- Added Gradient background class.
- Removed background image from demo and replaced with gradient.