DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
wraggster
by Published on September 2nd, 2007 09:52
Jesus Lover has released a new portal for the PSP, heres the details
The Homepage Portal is designed to get you to where you need to go, quickly, and in an attractive manor. The homepage portal V3.2 is filled with helpful applications, fun games, useful links, a working multi-engine search bar, and some other pleasant surprises too, all under a 2MB download! Nothing comes close to The Homepage Portal's seamlessness, usefulness, size, and quickness.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...by Published on September 2nd, 2007 09:42
Shash has posted more WIP news on his DS Emulator for Windows:
Speeding up
After abandoning desmume development for a few months, I've been working on it quite a lot lately. Of course, not as much as when I started working on the project, as motivation to develop desmume is rare this days (just check the official desmume CVS, and you'll see what I'm talking about). But anyway, I've done some improvements on a very specific side of the project that I've avoided working on for the last 6 months: speed.
I've to be clear: desmume current way of handling most of the interrupts sucks. For example, timers, dmas and other, are checked PER opcode emulated. In an ideal world, you'd run a batch of instructions (the exact ammount would be determined by some heuristics or whatever), and then you'd do the processing needed by the pending interrupt / timer handling, then again back to running a batch of instructions. Of course, that'd be a less exact than current implementation, but it'd be WAY faster. I did something similar on my Gameboy emulator, and it gave good results, we'll see how it works on desmume, whenever I find time to implement it.
Anyway, I'll start with two screenshots, one before the speed ups I implemented the past 3 days (left), and another one with them (right):
As you can see, it's a practical 33% speed up on this particular case. I must say that it affects every game that I've tested on a considerable ammount, being the minimum a 14% (I'll explain later why). Just as a real world example, tested "Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow" and it's 30% faster now... So let's talk about the speed ups.
First, desmume used/s GDI to draw the DS screens onto the main window. GDI setup is as easy as it can get, but seems that it's not as fast as I would wish (more keeping in mind that it's only task is to take an image and draw it on the screen). I considered a few options, namely DDraw, openGL or GDI+. I excluded openGL at the beggining, because it would be quite a lot of work to make the current 3D core work correctly with it. So after some discussing it with some friends (more exactly, hearing some DDraw bashing and why I should stop using DirectX7 features), I started working on a GDI+ blitter. In the end it was easier than I expected. Reading the documentation, implementing the blitter and a bit of adjusting was done in an hour. In fact, searching through the documentation was what took longer. The good part, is that it gave a free 14% perfomance gain.
The rest was a matter of fixing some tidbits of how memory is accesed, avoiding a lot of conversions from floating point to integer (which is way more expensive that you'd guess), changing the way the texture cache works, and more stuff I can't remember. I won't be any more concise about this stuff, as it would take quite a few pages, which I'm not willing to write now. Maybe I'll go back to them in a future post.
Just as an ending, it seems that my obsession about fixing all regression bugs that I see is giving good results, as most games that I test have perfect 3D. Here's some proof, Hotel Dusk running perfectly, even with the motion blur effect (I rotated the image with an image editor, because I don't have screen rotation implemented):
http://shashemudev.blogspot.com/ ...by Published on September 2nd, 2007 09:37
via engadget
Confessions up front: we're pretty hot for any device that sports some sort of console emulator, so when faced with GamePark Holding's GP2X, which currently boasts of SNES, NES, Genesis, MAME and quite a few other gems, it's a little difficult to rein in the enthusiasm. That said, the new F-200 could use just a little bit of slimming -- you have to really mean it if you're going to carry this thing around instead of your PSP or DS. Otherwise we found the unit to be quite comfortable to hold and use, responsive enough in the OS department, and completely packed to the gills with features. Video playback is sluggish, but games loaded and performed quite well. We weren't able to test the F-200's new touchscreen, which is the only upgrade of the device over the existing F-100, but apparently it will be implemented as a mouse controller for developers to do whatever they want with the Linux device. And trust us, they will. ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:31
News from PDroms
PDRoms Coding Competition (short: PDRC) #3.667 has sixteen days left for the deadline.
Topic: "Backport"/"Convert"/"Redo"/"Recode" a Nintendo DS homebrew game to Gameboy Advance!
Rules: [*]You must own all RIGHTS to your submission, this includes sound, graphics, code, simply everything! The use of copyrighted names and characteres should be avoided, unless you have an official permission, which should be forwarded along with your entry. We reserve the right to refuse or disqualify entries, which break any rule(s)!!! [*]In case of VERY OLD GAMES (+10y), which do not seem to have a copyright holder anymore and which are not distributed commercially anymore, we can make an exception, but you must be still able to proofe that you tried to get in touch with the responsible copyrightholders. [*]Keep in mind you OWN ALL RIGHTS to your production, this means you are also fully reliable for it. By submitting your production you declare that you did not break any copyright.
Prizes: [*]Prizes can not be paid out in cash [*]In case of entries having the same jury-end-score, the entry which has been submitted earlier will be the winner. [*]In case of teamwork, the team-leader has to make sure the prizes are split proper within the team itself. [*]The special prize is given to the person with the most "ports". If there should be a person with equal amount of ports, the one who was sending in things fastest, will win this special prize. - The amount for qualifying is minimum five ports/conversions!!!
#1 - One GBA Micro (new, unused) + One GBADEV.org 2004 Compo Cartridge (new, unused) + One real-cartridge with your winner entry!
#2 - One Qwak GBA Cartridge (new, unused) + 1 x GBAccelerometer (new, unused) + One HAMLib license
#3 - One HAMLib license + One GBAccelerometer (new, unused)
Special Prize:
One GBA Micro (new, unused) + One GBADEV.org 2004 Compo Cartridge (new, unused) + One GBAccelerometer (new, unused) + One HAMlib license
The special prize is given to the person with the most "ports". If there should be a person with equal amount of ports, the one who was sending in things fastest, will win this special prize (The amount for qualifying is minimum five ports/conversions!!!)
Entries: [*]Submit as many entries as you like and have an extra chance to win the "special prize" [*]No Splash-Screen required, you keep all your rights - even no need to mention PDRoms. [*]The "ported" homebrew NDS game should be "brandnew" for GBA, already existing ports which were available for the public before 2nd August 2007 are not allowed, unless they are heavily major updated! [*]You are not allowed to spread your GBA entry to the public before the official results! [*]You grant PDRoms and its staff members the right to spread your entry freely (we won't make money with it). We have connections to other important scene pages, so we'll make sure you get proper attention for your production [*]Entry should run on a REAL GBA [*]Write a README with information about your game, this text will be used to present your entry, also add a screenshot! [*]Please state out, which NDS game you were porting and send the NDS binary along (will not be published)! [*]Package each submission in ONE compressed file archive and send it to shahzad.sahaib(at)web.de AND kojote(at)pdroms.de (just to be on the save side, due to agressive spam-filters - each entry will be CONFIRMED after max. 2 days) [*]Entries can be updated by sending an updated archive ANYTIME before the deadline.
PS: If you feel left out: Release a NDS game first and then "backport"/"redo"/"convert" it to GBA and release it with this compo
See also: http://www.pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=341 ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:31
News from PDroms
PDRoms Coding Competition (short: PDRC) #3.667 has sixteen days left for the deadline.
Topic: "Backport"/"Convert"/"Redo"/"Recode" a Nintendo DS homebrew game to Gameboy Advance!
Rules: [*]You must own all RIGHTS to your submission, this includes sound, graphics, code, simply everything! The use of copyrighted names and characteres should be avoided, unless you have an official permission, which should be forwarded along with your entry. We reserve the right to refuse or disqualify entries, which break any rule(s)!!! [*]In case of VERY OLD GAMES (+10y), which do not seem to have a copyright holder anymore and which are not distributed commercially anymore, we can make an exception, but you must be still able to proofe that you tried to get in touch with the responsible copyrightholders. [*]Keep in mind you OWN ALL RIGHTS to your production, this means you are also fully reliable for it. By submitting your production you declare that you did not break any copyright.
Prizes: [*]Prizes can not be paid out in cash [*]In case of entries having the same jury-end-score, the entry which has been submitted earlier will be the winner. [*]In case of teamwork, the team-leader has to make sure the prizes are split proper within the team itself. [*]The special prize is given to the person with the most "ports". If there should be a person with equal amount of ports, the one who was sending in things fastest, will win this special prize. - The amount for qualifying is minimum five ports/conversions!!!
#1 - One GBA Micro (new, unused) + One GBADEV.org 2004 Compo Cartridge (new, unused) + One real-cartridge with your winner entry!
#2 - One Qwak GBA Cartridge (new, unused) + 1 x GBAccelerometer (new, unused) + One HAMLib license
#3 - One HAMLib license + One GBAccelerometer (new, unused)
Special Prize:
One GBA Micro (new, unused) + One GBADEV.org 2004 Compo Cartridge (new, unused) + One GBAccelerometer (new, unused) + One HAMlib license
The special prize is given to the person with the most "ports". If there should be a person with equal amount of ports, the one who was sending in things fastest, will win this special prize (The amount for qualifying is minimum five ports/conversions!!!)
Entries: [*]Submit as many entries as you like and have an extra chance to win the "special prize" [*]No Splash-Screen required, you keep all your rights - even no need to mention PDRoms. [*]The "ported" homebrew NDS game should be "brandnew" for GBA, already existing ports which were available for the public before 2nd August 2007 are not allowed, unless they are heavily major updated! [*]You are not allowed to spread your GBA entry to the public before the official results! [*]You grant PDRoms and its staff members the right to spread your entry freely (we won't make money with it). We have connections to other important scene pages, so we'll make sure you get proper attention for your production [*]Entry should run on a REAL GBA [*]Write a README with information about your game, this text will be used to present your entry, also add a screenshot! [*]Please state out, which NDS game you were porting and send the NDS binary along (will not be published)! [*]Package each submission in ONE compressed file archive and send it to shahzad.sahaib(at)web.de AND kojote(at)pdroms.de (just to be on the save side, due to agressive spam-filters - each entry will be CONFIRMED after max. 2 days) [*]Entries can be updated by sending an updated archive ANYTIME before the deadline.
PS: If you feel left out: Release a NDS game first and then "backport"/"redo"/"convert" it to GBA and release it with this compo
See also: http://www.pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=341 ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:30
News from pdroms
Space For Everything by PirataNervo is a collection of various helpful tools/routines in one program. It includes backup and freeing space functions.
New features:
- Fixed bug when replacing chinese, korean and japanese fonts with smaller fonts.
- RSS Remover
- Network Update Remover
- Restore RSS.
- Restore Network Update.
- added ICON0
- added PIC1
Download http://www.mediafire.com/?bm2myybr13y ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:20
Durka Durka Mahn posted this news/release:
Hey everyone, just updated my VCS Tool Pack for VCS Cheat Device with some new features!
Change log:
+Added Portal Maker
Makes a two-way portal that teleports your from one place to another by stepping into the circle!
+Added Car Spawner
Allows you to spawn cars by putting in the car ID, coordinates, and rotation.
+Added Car Spawn ID text document
A list of all the car spawn IDs in a .txt document for use with the Car Spawner. Credit to Matt11504 for this list.
+Added a ReadMe.txt for instructions on use, and special thanks to people who contributed.
*Note - The program can only be ran once per export, I will try to fix this in a later release.
As said before, I plan to make actual GUI later on (when I learn how) and make a PSP version.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:16
News/release from Akez
I created this homebrew app so i could flash my own waves to my psp.
I dont know whether there are other applications like this but i would still much rather use my own as i know there is nothing which harms my psp.
It is fairly easy to use and it shouldnt brick your psp unless the file you select to copy is not a system_plugin_bg.rco file.
PSP Wave Changer 1.2
I have added my own themes to this download. If you dont want them then just delete them.
If anyone does use this then use it at your own risk and make sure you know how to change the system_plugin_bg.rco file in flash0 using the recovery menu.
It is wise to only use this application with Custom Firmware as there is a way to restore any corrupt files using the recovery menu where-as 1.5 fw does not allow you to do this causing your PSP to become bricked.
Update. v1.2. Allows unlimited amount of files to be loaded instead of the limited 20 which was in previous versions. Link has been updated to newest version.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
via akez ...by Published on September 1st, 2007 22:05
kaisersoze has posted some great news and screenshots of his port of MAME to the Iphone:
CURRENT STATUS: Can definitely be made playable by choosing a suitably old version of MAME. Tested with version 0.29 since the code was simple enough back then to slap together something quickly to test performance. I am going to arbitrarily target whatever version runs the Galaga ROM I have on my arcade machine. I suppose I should start thinking about how I want to do the configurable control system. In addition to the straightforward "this area of the screen is this button/joystick/trackball/dial" controls, I'd like to support gesture based inputs as well. Imagine playing Tempest by making an actual circular motion on the touch-screen, or tapping anywhere to fire, or gesturing left-right up-down to move the joystick. You could play Pacman without any screen real estate wasted by displaying controls. I should be able to actually put some time into this over the weekend while I'm on vacation.
...by Published on September 1st, 2007 21:58
Dodgin' Diamond II is a Deluxe Galaga style shot'em up arcade game for one or two players. It's an 'old school' arcade game with top-down scroll action, energy based gameplay and different weapons with several levels of power. The UIQ 3 version has been ported by AnotherGuest from a PC/Linux game written by Juan J. Martinez.
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Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita