Japan just can't get enough of the Tales series, and that's good news for Namco, who have been releasing them at an incredible pace. Soon enough they're going to run out of swanky names to attach to the title. I'm looking forward to Tales of Normality, myself. So while the PS2 has been receiving new Tales games, the PSP has been regulated to port detention, with Tales of Destiny 2 and Tales of Eternia. Before Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology hits the country, Namco has decided to give the PSP yet another port, but not just any port. This time, it's a port of a port! How thoughtful, right? Tales of Phantasia: Full Voice Edition based on the PSOne port of the original SNES game. Still with me? Good.

If you haven't played the three previous versions of the game, Phantasia follows the story of a young swordsman named Cless Alevin, whose small town of Toltus is leveled by an evil dark knight named Mars, who is after a pendant that can break the seal over the evil sorcerer Dhaos. By fighting legions of enemies in the present, past and future, Cless and the friends that he makes along the way must do away with Dhaos once and for all.

The Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle aka USK, that rates Entertainment Software in Germany, recently put up the final rating of Vice City Stories in the country. The age restriction is set at 16, which according to the description contains ''frequent one-on-one gunplay and moderate violence. The game may cover adult themes.''

GTA: San Andreas also received an age 16 rating, which had several violent features removed, such as removing animations of headshots, pedestrians not leaving money behind after you killed them, and not being able to hit or kick dead corpses.

Chances are Vice City Stories will go through the same route, and the same censorship will most likely be put in for the Australian version. Other countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom, will remain uncut however.

I have discovered a new definition for the word frustration. It goes by the name of a sound ring-buffer.

Driving the sound on the DS is pretty straightforward. Its simply a case of setting up a sound channel and pointing it to a buffer that holds your sound data. This works perfectly for playing pre-defined samples. However, when attempting to stream sound data by creating and playing samples continuously the DS starts struggle. This causes popping and cracking in the sound.

One method to get around this problem is the use of a ‘ring-buffer’. The theory involves creating an empty sample that is played in a continuous loop. The current play position of this empty sample is tracked using a timer. When a new section of sound data needs to be played it is mixed into the empty sample just ahead of the current play posision.

As far as the hardware is concerned, it is just playing one sample over and over again, but it means that it is posible to alter the sample with the new data being streamed in.

The theory doesn’t sound too bad. It is, however, very dependent on timing. If the new sound data is mixed in too slowly, the play position of the buffer will catch up and eventually override the newly mixed data. If the new sound data is mixed in too quickly, the mix position will wrap around the buffer and override the data currently being played.

I have had major problems getting the timing to be perfect. I must have redesigned and wrote the sound code 6 or 7 times over the last few weeks without any real success.

Anyway, on Monday I had a bit of free time so a sat down and rewrote it again from scratch. Its the closest i’ve been so far, and sounds pretty good. The mix position is still running slightly quicker than the play position, but if it runs too far forward I skip a sample until it catches up. This can cause the odd scratch in the sound, but it only appears noticable when playing a fixed tone (using the BASIC beep command for example).

This whole problem does indicate that either the CPU core is running too fast or the sound is running too slow. At the moment I think its good enough to put into the first release and am going to move back to the file browser. Once i’ve cleaned it up a bit I think we are looking good for a release of Version 0.1.

I've not really worked on the project for the last few days, but after the funeral tommorrow I'll likely have more time again. I've worked on it very slightly, though it was in a totally different area - tech trees. Doesn't help at all in my current goal of loading and scrolling around in a big map, but it was an easy little bit to code and I felt like it ;p The tech tree foundation is there now anyway, and should allow all sorts of lovely techtrees, either for C&C or any other RTS.

Anyway I'll have a better update next time, promise. Felt like I should post this mostly because I'm in the habit of posting every few days now ;p

Hi !

I'm now on a point, where I can release my Homebrew I call it NoNameDS (YES, not a very exciting name and it should be a collection of usefull Applications and small Games for the DS. It is in the Version 1.3 - not many functions yet, but it'll come you can be sure in this point.

Now the Program has :
* A tool for showing the Pixel-Position on the TS (not very useful, but for programmers, why not ?!
* A Counter (nothing's to explain in this point)
* A reaction tester (You have to tap as fast as you can the red X's an on the upper Screen it shows your last and your average time)
* Snake DS (my first self-made game The whole "Snake-Engine" is made by, also the gfx)
* Icy-Tower DS (I think you know that game from the PC, it's quite funny you have to jump up and up and up, Game is still in Beta State, means there is missing a lot (jumping from down through the platforms but standing on them, points, time, "auto-scroll" etc.)
* Credits (self-explaining )

The bold Thing is my Highlight of the Homebrew, the cursiv is still in "production" ;-)

Oh my god I now realized, that Icy Tower doesn't works anymore.... I think I make another thread in the help section But anyway, here's the Version WITHOUT a working Icy Tower - Sorry !