DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
wraggster
by Published on July 22nd, 2012 21:45- Categories:
- PS3 News
PS2 backwards compatibility remains something of a contentious issue for PlayStation 3 users. US and Japanese launch models featured the principle PS2 hardware built into the system, making for excellent support for almost all legacy PlayStation titles and the ability to run older games with a precision HDMI output. By the time the EU launch rolled up months later, the design was altered, removing the PS2 CPU - dubbed the Emotion Engine - and replacing it with software emulation to mixed results. With Sony still haemorrhaging cash on PS3 production, all PS2 components were removed by October 2007, and backwards compatibility was no more.But the story doesn't end there. Behind the scenes, Sony has been working on restoring PS2 support for all PlayStation 3 consoles regardless of configuration, and we've now reached the point where you can visit the PlayStation Store and download 74 "PS2 Classics" - in truth a roster of immensely variable quality, with only a smattering of stand-out titles. Warnings are given out that the games are running under emulation and may vary from the original PS2 experience, but the real kicker is that you'll have to pay for them - even if you own the original discs. While lesser known games cost between £0.99 to £3.99, most of the titles cost £7.99 a pop.Value issues aside, we wanted to find out more. From a technical perspective, the notion of original PS2 code being able to run under emulation on the PlayStation 3 is a seriously impressive feat of engineering. Ken Kutaragi's finest hour hails from an era where games machines featured custom components built from the ground up, a necessity in an era where PC parts were too expensive to be crammed into a console box. The Sony R&D team responsible for the PS2 software emulator have achieved something of a miracle here - the design of the older console is completely alien to the hardware set-up of the PlayStation 3. The PS2's graphics synthesizer GPU in particular, with its attached eDRAM, offers levels of bandwidth that even the RSX may have issues duplicating...."Having phased out support for PS2 backwards compatibility, Sony has been working behind the scenes on a full software solution for all PS3 owners - and the results are impressive overall."
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution running on three different PS2 emulation schemes - full hardware back-compatibility via a PS3 debugging station (equivalent to an NTSC launch unit), an EU PS3 with partial hardware support and finally the software emulator that runs on any PS3. On this game, the EU machine appears to have a slight blur, while the full hardware model has some poor deinterlacing (only really noticeable in motion). The emulator deinterlaces nicely, generally speaking, giving a 480p-style presentation.
Out of a library of thousands of games, the fact that only 74 are currently available suggests that the emulator remains a work in progress, that many games simply don't work at the moment: not surprising bearing in mind how many developers pushed the system's architecture in ways its creators never even conceived of. Additionally, it is perhaps telling that the big Sony exclusives have no representation - even games that are certain never to get an HD remaster are conspicuous by their absence."We set out to test PS2 emulation on a number of platforms - full hardware backwards compatibility, partial PS2 support from the EU launch PS3 and finally, the new software emulator."
Regardless, we delved into our PS2 game collection, dug out some titles available on the PlayStation Store and ran them on three different PlayStation 3s - our launch debugging station (which runs any PS2 game from any region under full hardware back-compat), an EU launch unit with the hardware graphics synthesizer and emulated Emotion Engine, and finally, a newer PS3 with no hardware support for the older console at all. The latter turned out not to be required at all, so it was quickly disposed of: even if you're running a launch NTSC unit with all the original PS2 hardware contained therein, the PSN downloads still run completely under software emulation.First up, the game that gave us the most curious results of all: Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. This is a title that relies completely on its 60Hz update - the fundamental interface between game and player is based on that locked frame-rate. As you might expect, there were no problems at all for our debugging station: aside from a couple of tiny, almost imperceptible glitches on a handful of the stage intros, there were no issues with frame-rate at all. The emulation works out OK for the most part, though the glitching does seem to intrude occasionally into gameplay. However, on Jeffry's stage, the effect is far more pronounced, with the game often slipping into what feels like slow motion with dropped frames and borked deinterlacing, resulting in screen-wobble. In these areas, the quality of the gameplay is fundamentally compromised.Switching the game onto our EU launch PS3 with Emotion Engine emulation, we find a curious middle-groundby Published on July 22nd, 2012 21:41- Categories:
- Nintendo 3DS News
All the fuss over 3DS XL's big screens caused Nintendo to neglect mentioning one other notable upgrade - special anti-glare treatment.
Nintendo says the the 3DS XL has the least reflective handheld screen in Nintendo history, and that's thanks to an additional anti-glare treatment that's been applied to its LCD screens.Nintendo's Takeshi Murakami explains, "On a LCD screen there are basically three reflective layers, which all of them reflects and cause glare. So this time, we specially treated all the layers. Reflectivity on the Nintendo 3DS was about 12%, but we decreased that to about 3%."
Anti-glare tech has been around for years, so why has Nintendo only chosen to incorporate it now? Simple - it was expensive, but is now cheap enough thanks to advances in technology and manufacturing processes.
Nintendo boss Iwata said, "Anti-reflection has been a topic every time since the Game Boy Advance system, but most of the time we had to give it up because of the cost."
Murakami chimed in, "The time finally came! When it comes to anti-reflection, this device beats all previous Nintendo game systems."
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...glare-upgrade/
...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:52- Categories:
- PC News
Whew, we did it. It's finally the last day of the Steam Summer Sale and we ... what's that? There's another day of this madness? That's just great. Well, hopefully you didn't budget your lemonade stand money the way we did this year in order to account for tomorrow, the final day of the sales promotion.
It's hard to keep up when today's sales include Quantum Conundrum andArma 2: Combined Operations, both at 40% off. Also, Batman: Arkham Citystands alone at 66% off, plenty of reason for us to pretend July 22 isn't even on the calendar. While we're at it, Prince of Persia, Evochron Mercenary, Torchlight,Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2, and Fable 3 are tempting us with a 75% discount. Finally, the indie bundle for today includes Bit.Trip Runner, Eufloria, and Machinarium.
Enough about games, who wants to buy some delicious lemonade so we're ready for tomorrow's sales?
http://store.steampowered.com/ ...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:51- Categories:
- DCEmu
We're not entirely sure if this new development in password technology is amazing or terrifying or both, but a group of cryptographers and neuroscientists have developed a method through which a subject can be taught a 30-character password and not even know that they know it. This is all accomplished through repeated play sessions of a keyboard-controlled Guitar Hero clone. I mean, how else would you do it?
The "game," developed by Stanford University student Hristo Bojinov, has players pressing the S, D F, J, K and L keys on their keyboards as corresponding symbols fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, as seen above. During a standard 45 minute play session, nearly 4,000 "notes" are generated and entered by the player, 80 percent of which are actually part of a cryptographic sequence. By the time the session is over, the subject has "learned" a 30-character password, though it is supposedly impossible for them to actually know what it is.
In order to "enter" the password, the subject plays a round of the game in which their 30 character password is randomly jumbled with other 30-character sequences. The subject subconsciously trained on their specific password would statistically perform better on those sequences rather than the sequences belonging to other passwords, thus verifying their identity.
Unfortunately, Bojinov's subconscious encryption engine isn't playable online at present. Maybe that's for the best, though -- we're not sure how ready we are to be implanted with unknowable knowledge.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/21/gu...cious-passwor/ ...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:50- Categories:
- Nintendo Wii News,
- Wii U News
The problem with these console eulogies is that they're prone to what Wikipedia editors call 'recentism'. Like the N64 and GameCube before it, the Wii seems doomed to be remembered by some for the gaming drought that blighted its final two years of existence - during which time the only game oases to lap from turned out to be horse riding and fitness-sim cesspools.
Not us. We prefer to look beyond the cold dead eyes of Mel B and Jillian Michaels and remember the Wii as it was in the bloom of youth - a sprightly, idealistic young console witha brilliant blue mouth and an anarchic desire to shake the gaming landscape up forever. In its six short years of existence, the console aptly codenamed the 'Revolution' would go on to do exactly that.
Nintendo's Revolution got off to a stalled start at E3 2005. "We gave you DS. A new Game Boy. And new games to play on them," began company present Satoru Iwata at the climax of Nintendo's media briefing. "And now you say, you want a Revolution? Well, wegot one!"With those bold words, Iwata fished a mysterious black box with a cheeky blue gobhole from his dinner jacket (this being before his 50 percent paycut, of course - Iwata appeared at this year's E3 wearing a potato sack). The crowd whooped in that really professional way games journalists do, but once the euphoria died down, it was unclear why, exactly, anyone was whooping.
I Wanna Whoop U Up
It was the Wii U reveal in reverse; the controller was the key to Revolution's magic, but it missed the flight to LA. Without its rudder, the good ship Revolution was forced to meander into vague waters. We knew it was no bigger than three DVD cases (whooping) and you could download old games onto it (witchcraft in 2005, hence: more whooping), but nothing concrete.
Once the dust had cleared, pundits clamped their whoopholes and once again donned their sceptical hats - would this fabled new controller really be different enough to revive Nintendo's fortunes? Early mock-ups from internet wags with too much free time included a trackball and a controller which split into two halves. Even these bizarro controllers would appear conservative when Nintendo gasped us into submission with the real deal at that year's Tokyo Game Show...
U Really Got Me Going
It's impossible to get across just how radical a concept the Wii remote was in 2005. Touch-screens were still in their infancy, Kinect was but a twinkle in Peter Molyneux's eyes and, bar a failed Microsoft experiment in the mid-'90s, motion-controlled gaming was exclusively the domain of the arcades. But although the idea was as alien as one of the aliens from the film Alien, the sleek design - modelled after the ubiquitous television remote - was comfortingly familiar.
To see it was to know immediately how it worked - and to know how it worked was to obsess over its giddying world of play potential. Within seconds of the remote flashing up on the projector, the Nintendo Gamer office was ablaze with grown men and women hopping around desks and chairs, swinging anything even remotely rectangular around like golf clubs, katana swords and Wispa Gold bars (this was during the bleak 2003-2009 Wispa Prohibition Era, remember). Erstwhile editor Mark Green even went as far as to scribble a few buttons on a banana with a marker pen in an attempt to get a 'feel' for how it handled. Many teeth were lost that evening, either way.
We had fun though, and that's really the main thing you should take away from this issue - we're only just entering the really exciting stage of the Wii U waiting game. Just as we spent the second half of 2005 replanning our living room and chucking our sofa in a skip to make room for Wii, now too begins our rigorous muscle-building regime so we'll have enough strength to hoist Wii U's gargantuan slab of delight in the air when the new console hits stores.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...ive-the-wii-u/ ...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:49- Categories:
- Nintendo 3DS News
The release of New Super Mario Bros. 2 will usher in a new digital era for 3DS by being the first retail game you'll also be able to purchase and download via the eShop.
And Nintendo wants you try out the new-school digital method, and is offering a small reward for doing so; double the Club Nintendo Coins.US gamers who purchase the game via the eShop can redeem 100 Coins on their Club Nintendo accounts - double the usual 50 that brick and mortar purchases will get.
That's not a huge amount - 50 extra coins is about enough to get you a few rubbish screensavers. But if you're saving up for that 1200-Coin Game & Watch, every little helps. All the Ts and Cs are through the source link.
The game's out in US on August 19 - weeks after the July 28 street date in UK.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...intendo-coins/ ...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:37- Categories:
- PS3 News
Perry believes publishers will be very pleasantly surprised by benefits of Gaikai sale to Sony
Gaikai Inc.
Sony
Sony's buyout of Gaikai is a strong indicator that major publishers and manufacturers are taking a vested interest in the potential for cloud gaming. Gaikai creator David Perry believes that this is a very good thing, saying that the move "opens a lot of doors that weren't there before" for many in the industry.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Perry says "It's going to make the publishers very happy, because the publishers like PC, but they love console. The message I kept getting back was, PC is cool, but I wish you could do this with console. That's the real meat in our business. That would be really good."
"Of course, we had to go, look at this new PC stuff we have. We had to keep avoiding the console question. It's a very difficult question. If you look at the P&Ls of the publishers, that's such an important piece of their business. We were like, don't look over there. Focus on the PC. But the console question never went away. I had a major publisher recently say to me: 'David, just to be clear, the iPhone is interesting to us. Not as interesting as console. PC? Not as interesting as console. Just to be clear.'
"The second thing they said was, if we're going to put our biggest games on your service, I've got to know you're going to have the financial muscle to support it. When you're a start-up, it's harder to answer that question. But when you've got Sony behind you, it's very easy to answer that question. There are multiple things that have been solved in a single deal. It's quite surprising."
The new deal with Sony is going to help things along tremendously for Gaikai; solving problems relating to the console issue have been cleared up, as well as the controller issue at hand for the service. Perry now says he has to think differently about what he and the team are going to do moving forward.
"We were doing it the way you do it if you're a VC. I have to start thinking differently now because I have one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world in our corner. So you have to think differently.
"It's going to open a lot of doors that just weren't open before."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...or-david-perry
...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:36- Categories:
- PS3 News
Rockstar continues to delay reveal of Grand Theft Auto V
Rockstar
Rockstar Games
www.rockstargames.com
Gamers hoping to get a glimpse of the next installment of the Grand Theft Auto franchise are going to be disappointed at Gamescom. A statement from the show organizers has confirmed that the game will not be shown off at the largest gaming conference in the world. The word comes after speculation arose after a small segment of the game was showcased in a Gamescom promotional trailer.
Gamescom has spoken out, saying the footage was added in error, and that they have no plans to discuss or reveal anything relating to the mega franchise.
"Rockstar Games is not scheduled and has never been scheduled to exhibit at Gamescom 2012," said communications manager of Gamescom, Franko Fischer. "We apologize for any confusion this may have caused."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...show-promoters
...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:34- Categories:
- Android News
There's only so much kit you can cram into a sub-$200 tablet without pushing past the price ceiling. And for Google's Jelly Bean-blessed Nexus 7, corners were definitely cut, leaving users without a handy microSD slot for expansion and rear-facing camera. But where there's a will, there's the XDA and its community of developers to remedy the situation. As you can glimpse from the photo above, an enterprising forum member by the handle of c0m47053 devised an interesting workaround for the slate's lack of expandable storage and then some. Using the StickMount app available on the Play store, which allows users to mount/dismount mass storage devices, he was able to connect the ASUS-made tab to a USB hub and hook it up to a keyboard, mouse and, most amusingly of all, a floppy drive -- to playUltima on DOSbox, of course. It goes without saying that a feat of this kind requires root access, but thankfully that's what Mountain View made the Nexuses for.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/21/u...storage-flopp/
...by Published on July 22nd, 2012 10:34- Categories:
- Android News
We're rather big fans of the Nexus 7 here at Engadget HQ -- it's just hard not to like a $200 tablet with aTegra 3 SoC and 7-inch glass-bonded IPS display running pure Jelly Bean. Of the few missing features, there's one we're bemoaning more than the lack of rear camera, and that's the absence of any kind of HDMI or MHL video output. So far, watching movies with the Nexus 7's been relegated to using a Nexus Q and streaming content from Google Play or YouTube.
Enter Wi-Fi Media, an app available for free on Google Play that lets most Android devices like the Nexus 7 play movies, music and stills on any screen via any Cavium PureVu-compatible streamer, such as HTC's $90 Media Link HD. We tested Wi-Fi Media with our Nexus 7 and Media Link HD and found it to work pretty much as advertised except for some caveats. First the app doesn't mirror your screen -- you're limited to playing content stored on the tablet or on the network via DLNA, which means no YouTube, Netflix or games. Second, the app doesn't handle some common file types -- like AVI, for example.
While it supports watching movies, listening to music and looking at pictures, keep in mind that Wi-Fi Media is not a particularly polished app. In addition to playing local and remote DLNA content, you're able to login to Facebook and Picasa and stream images directly from these accounts, but that's pretty much it in terms of functionality. There's also no way to configure the Media Link HD, so you'll need a sanctioned HTC handset to setup the multimedia streamer before using it with a Nexus 7. Want to know more? Peek at our screenshot gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/21/w...creen-via-htc/ ...- Search DCEmu
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